Commas in the Second Amendment

"The bottom line is that there were no photocopy machines back then, and scribes who hand copied documents punctuated and capitalized as they thought best."

And sometimes spelled as they thought best. Any genealogist can tell you about finding a person's name spelled more than one way in the same document. With no photocopy machine, it all depended on a scribe, and folks REALLY weren't all that concerned about commas then. Even now, many well-educated people simply add a comma when they think they'd need to take a breath if they were speaking the sentence.

David E. Young's book "The Founder's View..." reproduces Thomas Jefferson's authenticated Official Imprint (1 March 1792) of the amendments proposed by congress. He states that copies were sent to state governors with notification that the state legislators had ratified the last ten (of twelve) articles.

Article The Fourth:

"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."

"Note that The Green Bag is a lighthearted legal publication: the ending suggestion that we settle the issue by picking the version we want and re-ratifying it is not meant to be taken seriously"
Wouldn't hurt, though...

It is somewhat surprising that the article did not mention Jefferson's official imprint of the amendments proposed by Congress as ratified. This is the official "version" that the government's executive branch certified as ratified by the state legislatures.

I see no evidence that the various "versions" have different meanings.

There are undoubtedly those itching to assign different meanings to the Second Amendment's versions based on variations in commas or caps. However, such persons clearly have not looked into exactly how the proposed amendment originated and exactly what it meant to those who desired "that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added" to the Constitution in order "to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers".

The Second Amendment has a history. It is too bad that most of those arguing about the Second Amendment's intent will not actually take a look at that history.

I thought commas were used less for semantics than to indicate rhetorical pauses back then. Did I misremember?

Or should it be, "Did I, misremember?"

While we're trotting down the wooded path of punctuation I'll recommend an enjoyable and lighthearted book Eats, Shoots and Leaves

It contains a discussion of the evolution of the use of the comma and semicolon and compares the two

from the book which I highly recommend:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“Well, I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Heller isn't going to instantly
nullify thousands of gun laws.

Unless all the Justices have suddenly
taken up meth to get through the long decision
re-drafts at night.

Roberts likes narrow decisions and this is what
it will be.

Remember a President Obama with a hugley Democratic Congress will come back and ream
us gunowners totally if the Supreme Court
starts striking down gun laws.

Marcus, sadly I expect that a President McCain would do the same thing. Especially if he has VP Bloomberg.

"Especially if he has VP Bloomberg."

Oh gawd, don't do that to me. Sheesh. I haven't had enough coffee yet to read something like that. Ugh. Now I feel ill.

There is NO way it is going to be Bloomberg.

And if it is Romney we will either
lose the election OR lose a lot more
if Mitt the Liar becaomes President.

Man I wish David would include
some edit functionality on this
website. lol

For all those comma freaks out there, here is my Second Amendment comma commentary:

When Congress dealt with the proposed amendments in 1789, it was working with printed copies of those amendments. Handwritten changes were made to those copies as the final language was developed within each house of Congress. After all changes were made, Congress decided to have handwitten copies of the proposed amendments on parchment to be sent to the state legislatures for ratification.

So far, the overly technical legal question would be were all of these at least 14 copies exactly the same with respect to commas and capitalization? I suspect this question cannot ever be answered unless all 14 copies survive and can be located and compared. It seems that the particular copy saved in the National Archives has three commas. Note, however, that the original versions of this language all consisted of two clauses developed from the two different forms of the Mason Triads found in the Revolutionary Era state declarations of rights.

Next, the state legislatures dealt with ratification of the proposed amendments. I do not claim any expertise on exactly what transpired there, but it is very likely that copies of the proposed amendments were printed for each of the legislative bodies, just as Congress dealt from printed copies (one set in the House and and a different set in the Senate).

Many of the states returned their own copies of the amendments they ratified. Some apparently did not because those states simply adopted all of the proposed amendments and so indicated. As for those that returned copies, in the case of the Second Amendment, no two of these are exactly alike with respect to commas and capitalizations. One even substituted an ampersand symbol for the word "and" in the second clause. These facts emphasizes what would be evident to anyone who reads a large amount of Ratification Era documents. Punctuation and capitalization had little interpretive meaning then compared to something written today. In other words, these variations were not viewed as affecting the meaning of the sentence.

As for commas in the eight different versions returned as ratified from various state legislatures, there was at least one of each with none, one, two, and three commas as the article indicated. The origianal sources of the Second Amendment's clauses, the leading Mason Triad clauses in the origianl state declarations of rights, came in two versions - well regulated militia and right of the people to bear arms. This simple historical fact makes it evident that the Second Amendment has a fundamentally two clause structure. The fact that the Second Amendment was based upon these two different descriptions of a defensively effective armed populace made the two clause structure obvious to the Founders no matter how many commas a copyist might add to the language.

Finally, to cap all of these interesting variations, Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State in the Washington Administration had an official printing made of the ratified amendments. This is the version that he authenticated as the amendments proposed by Congress, ratified by the state legislatures, and made part of the Constitution under Article V. Jefferson's official authenticated version has one comma with only the leading word, "A", in the sentence capitalized. It would be hard to argue that Jefferson's version is not the official version of the Second Amendment recognized by the government itself.

Commas, commas everywhere, but not nearly enough for the controllers to confuse this issue.