What is the REAL 2nd amendment?

M

MinutemanEagle1

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Some people say the 2nd amendment has three commas in it, such as:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Others say that the originally-ratified form had only one comma:

"A well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Does anyone know where to find EVIDENCE that one or the other, was in the original Bill of Rights that was ratified by the states?
 
Wikipedia has it:
The Second Amendment, as passed by the House and Senate and later ratified by the States, reads:
“ A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. ”

The hand-written copy of the Bill of Rights which hangs in the National Archives had slightly different capitalization and punctuation inserted by William Lambert, the scribe who prepared it. This copy reads:
“ A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. ”

Both versions are commonly used in official Government publications.
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Also:
Commas in the Second Amendment

There is some question as to whether the Second Amendment contains a comma after the word "militia," and a parallel debate as to whether the presence or lack of this comma influences the overall meaning of the Amendment.[citation needed] In the twentieth century, it became unusual to separate a subject and verb or verb and object with a comma. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, commas were used to indicate rhetorical pauses; in the twentieth century, commas were generally used to differentiate between restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers. This practice continues in the early twenty-first century.

On March 4, 1789, the completed, hand-written Bill of Rights was approved by the first Federal Congress, and attested to (signed) by Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and John Adams, the Vice-President of the United States and President of the Senate, as well as the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate. [6]. In this original signed document, now held by the National Archives, the commas were present. Some of the later type-cast printings of the Constitution, such as those in the National Annals, delete the commas from the Second Amendment.

The U.S. Government is inconsistent in the use of the comma in publications. The Statutes at Large (the official permanent record of all laws enacted) does not include the comma.[22] The Government Printing Office (GPO) has produced versions both with and without this comma.

A second comma, after the word "State," is generally seen in printed versions. It is not controversial.

The third comma, after the phrase "to keep and bear arms," is also an example of changing customs. It is generally seen in contemporary reprints of the Amendment, but it would not appear if the Amendment had been drafted and enacted recently.
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I urge you to go right to the sources referenced by the wikipedia entry.
 
The commas are largely irrelevant, in a legal context. The law is whatever the US Supreme Court says it is at any particular point in time.
 
Not quite, Abstract. What gets ENFORCED, is what the Supreme Court says. But the law is what's written on that little antiquated piece of paper.

SecDef, great reference, thanks!
 
Laws have to be interpreted

in order for them to have application in the real world. That's what we have courts for.

Legal language is a specialized domain, where words' meanings are specific things with real consequences. If everybody agreed on what the words in the laws meant, we'd not need lawyers. Language in the law is more like a formal system than it is like everyday communication. Words have defined meanings. It's not mathematics, though, so those defined meanings are subject to change over time. There's no way around that, so long as you've got people in the process.

Everybody talks about the Framer's "intent." For some strange reason, everybody also seems to think that those great men agreed with them. It'd be nice to ask them, but they're all dead, and we can't.

The system we've got, flawed as it is, is about the best we're going to get. One thing that I've noticed, on both sides of this (and other) Constitutional debates is that everyone involved seems certain that the words mean what they want them to mean... even when those meanings are diametrically opposed. Again, this isn't math, and there are no absolutely correct answers.

So we have Courts to decide the meaings, and lawyers for each side to try to convince the Court that they're right.

I can't think of a better solution. Certainly nothing that's been tried is better.

--Shannon
 
Check out the rest of the constitution for a wacky lesson in 18th century sentance structure. They used commas to delineate between separate thoughts like modern writers use the period.

They are not irrelevant.
 
The point of SecDef's reference, is that commas were frequently changed willy-nilly by lowly scribes, even in vastly important legal documents like the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

I'd say that supports the idea that they ARE irrelevant.

thunderchief, I wonder how many of the wacky commas you mention in the rest of the Constitution, were inserted AFTER ratification by scribes who were trying to make themselves sound educated, rather than before ratification by learned Framers who actually knew what was important? We have at least two examples in the 2nd amendment, which is less than 1% of the language of the document. How many more were put in or changed by people who really didn't know how they should be used?

OTOH, anti-gun-rights types keep trying to use the existence of the three commas in that version of the 2nd amendment, as evidence that theFramers meant to link the RKBA to membership in militias, and thus to conclude that the RKBA is a collective right only, held by those militias and not by ordinary, individual citizens.

The fact that there was only one comma in the version that acutally got passed by the Congress and ratified by the states, becomes very important in that case. It supports just as strongly, the idea that the 2nd really does mean:

"Since an armed and capable populace is necessary for freedom and security, the right of ordinary people to own and carry guns and other weapons, canot be taken away or restricted."
 
No comma takes away from the fact that the framers chose to use the word 'people' and not 'militia' when stating that the right shall not be infringed. How much clearer could it be? If they meant 'The right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' that is what they would have written.

There is really no logical controversy about the meaning of the second amendment except by those looking for a way to take away the right.
 
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