Holy shit. This 15-year-old 'kid' talks a mile a minute for six and a half minutes, never stammers, pauses, or says "...like..." or "...you know..." even once, and if he's reading from a teleprompter his eyes don't show it. Start to finish, a brilliant defense of the Second Amendment.
Looks to me like Colt's original LE6920
I know it makes a lot of you guy's eyes roll back into your head when I get on my grammar soap box but this is exactly the reason I do. Because if you understand proper grammar, and I'm talking the Queen's English, then the argument over the role of "A well regulated Militia" in 2A melts away.
In writing for the majority in DC vs Heller (2008), the late Justice Scalia took the grammatical high ground. He called "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," a "prefatory clause," which is a functional term. I prefer the term "nominative absolute clause" because that is how it was defined by Rule #15 in Noah Webster's "Rudiments of English Grammar," which was a work that was contemporaneous to the writing of the Constitution and would have been well-known to Messrs. Mason and Jefferson (who were educated at the College of New Jersey [since renamed to Princeton] and the College of William and Mary, respectively), et Al.
In his justification, Justice Scalia wrote the following:
"The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause. The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose. The Amendment could be rephrased, "Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."...
...Although this structure of the Second Amendment is unique in our Constitution, other legal documents of the founding era, particularly individual-rights provisions of state constitutions, commonly included a prefatory statement of purpose...."
And Scalia cites extensive precedent-setting case law to support his argument.
Webster's Rule #15, in my humble but unerringly accurate opinion, is less technical but more logical than Scalia's argument. This is a verbatim excerpt from the 1790 printing of that work:
"A nominative case or word, joined with a participle, often stands independently of the sentence. This is called, the case absolute.
Examples. The sun being risen, it will be warm. They all consenting, the vote was passed. “Jesus conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place.”
Explanation. The words in italics are not connected with the other part of the sentence, either by agreement or government; they are therefore in the case absolute, which, in English, is always the nominative."
The first half of the last sentence of Rule #15 settles the argument for once and for all:
"The words in italics are not connected with the other part of the sentence, either by agreement or government;...
The words in italics Are NOT Connected with the other part of the sentence, either by agreement or government;
Game, Set and Match, Noah Webster, the Father of American Scholarship and Education.
My argument was echoed in an Amicus Brief submitted by Dr. Nelson Lund (Ph.D., J.D., & professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia School of Law) to SCOTUS on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation in the case of DC v Heller.
"The most significant grammatical feature of the Second Amendment is that its preamble is an absolute phrase, often called an ablative absolute or nominative absolute. Such constructions are grammatically independent of the rest of the sentence, and do not qualify any word in the operative clause to which they are appended. The usual function of absolute constructions is to convey some information about the circumstances surrounding the statement in the main clause." (emphasis added)
This is why I get wrapped around the axle about grammatical minutia. Because WORDS MEAN THINGS. As Mark Twain wrote,
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
But that condition only persists for so long as you have standards and means (and will) to enforce them. All of which vanishes in a wisp of smoke when you turn over control of the evolution of the language to 15-year-old girls who are stoned on estrogen.
2A's chief problem (in the modern era) is that the framers wrote it -- and the whole of the Constitution -- with the same rigidly formal (and flowery) language as they did other weighty documents, such as the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence. And they made frequent use of "terms of art." A "term of art" is a word or phrase with a specialized and bespoke meaning that can be aimed with a laser-like focus, but that term's aim only can remain true for so long as all the interested parties agree on its specialized meaning. I am sure it was abundantly clear to the framers that 2A's prefatory clause could never be misconstrued as being intended to control or modify its operative clause. If they had had the slightest glimmer of a doubt, they would have written it differently to account for that possibility.
It would have been a much less elegant document if they had cut to the chase and written 2A as "People need guns so they may keep them, and government may not take them away." But I'm sure the lib-tards still would have found nits to pick even with that verbology. Like Bill Klinton saying, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is...."
Which is still another reason that the cause of socialism is so invested in the decay of the American educational system. Because if you know the language you're less susceptible to fall for their "re-definings" or outright lies.
And you'll also know that the reference to "the Militia" in the Second Amendment, from the standpoint of agreement or government, is absolutely meaningless. It's a red herring and you shouldn't even waste your breath arguing it. Just tell them to read Webster's "Rudiments of English Grammar," and get back to you once they are not so bog-ignorant of the English language.
The grammar settles the matter without so much as having to broach the topic of the law.
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Originally Posted by Beetlegeuse
