In other words, if a tyrannical government does repeal the Second Amendment, it will not take away our right to keep and bear arms. Only we can give that up. [More]
You tell these guys to give it because their posterity wants to argue over punctuation.
We live in a post Constitutional country. And have for several decades. We ust accept that reality then plan and act accordingly. Rule of law is dead in America.
Two can play that game. The pro 2A side should argue that “free State” actually means – ‘free condition’ – (one of the definitions of ‘state’ is = condition). This would more accurately represent the true meaning of the 2A.
“Comma pickers” may well be a subset of nit pickers.
There’s more to the Second Amendment than the texts mentioned in the above post. There’s Josiah Quincy’s pamphlet of 1774, the various colony/state documents starting with the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, the paper trails and debates that produced them, and similar trails leading up to the anti-federalists refusing to ratify the proposed constitution unless protective language, similar to what the states had, was appended to it.
All of that is well documented and available to any who wish to know what the people who wrote, debated, and ultimately ratified what we now know as the Second Amendment had as their ultimate purpose.
Ergo, nattering on about the number and placement of commas in the text is a classic case of willful ignorance and/or deflection. None of it has any bearing, or modifying effect, on the intent made obvious by researching the history of the text.
That same text is why we have the tests SCOTUS mandated in Bruen. The modern day equivalent of what were once called “Philadelphia Lawyers”, those who would quibble in court about what the meaning of what the word “is” is, those who would deny being a drug addict on a Form 4773 because they hadn’t had any crack cocaine yet that morning, are the reasons why SCOTUS felt those test were necessary.
“On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.” –Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, 1823. ME 15:449