On reading remarks in my recent Newsletter on the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Hunter Rawlings of Cormell University responded with these observations about its primary author James Madison:
“It is evident that it is not James Madison’s meaning in the Second Amendment, but his idiosyncratic wording, that has undermined gun control in our era (not in prior eras, e.g., the 1939 U.S. v. Miller decision by the Supreme Court). It is also evident that a proper understanding of his syntax would solve the issue of a Constitutional gun right without going through the almost impossible process of repealing the Amendment. Having read a lot of Madison, I am convinced that his standard usage compels us to interpret the second clause of the Amendment as dependent upon (or, to use a more formal linguistic expression, “entailed by”) the first: that is, the right “to keep and bear arms” depends fundamentally upon the existence of “well regulated Militia(s).” The fact that Madison did not say “Since a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State…” in the first clause, but instead used what linguists call an “absolute adjunct” (“being necessary”) has, unfortunately, caused the problem. If he had written “Since” with a verb in the indicative or subjunctive, the meaning would be clearer, but his use of the absolute expression is standard for him in the protasis of a conditional sentence. Madison clearly, and I mean clearly to anyone acquainted with his syntax, and with the conditions current when he was drafting the Amendment, meant that the right “to keep and bear arms” is a right of the people only because militias are “necessary to the security of a free State.” He was, in the historical context, trying at the outset of the new federal government to appease Americans who knew that their state militias had been crucial to our victory in the Revolutionary War, and were worried that a new national (federal) army might overshadow the state militias and dominate and threaten the people, who were used to, and proud of, their state militias.
In summary, a proper reading of his syntax and a basic understanding of the historical context make the Second Amendment no longer applicable, i.e., moot. Any other reading is ideologically willful. Justice John Paul Stevens knew all this, and so have other Justices, but in recent decades they have been in the minority on the Supreme Court.”
--
Here’s the text of the Amendment, prfetly clear, O think, to anyne who, like Madison and his colleagues, knew their Latin and could spot an ablative absolute at musket range:
“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.”