Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter, Register to vote and apply for an absentee ballot today. Prior to the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller,1 the courts had yet to definitively state what right the Second Amendment protected. The Justices divided the Amendment into an operative clause: "right of the people to keep and bear arms," and a prefatory clause: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State." "One thing people disagree about is whether assault weapons bans are constitutional," says Rosen. "So here," Rosen continues, "George Mason (the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights) is talking about not only the free state of Virginia." It cannot be presumed that any clause in the constitution is intended to be without effect; and therefore such a construction is inadmissible. It may seem obvious, but Rosen and Rakove agree the Constitution bore a lot of contemporary moralism and not every word is well-defined. (Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.). This is an uncomfortable fact to those accustomed to reading only half of the Amendment, reciting the last 14 words over and … The decision struck down the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, which heavily regulated owning and keeping firearms in the District of Columbia. As with many of the amendments, the exact wording proved critical to its interpretation. The only Supreme Court ruling in U.S. history that has focused primarily on the issue of what the Second Amendment really means is U.S. v. Miller (1939), which is also the last time the Court examined the amendment in any serious way. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, "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 median interpretation, which holds that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to bear arms but is restricted by the militia language in some way. Or maybe not; interpretations vary, partly because Miller is not an exceptionally well-written ruling. In McDonald v. Chicago,5 the Court struck down laws enacted by Chicago and the village of Oak Park effectively banning handgun possession by almost all private citizens, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Second Amendment right, recognized in Heller, to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense. The Second Amendment holds the distinction of being the only amendment to the Bill of Rights that essentially goes unenforced. Who are entitled to exercise that suffrage? Here’s how. It also meant physical protection from government overreach. "It's really striking that since these Supreme Court decisions... lower courts have upheld almost all of the gun regulations they have asked to review," he says. "While there is a common law right to self-defense, most historians think that it would be remarkable news to the framers of the Second Amendment that they were actually constitutionalizing a personal right to self-defense as opposed to trying to say something significant about the militia," he says. Of course, with the size and scope of the modern United States military, and the fact that militias as we know it no longer exist, that notion is hard to imagine today. In its final form, the amendment presented a challenge to interpreters. The D.C. Earlier this week, retired Supreme Court Justice. His book "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution" won a Pulitzer Prize in History. Does the Second Amendment Protect the Right to Bear Arms? Here's a look at the Second Amendment, its phrases parsed and placed in legal and historical context. Copyright © 2020, Thomson Reuters. "This is referring immediately to 'state' as in one of the states of the original colonies," Rosen says. In the debate over the Second Amendment, this phrase, "a well regulated militia," remains one of the most cited and argued parts of the sentence. What follows in an excerpt, with a link to the full text at the end: In this second installment, we explain how the Parker panel ... botched its textual and historical analysis of the Second Amendment. 1993); Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (1984); Symposium, Gun Control, 49 Law & Contemp. Moreover, the prefatory clause's history comported with the Court's interpretation, because the prefatory clause stemmed from the Anti-Federalists' concern that the federal government would disarm the people in order to disable the citizens' militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. In Heller, the Court held that (1) the District of Columbia's total ban on handgun possession in the home amounted to a prohibition on an entire class of "arms" that Americans overwhelmingly chose for the lawful purpose of self-defense, and thus violated the Second Amendment; and (2) the District's requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock also violated the Second Amendment, because the law made it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense. The NCC's website hosts a fully interactive version of the Constitution featuring commentary and primary source documents. If there were any clear answers, these 27 words wouldn't be so incendiary. The case is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v.Heller, which may soon address the meaning of the Second Amendment. The 2nd Amendment was ratified on December 17, 1791, along with the other nine amendments that make up the Bill of Rights.While it is a very short amendment, its exact meaning in terms of what types of weapons are protected and what constitutes a well-regulated militia is still in contention today. The 2nd Amendment was ratified on December 17, 1791, along with the other nine amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. This article contains a more detailed discussion of whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. ", The Second Amendment: Text, Origins, and Meaning, The First 10 Amendments to the Constitution. As Fareed Zakaria pointed out in Time , “Congress passed the first set of federal … He is the author of "The Everything American Presidents Book" and "Colonial Life: Government. What is the correct wording of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution? The Second Amendment: 27 Words, Endless Interpretations After more than 200 years of intense scrutiny, the meaning of the Second Amendment … We must give effect to all of its words - not just the ones we like - to understand what the Amendment means. The Constitution says they do exist, and so we must read the whole Second Amendment. Second Amendment - Bearing Arms . Print 1982); Don B. Kates, Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment (1984); Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment (Robert J. Cottrol, ed. There is the "Militia purpose" clause, with 13 words. In the case [pdf] now on appeal to the US Supreme Court, however, two judges on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals virtually "erased" the 13 words of the "Militia purpose" clause altogether, and made them practically meaningless. He is also talking about a broader state of freedom. The term "arms" is also an ever-changing one, and there are ongoing debates about assault weapons and emerging firearm technologies. on the Constitution, Senate Comm. "They also disagree about how we should interpret the constitution in terms of history or in light of new technologies.". Part of HuffPost Politics. In the above excerpt, we can see the Court considered the awkward phrasing of the Amendment. We have entitled this piece Decision by Eraser because Parker treats the Constitution as if courts are empowered to selectively erase its words and replace them with unexpressed meanings that support the court's predilections. to have an armed militia. ", ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court affirmed for the first time that the right belongs to individuals, for self-defense in the home, while also including, as dicta, that the right is not unlimited and does not preclude the existence of certain long-standing prohibitions such as those forbi… By using ThoughtCo, you accept our. (CNN)It's only a sentence long; 27 words that barely take up a full line on the Bill of Rights. In the case of United States v. Miller in 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court basically ruled that the amendment only applied to firearms that have "some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia....". The Start of Restricted Gun Rights in America, The First 10 Amendments to the Constitution, Text of the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Interracial Marriage Laws History and Timeline, Biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Justice, Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, Ph.D., Religion and Society, Edith Cowan University, M.A., Humanities, California State University - Dominguez Hills.

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