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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: DMaA who wrote (230421)12/5/2007 10:43:04 AM
From: Rambi  Read Replies (2) of 793912
 
That was a great find.

I do think it reinforced Lane's original response about the two clauses not being separable. "Being" is a participle, and can't be turned into "is", and so has to belong to something- as he says, it describes "militia". The phrase can't exist on its own.
(incidentally, I never read Lane as arguing against anything; she even stated she is not for gun control. I saw her argument as grammatical and logical rather than political.)

The right is not granted by the amendment; its existence is assumed. The thrust of the sentence is that the right shall be preserved inviolate for the sake of ensuring a militia.

This is what I was trying to say yesterday about the connection between the clauses-- that the Amendment itself was written to insure weapons were not taken away (as they were in England) because there might be a need for a militia. That was their concern. The right itself must have been assumed to already exist.

That makes sense to me since the Federal govt was just beginning to define its role, and was carefully placing limits on its power, and saw states' rights as taking priority.

Last night, I came across this in Bryson's (not nearly as illustrious an academic linguist as your guy but definitely a fun writer with an overwhelming knowledge about words and history) book Made In America: An Informal History of the ENglish Language in the United States. He argues that the "much vaunted right of the people to keep and bear arms was not intended as a carte blanche, semidivine injunction to invest in a personal arsenal for purposes of sport and personal defense,"... but that the framers had in mind "only the necessity of raising a defense force at short notice."

This defines the problem for me personally. Growing pains-- a case of a right existing, but because of modern technology and weapon development, it poses problems for the maintaining of law and order. So people are scrambling to figure out how to "fix" it.
As always, that leads to the usual push and pull and politicizing.
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