Grammatical Analysis: The Second Amendment
"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."
I’m aware that jurists have
split into two camps when it comes to the second amendment – those who argue
that it refers to collective rights (the militia, or our modern National
Guard), and those who argue that it refers to individual rights (each and every
single American). I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t cite the many contradictory
court decisions through the ages concerning gun ownership.
But I am a retired Professor
of English, so I intend to approach the meaning of the second amendment through
its grammar. First of all, let’s dump a couple of commas that make no sense in
modern grammar. We end up with a sentence containing two parts:
(1) A
well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State,
(2) the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
(1) The Latin predecessor of the first half of this
sentence was called an ablative absolute; by itself, it was an incomplete
sentence. The same is true in English, where it is now called an adverbial
phrase or, more technically, a truncated dependent clause.
(2) The
second half of this sentence is called the main clause; it is a complete
sentence all by itself.
An ablative absolute is
a phrase used as part of a sentence, but somewhat detached from the main clause
of the sentence in the sense that it does not modify a particular word in the main clause. Rather, it modifies and sets
the scene for the idea of the entire
main clause.
The way that an ablative
absolute modifies the idea of the main clause can vary. It can set up a
condition for the main clause. It can establish a cause/effect relationship. It
can refine the time element. It can modify the attendant circumstances. It can
offer opposition to the idea of the main clause in order to set up a clarifying
contrast.
The point to take away
is this: the ablative absolute is not irrelevant in its sentence. Rather, it is
absolutely essential to the total sentence. In fact, if you don’t factor it in,
it is easy to distort the import and force of the idea of the main clause. The
ablative absolute is an anchor, a pointer, a stabilizing bracket.
So let’s return to the
wording of the second amendment. The main idea is this: the right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed. But the first part of the sentence tells us why people have a right to keep and bear
arms and why that shouldn’t be
infringed. It sets up a cause/effect relationship. People have a right to keep
and bear arms because a
well-regulated militia is necessary to keep the state secure and free.
Conclusion: grammatically,
the ablative absolute limits the extent of the main clause. Able-bodied
citizens were able to own weapons in case they were called up to serve as
citizen soldiers in an emergency. Unless our Founding Fathers were grammatically
ignorant, they weren’t giving carte blanche to individual civilian gun
ownership as an absolute right in and of itself. It was conditional, and these days, the
National Guard has supplanted civilian militias.
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