06.26.08
District of Columbia v. The English Language
The results of DC v. Heller are finally in, and it seems to be a momentous victory for owners of both firearms and a sound understanding of the English language. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States reaffirmed the Second Amendment of the Constitution as an individual right to bear arms rather than a collective, a distinction that Justice Antonin Scalia outlines in a rather unsubtle verbal jab at fellow Justice John Stevens in his writing of the majority opinion.
In any event, the meaning of “bear arms” that petitioners
and JUSTICE STEVENS propose is not even the (sometimes)
idiomatic meaning. Rather, they manufacture a
hybrid definition, whereby “bear arms” connotes the
actual carrying of arms (and therefore is not really an
idiom) but only in the service of an organized militia. No
dictionary has ever adopted that definition, and we have
been apprised of no source that indicates that it carried
that meaning at the time of the founding. But it is easy
to see why petitioners and the dissent are driven to the
hybrid definition. Giving “bear Arms” its idiomatic meaning
would cause the protected right to consist of the right
to be a soldier or to wage war—an absurdity that no
commentator has ever endorsed. See L. Levy, Origins of
the Bill of Rights 135 (1999). Worse still, the phrase
“keep and bear Arms” would be incoherent. The word
“Arms” would have two different meanings at once:
“weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of
“bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying
“He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled
the bucket and died.” Grotesque.