Discovering the Palladium of Liberties From Another Source

Ranjit Singh has a different take on Second Amendment scholarship. What Singh has discovered is some German translations of the Bill of Rights that were made during the Founding era. I am assuming that these translations were made for German immigrants to the states. What is interesting is that these tranlations support the understanding of the Second Amendment as an idividual right of every citizen of the United States. You can find Singh's piece at Bearing Arms entitled A Well Outfitted Militia: German Translation of the Second Amendment Offers Insights.

The insights come from the words used in German for certain concepts. The German words indicate a common understanding at the time of an individual right, not a collective right.

I have learned over the years that the words used in other languages can carry meanings that are very important to one's understanding. For instance, one of the difficulties in reading the Bible is that different translations offer different wordings in English for the Hebrew and Greek texts that form the Old and New Testaments. These English translations can be either more or less true to the original meaning and also reflect to some degree the theology of the translator. As with the Second Amendment, it is important to get the wording right.  A paraphrase just won't do.

There’s a perennial debate in gun politics in the United States. The gun control side makes various specious arguments claiming that the Second Amendment protects muskets and not modern arms, that the right to keep and bear arms belongs to a select militia like the National Guard, not We the People, and that “well-regulated” authorizes the de facto destruction of our rights via regulation.

Those of us who have studied the copious scholarly research on the text and history of the Second Amendment know that those arguments are bunk. We know that the right to keep and bear arms is not dependent on militia service. We know that the right extends to modern arms, much like the First Amendment is applicable to modern forms of communication. We know that “well-regulated” means in proper working order, not choking off that right while pretending to nurture it.

To further support the originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment, there’s insight offered from an uncommon source: the re-translation into English of founding era documents originally translated into German. The following is the abstract from an academic paper published in the American Journal of Legal History:

A Well-Outfitted Militia: German–American Translations of the Second Amendment and Original Public Meaning

By Brandon Kinney

This article seeks to uncover the original public meaning of the Second Amendment by scrutinizing unusual and previously unexamined sources: German–American translations of the Bill of Rights during the Founding Era. Translations offer a unique perspective of political culture, because they served as thoughtful analysis and contextual commentary on the source text. Using six German–American translations in the Founding Era, this article argues that the public understanding of the Second Amendment during the Founding Era was one that recognized the individual right to own firearms for individual use unconnected to militia service as well as a constitutional endorsement of an armed population as the best bulwark to preserve the liberty of the national people. Though the exact text of the translations differ across publishers and states, they retain thematic and syntactic similarities that suggest a public consensus over the meaning of the text. The notion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right rather than a collective one is borne out by additional translations well into the mid-nineteenth century. Printers adjusted their translations of the amendment after the militia as a military institution had fallen into disuse but preserved or strengthened the clause protecting the individual right to arms rather than letting it ‘fall silent’.

Gentle readers will want to read the entire article as well as Mr. Bandon Kinney's article as well. They will discover in the work of Mr. Kinney the true meaning of the Bill of Rights. After all, we preserve the Second Amendment in order to preserve the other Amendments of the Bill of Rights.