Grasping at straws

From The New York Times:

The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence. Professor Lund is correct that the clause about a well-regulated militia is “absolute,” but only in the sense that it is grammatically independent of the main clause, not that it is logically unrelated. To the contrary, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause.

The founders — most of whom were classically educated — would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras). The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.”

Likewise, when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary.

I suppose that all of this comes from spending the eight years of the Clinton presidency having to constantly keep track of the ever shifting meaning of words like "is".

I love the way that leftists can pretend that the Second Amendment exists in a vacuum of any other statements the Founders might have made about the issue of firearms, militias or who they considered "the people" to be when referred to in the constitution.

After all the scholarship which has gone into the current recognition of the fact that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right going back and re-listing all of the points demonstrating that fact would not only be pointless, but actually insulting to the intelligence.

At this point the only argument that the Second Amendment, uniquely among the other items of the Bill of Rights, speaks of a "collective right" rather than an individual right is centered around wishful thinking. You don't want there to be constitutional right for individual citizens to own and carry firearms so you simply deny that there is. And if anyone counters you with fact you stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud until they shut up.

I don't know what the Supreme Court will do in the upcoming Second Amendment case, but if Justice Kennedy seeks to pay true honor to his oath of office rather than to receive what passes for honor from the New York Times and the Washington Post we will have a ruling that the constitution actually means what it says, that the individual has a right to own and carry firearms.