A friend posted this to another list I'm on and I've posted it in the Rifles and Pistols tribe as well (but it really needs to go on Filthy Bitches Gun Club too) and it goes to the very crux of the second amendment...

"Here's an interesting exchange from 1991 between a writer for Gunweek (Neil Schulman) and
Roy Copperud, a retired professor of journalism at the University of Southern California. He's on the English usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and Merriam Webster's Usage Dictionary frequently cites him as an expert. Copperud's fifth book on usage, American Usage and Style: The Consensus, has been in continuous print from Van Nostrand Reinhold since 1981, and is the winner of the Association of American Publishers' Humanities Award.


Here's the whole article: www.2asisters.org/unabridged.htm


Here's the punch line:


[Schulman:] As a "scientific control" on this analysis, I would also appreciate it if you could compare your analysis of the text of the Second Amendment to the following sentence,


"A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed."


My questions for the usage analysis of this sentence would be, Is the grammatical structure and usage of this sentence, and the way the words modify each other, identical to the Second Amendment's sentence?;
and Could this sentence be interpreted to restrict "the right of the people to keep and read Books" only to "a well-educated electorate" -- for example, registered voters with a high-school diploma?]


[Copperud:] Your "scientific control" sentence precisely parallels the amendment in grammatical structure.
There is nothing in your sentence that either indicates or implies the possibility of a restricted interpretation.


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Copyright (c) 1991 by The New Gun Week and Second Amendment Foundation. Informational reproduction of the entire article is hereby authorized provided the author, The New Gun Week and Second Amendment Foundation are credited."

Sas