The well regulated militia is subject to regulation.
[0] https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-1/58-the-mili...
Wikipedia has an excellent reference on this. See the "Experience in America prior to the U.S. Constitution" section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_Unit...
A: Soldiers were trained to follow rules (aka regulations) and obey. Line up shoulder to shoulder and fire 3-5 volleys a minute in a prescribed manner. A rabble would get 1-2 off and die.
The following source gives examples from the Oxford English Dictionary of how the idiom was used from 1709 through 1894, demonstrating how the idiom 'well-regulated' has meaning beyond 'regulations' i.e. laws.
https://www.constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htm
> 1709: "If a liberal Education has formed in us well-regulated Appetites and worthy Inclinations."
> 1714: "The practice of all well-regulated courts of justice in the world."
> 1812: "The equation of time ... is the adjustment of the difference of time as shown by a well-regulated clock and a true sun dial."
> 1848: "A remissness for which I am sure every well-regulated person will blame the Mayor."
> 1862: "It appeared to her well-regulated mind, like a clandestine proceeding."
> 1894: "The newspaper, a never wanting adjunct to every well-regulated American embryo city."
The sense of the term above is something like 'normal', 'well-ordered', 'regular'. Indeed the word 'regular' also shares the same origin as the word 'regulations', yet its common meanings are unrelated to the concept of regulations.
Parsing the 2nd Amendment, the US Supreme Court wrote that "the adjective “well-regulated” implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training", and elaborated (quoting another scholar, Thomas Cooley):
> The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms; and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose. But this enables government to have a well-regulated militia; for to bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them in a way that makes those who keep them ready for their efficient use; in other words, it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order.”
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/#tab-opi...
The phrase "a well-regulated militia" in this context consequently means a militia that's learned, proficient, and effective in firearm use. In any case, what we're discussing is the preface of the amendment, which announces a purpose for the amendment and does not limit it. As the court wrote:
> 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.”
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
> By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects. Blackstone, whose works, we have said, “constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation,” cited the arms provision of the Bill of Rights as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. His description of it cannot possibly be thought to tie it to militia or military service. It was, he said, “the natural right of resistance and self-preservation,” and “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence,”. Other contemporary authorities concurred. Thus, the right secured in 1689 as a result of the Stuarts’ abuses was by the time of the founding understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence.
> And, of course, what the Stuarts had tried to do to their political enemies, George III had tried to do to the colonists. In the tumultuous decades of the 1760’s and 1770’s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. A New York article of April 1769 said that “[i]t is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence.” They understood the right to enable individuals to defend themselves. As the most important early American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (by the law professor and former Antifederalist St. George Tucker) made clear in the notes to the description of the arms right, Americans understood the “right of self-preservation” as permitting a citizen to “repe[l] force by force” when “the intervention of society in his behalf, may be too late to prevent an injury.”
> There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course the right was not unlimited, just as the First Amendment’s right of free speech was not, (...) [citations omitted]
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/#tab-opi...
The military calls rules that impose proper discipline and training "regulations". Such as Army Regulation 670-1, which states “While in uniform, personnel will not place their hands in their pockets, except momentarily to place or retrieve objects.”
The word "regulation" is perfectly compatible with the "well-regulated" idiom.
Regulate is a form that appeared in Middle English that means “to control by rules”.
I’m all for guns and appreciating the inscrutable nature of the 2nd amendment. But words mean things.
There's obviously a middle ground where regulation is allowed. There's no world where artillery, or arming the insane isn't acceptable in a civilized society. Conversely, the overreach of prohibition of arms in places like DC or NYC is not in alignment with the ideals of nation.
To me, the notion of armed civil insurrection against a modern state apparatus is absurd, and has been since the late 19th century. Civil disobedience and disruptive protest, including protest that undermines control of the armed forces, is the only check on the state's ability to wield force. Even a 3rd rate army is able to control civil unrest.
There’s a very real possibility that a teenager with an AR15 is literally part of a well-regulated military group protecting the county.
> ... the Second Amendment’s prefatory clause announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia. The prefatory clause does not suggest that preserving the militia was the only reason Americans valued the ancient right; most undoubtedly thought it even more important for self-defense and hunting. But the threat that the new Federal Government would destroy the citizens’ militia by taking away their arms was the reason that right—unlike some other English rights—was codified in a written Constitution. ...
> Besides ignoring the historical reality that the Second Amendment was not intended to lay down a “novel principl[e]” but rather codified a right “inherited from our English ancestors,” Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U. S. 275, 281 (1897), petitioners’ interpretation does not even achieve the narrower purpose that prompted codification of the right. If, as they believe, the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia — if, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment’s guarantee — it does not assure the existence of a “citizens’ militia” as a safeguard against tyranny ...
> Every late-19th-century legal scholar that we have read interpreted the Second Amendment to secure an individual right unconnected with militia service. The most famous was the judge and professor Thomas Cooley, who wrote a massively popular 1868 Treatise on Constitutional Limitations. Concerning the Second Amendment it said: (...)
> “It might be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been elsewhere explained, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. (...) The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms; and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose. But this enables government to have a well-regulated militia; for to bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them in a way that makes those who keep them ready for their efficient use; in other words, it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order.”
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