Thirteen superfluous words

On December 15, 1791, Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify the Bill of Rights; with Virginia’s ratification, the Bill of Rights was adopted. Of the ten amendments that came into force that day, the Second Amendment is among the most difficult to parse:

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.

The commas are in the wrong places, the logical connection between the clauses is hard to follow, and the the relationship between a well regulated militia and the security of a free state is hardly self evident.

Yet despite the oddly contorted language of this Amendment, fanatics in the National Rifle Association insist that the language is plain: any American is allowed to own and carry a gun, and any attempt to regulate guns is out of bounds.

What I can’t figure out is why the bit about the “well regulated militia” is in this amendment if everyone is entitled to keep and bear arms, as the NRA wants us to believe. If the writers of the Bill of Rights had wanted an absolute right to bear arms, they could have — and no doubt would have — written this:

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.

And they would have called those fourteen words the Second Amendment. Yet those same authors added thirteen important words before the right to bear arms — thirteen words that, clumsily, awkwardly, painfully, insist that the right to bear arms is intimately connected to disciplined (“well regulated”) military service.

While the NRA was founded in 1871 because American soldiers were apparently rotten shots, and a number of people thought that pre-military arms training would be a good idea, the connection between shooting clubs and military service has all but disappeared.

Yet, with the legacy of its para-military origins lurking in the background, the NRA cloaks itself in a mantle of ultrapatriotism, pretending that the Second Amendment as understood by the NRA is the key to civil and political rights in the United States.

As I noted in another post, approximately ten times as many people were killed in the United States in 2001 as were killed by terrorists. What kind of patriot argues for this kind of carnage? The NRA’s kind of patriot.

It’s time to stop the madness. It’s time for ordinary people to stand up to the arms-industry-funded juggernaut, the National Rifle Association; it’s time for ordinary citizens to write to their Members of Congress, to local and national newspapers, to the members of the boards of Glock and Smith and Wesson and Colt and all the other arms manufacturers, and say, “Enough.”