If you have to debate with gun grabbers

 Over at the Truth About Guns there is an article today by Sheldon Richmond entitled Some Things Never Change: What the Second Amendment Says and What It Actually Means. Richmond points out that the amendment says exactly what is meant, but some people deliberately misread the Second Amendment because the clear meaning goes against their political aspirations.

Richmond goes into great detail explaining not only what the Founders meant, but the errors of the other interpretations. Also, contrary what many people think, the Constitution in general, and the Second Amendment in particular are easy to understand even today. There is no archaic language; no "thees" and "thous." The Founders intended to write a document that was easily understood by any reasonable person with what would be today a high school education.

But the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights is indeed a well-crafted sentence. By that, I mean that its syntax permits only one reasonable interpretation of the authors’ meaning, namely, that the people’s individual right to be armed ought to be respected and that the resulting armed populace will be secure against tyranny, invasion, and crime. Someone completely ignorant of the 18th-century American political debates but familiar with the English language should be able to make out the meaning easily.

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Before proceeding, let’s understand the competing interpretation. As the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California put it, “The original intent of the Second Amendment was to protect the right of states to maintain militias.” Dennis Henigan of Handgun Control, Inc., says the amendment is “about the distribution of military power in a society between the federal government and the states. That’s all they [the Framers] were talking about.”

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Henigan and company are in the untenable position of arguing that while the Framers used the term “the people” to mean individuals in the First (the right to assemble), Fourth (the right to be secure in persons, houses, papers, and effects), Ninth (unenumerated rights), and Tenth (reserved powers) Amendments, they suddenly used the same term to mean “the States” in the Second. That makes no sense.

Richmond goes into the syntactical implications of the Second Amendment showing that any interpretation other than that it protects and individual right is in error. Then he goes on to discuss what language experts say about the Second Amendment.

It is also important to realize that, as a matter of logic, the opening phrase does not limit the main clause. As the legal scholar and philosopher Stephen Halbrook has argued, although part one of the amendment implies part two, it does not follow that if part one doesn’t obtain, part two is null and void. The sentence “The earth being flat, the right of the people to avoid ocean travel shall not be infringed” does not imply that if the earth is round, people may be compelled to sail. The Framers would not have implied that a right can properly be infringed; to call something a right is to say that no infringement is proper. As another philosopher and legal scholar, Roger Pilon, has written, the amendment implies that the need for a militia is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for forbidding infringement of the right to have firearms. The sentence also tells us that an armed populace is a necessary condition for a well-regulated militia.

Please go and read the whole article. It will provide ammunition for those who may have to debate with gun grabbers.