What the right to bear arms really means.

SO WHAT DOES the Second Amendment mean? A lot, says the National Rifle Association. Not much, say gun-control groups. Until recently, it didn’t much matter who was right—on all but the mildest of measures, the NRA had the votes (and the cash), and that was that. Then came Littleton. Now proposals for serious federal gun controls are in the air. Thus far, the House and Senate have failed to agree on any specific gun measures, and whatever Congress ultimately decides in conference promises to be modest at best, targeting only gun shows and youngsters. But prominent politicians and civic leaders are now arguing for far more sweeping restrictions on guns, including mandatory licensing schemes and strict limits on the number of weapons that may be purchased in a single transaction. Would such measures violate the Constitution? Is the NRA right after all? No, but neither are its leading critics. Properly construed, the Second Amendment means quite a lot, but not what the NRA thinks.

Begin with the words of the amendment itself: “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.” This curious syntax has perplexed most modern readers: How do the two main clauses with different subject-nouns fit together? Do these words guarantee a right of militias, as the first clause seems to suggest, or a right of people, as the second clause seems to say? In one corner, gun controllers embrace a narrow, statist reading, insisting that the amendment merely confers a right on state governments to establish professional state militias like the National Guard or local swat teams. No ordinary citizen is covered by the amendment in this view. In the other corner, gun owners and their supporters read the amendment in a broad, libertarian way, arguing that it protects a right of every individual to have guns for self-protection, for hunting, and even for sport. Virtually nothing having to do with personal weaponry is outside the amendment in this view. Both readings are wrong.

The statist reading sidesteps the obvious fact that the amendment’s actual command language—“shall not be infringed”—appears in its second clause, which speaks of “the people” and not “the states.” A quick look at the Tenth Amendment—which draws a sharp distinction between “the states” and “the people”—makes clear that these two phrases are not identical and that the Founders knew how to say “states” when they meant states. What’s more, the eighteenth-century “militia” referred to by the first clause was not remotely like today’s National Guard. It encompassed virtually all voters—somewhat like today’s Swiss militia—rather than a small group of paid, semiprofessional volunteers.

But the libertarian reading must contend with textual embarrassments of its own. The amendment speaks of a right of “the people” collectively rather than a right of “persons” individually. And it uses a distinctly military phrase: “bear arms.” A deer hunter or target shooter carries a gun but does not, strictly speaking, bear arms. The military connotation was even more obvious in an earlier draft of the amendment, which contained additional language that “no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.” Even in the final version, note how the military phrase “bear arms” is sandwiched between a clause that talks about the “militia” and a clause (the Third Amendment) that regulates the quartering of “soldiers” in times of “war” and “peace.” Likewise, state constitutions in place in 1789 consistently used the phrase “bear arms” in military contexts and no other.

By now it should be evident that we need to understand how all the words of the amendment fit together, and how they, in turn, mesh with other words in the Constitution. The amendment’s syntax seems odd only because modern readers persistently misread the words “militia” and “people,” imposing twentieth-century assumptions on an eighteenth-century text. The key subject-nouns were simply different ways of saying the same thing: at the Founding, the militia was the people and the people were the militia. Indeed, the earlier draft of the amendment linked the two clauses with linchpin language speaking of “a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people.” The linchpin was later pulled out as clumsy and redundant. A modern translation of the amendment might thus be: “An armed and militarily trained citizenry being conducive to freedom, the right of the electorate to organize itself militarily shall not be infringed.”