To Keep and Bear Arms

(Hat tip: Volokh Conspiracy )

One of the centers of furious argument with respect to the Second Amendment has to do with the meaning of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms". Bill Posner at Language Log looks at the meaning of the term "bear arms".

One of the issues is whether the Second Amendment guarantees a private right, that is, a right of individuals to own and carry arms, or a public right, that is, a right of militias to own and carry arms, or both. Many advocates of restrictions on the right of individuals to own and carry arms promote the interpretation that the Second Amendment is meant only to protect the organized militia units, which, they typically argue, are now subsumed under the National Guard. For advocates of this interpretation, there is no individual right to own and carry weapons.

One aspect of this argument is the interpretation of the leading clause of the amendment. Advocates of the "public only" interpretation consider this clause to indicate that the needs of the militia are the exclusive motivation for the Second Amendment and that its scope is therefore limited to the militia.

....

[T]he so-called "Linguists' Brief"...that the Second Amendment protects only a public right on two grounds: the afore-mentioned interpretation of the leading clause, and the argument that the expression "bear arms" refers only to the organized military use of arms, not to individual use. They claim that the term "bear arms" is "an idiomatic expression that means 'to serve as a soldier, do military service'".

If true, this would be quite surprising, since there is what seems to me to be a very strong case, nicely put in the The Cato Institute Brief, that the right to bear arms in English law prior to the Bill of Rights was an individual right and that the Founders saw the Second Amendment and similar provisions in state constitutions as continuations and extensions of that tradition. A view contrary to that of the Linguists' Brief is presented by Clayton Cramer, a software engineer and historian, and Joseph Olson, a historian, in their paper What did 'Bear Arms' Mean in the Second Amendment. English usage of the late 18th century is not my area of expertise, but it seems to me that it is the non-linguists who have the stronger case.