Guns and Grammar
For several weeks gun enthusiasts have been nervously watching the U.S. Supreme Court. The highest court has flirted with granting certiorari and agreeing to hear two noteworthy gun-related cases: Snope v. Brown and Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island. Both cases involve statewide bans on semiautomatics and ammunition. So far, the courts have only relisted the cases, keeping the dockets—and those nervously refreshing the court’s website—in a suspenseful procedural limbo.
If the Court accepts these cases, the justices will undoubtedly revisit the current precedent established in 2008 by District of Colombia v. Heller. This landmark decision not only acknowledged and affirmed the individual right to firearms protected by the Second Amendment but also resurrected an age-old debate about the amendment’s curious grammatical structure.
The Second Amendment’s stilted syntax often inspires critics to wax grammatical. “The text of the amendment…is, as a whole, ungrammatical,” writes Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s chief legal analyst. Some even argue that corpus linguistics—the study of language by analyzing vast collections of historical texts—safely rejects the current jurisprudence affirming an individual right to firearm ownership. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t, as David Kopel and Will Baude of The Volokh Conspiracy can confirm.)
Though seemingly ambiguous, the Second Amendment makes sense once dissected grammatically.
Clause for Concern
Scholars divide the Second Amendment into two clauses: the prefatory and the operative clauses. Each serves a different purpose. The prefatory clause—the subordinate opening about a well-regulated militia being necessary for security—provides the amendment’s historical and cultural context. Meanwhile, the operative clause—the final half prohibiting infringement—unequivocally asserts the natural right of gun ownership. If the Second Amendment were a meal, the prefatory clause would be the appetizer, and the operative clause the main course.
From a grammatical standpoint, the prefatory clause is nonrestrictive. This introductory throat-clearing provides additional details unessential to the sentence’s core meaning. Justice Antonin Scalia affirmed this interpretation in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 landmark legal precedent that secured the individual right to firearms. The prefatory clause, Scalia argued, “does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose.”
Gun control advocates tend to elevate the prefatory clause’s militia reference, suggesting it’s a precondition for the right to firearms. Some even claim that the Second Amendment preserves the right to maintain a militia.
Yet many linguistic scholars reject this interpretation. Kari Sullivan, a senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Queensland, argues that the prefatory clause is neither internal nor conditional; instead, it’s temporal and external, meaning the opening words introduce its context and purpose.
The amendment’s bifurcated construction mirrors other famous documents of the era. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, often considered the foundation of the Bill of Rights, also used the prefatory/operative structure. Regarding free speech, section 12 of the declaration stated: “That the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.” Prefacing a free press as “one of the great bulwarks of liberty” serves a similar prefatory purpose, adding colorful prose to the right articulated in the operative clause (i.e., can never be restrained but by despotic governments).
The arguments don’t stop with grammatical construction. The Second Amendment’s punctuation also provokes heated debate.
Plain Comma Sense
In a fictional exchange between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, John Quaintance satirized the amendment’s questionabl
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