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. Adam Freedman's explanation of the centrality of comma placement in arguments over the Second Amendment is fascinating stuff. Many of the raging debates over the amendment's meaning appear to be over whether the comma invalidates the first clause, making it nothing but "preliminary throat clearing," or whether the first clause was, in fact, the justification for all that followed after. Feeedman comes down on the latter side, concluding that the content before the comma is an "ablative absolute," a fairly common rhetorical device in Latin (remember: the Founders were classically trained) that suggests a causal link. I don't pretend to have an opinion on this. And while a read of the amendment supports, to me, Freedman's interpretation, I don't think there's much that a new interpretation could or would do to take away, or even really effectively regulate, the country's guns. I do think that this shows, as the Founders said, that a Constitution written over two centuries ago isn't necessarily well suited to the present day, and we'd be well-served to think about amending some of it in ways that at least clarified these debates.
