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> You can’t drop half the sentence and have the same meaning.

My point entirely.

If it was you’d include the entirety of it. How does it being for “The People” work with “Necessary for a well regulated milita” in your mind? Does the word regulated not exist?

Edit: as neither of us have put the full text, putting it here. In the course of getting the exact text I also learned that there are multiple versions of the bill of rights with different punctuation and capitalization(i.e. “The People” vs “the people”) which adds even more confusion to the intent. It was not an amendment written clearly enough to convey the specific intent 250+ years in the future and there going to be disagreements about it.

“ A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The first part explains the reason for the second part. It's not prescriptive or actionable. Its like saying "When it is hot out, food spoils quickly, in our house we keep the milk in the fridge.", that doesn't mean it's ok to leave the milk out in the winter.

The constitution is designed to be understood by the citizens who are subject to it. If you start to engage in word play you are almost certainly on the wrong track. Same goes for "charging a item with a crime and not a person", justifications for mass surveillance or limitations on press freedom or speech.

That is not the interpretation I or many others over literal hundreds hundreds of years of documented history believe.

This is all besides the point though, I’m not here to argue about the specifics of the 2nd amendment and interpretations of each clause. The original poster asked how the US got in the situation with missiles not being in civilian hands based on what they currently knew of the US.

The historical reasons behind that are the same whether or not they were made incorrectly

> The constitution is designed to be understood by the citizens who are subject to it.

Even if I were to accept this as truth, that went out the window when the slaves were freed and I do not accept this as true as you needed to be a white land owning male[1] in the original founding to even vote.

There was zero expectation by the founders that everyone subject to the Constitution would be capable of interpreting it correctly. I would need to see some historical evidence before I could have my mind changed on that point

[1] Some exceptions, they were all changed to remove the women’s vote at some point up until women’s suffrage was passed

"You can’t drop half the sentence and have the same meaning."

In a very technical sense, but if you understand what a subordinate clause means you'll know what can be dropped with changing the restriction on everyone of the main clause.

The technical sense comes from what the subordinate was politically achieving at that time, the Anti-Federalists were properly suspicious of standing armies and regulars, but the guys who actually got a reputation for the successful prosecution of the Revolutionary War starting with the indispensable man Washington knew the nation's defense could not entirely be left to militias.

> In a technical sense

This is a common mistake software engineers make when parsing law. It is not code and cannot be treated in a technical sense as the language it was written in was English which is not technical.

Imagine every person reading the law is like their own personal compiler and so when they intercept “the law” they get different results. Our Supreme Court exists entirely to determine the standard interpretation of the law whenever a disagreement occurs

Replying to vt85 who got flagged almost instantly.

lol at the “socialist wait I mean democrat” comment.

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”

You should look up that quote and find the socialists view on arms. I have zero problems with weaponry and have shot since I was a child. The instant infantile reaction to the idea that not everyone has the same interpretation of an ambiguous sentence is honestly kind of a tiring knee jerk reaction to discussing the second amendment at all.

If you are so concerned about weaponry go learn how to do some basic metal working and chemistry and you can manufacture all the weapons you want with hand tools even and the government won’t be able to take the knowledge from you