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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> The accepted solution is to have a constitution that says otherwise.

Constitutions don't enforce themselves. The US constitution has a crystal clear right to bear arms but multiple jurisdictions ignore it and multiple supreme court rulings and make firearm ownership functionally impossible anyway. Free speech regulations have, thankfully, been more robust.

The only thing that stops bad things happening is a critical mass of people who believe in the values the constitution memorializes and who have enough veto power to stop attempts to erode these values.

The US has such a critical mass, the gun debate notwithstanding. Does the EU have enough people who still believe in freedom?

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> The US constitution has a crystal clear right to bear arms

It looks like it was drafted by an ESL speaker. It's by far the worst-drafted amendment, grammatically speaking:

> 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.

It's not even a valid English sentence, and it certainly never bothers to define "Arms." Not to mention that, as written, it appears to make it illegal for me to tell you that you cannot come to my house with a gun, because that's me infringing your right. It doesn't constrain Congress. It constrained anyone who wants to take away your right to bear arms.

Sheer lunacy as written. Ungrammatical and implies some insane shit.

But no, you're right, it's crystal clear. Much like how the First Amendment says

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

which in crystal clear terms makes it legal to mass-distribute child pornography. To prohibit it would restrict the freedom of the press.

Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly

Ok, get a 2/3 majority of the House and Senate to approve a proposed edit removing those commas, and then get 3/4 of the state legislatures to approve it.

Until then, the commas are officially part of the text.

Comma rules change over time.

But the text of the Constitution only changes through amendments.

That said, the effective meaning of the Constitution is "whatever a majority of the Supreme Court agrees it is."

And to a degree, given the power to impeach Supreme Court justices, "whatever a majority of the Supreme Court agrees it is, and with Congress sufficiently on board to not impeach sufficient justices to force a shift in the balance of the Court."

I'm responding to:

>>> Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly

>> Until then, the commas are officially part of the text.

> Comma rules change over time.

Maybe the equivalence of the sentence at drafting, today is without commas?

That depends on the opinions of 9 very specific individuals. How the text and its commas might be interpreted by you or I today is irrelevant.

But you chose to tell us about your interpretation. :-)

I had less the current legal interpretation and more the meaning at the time of writing down, as it would reveal itself in current text, in mind, which is relevant to this argument.

I see the conversation differently.

KPGv2 pointed out the phrasing of the 2nd amendment is not clear.

GLdRH said "Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly".

I said that modifying the literal text requires going through the amendment process.

You said "Comma rules change over time."

I reiterated that the literal text does not change except through the amendment process, and also noted that fundamentally the literal words don't matter much as it's up to a majority of the Supreme Court how to interpret any of it.

You then brought up modern language usages of commas.

I replied that how you or I today interpret the text is irrelevant because only the Supreme Court's opinion matters.

At no point in this conversation have I expressed a specific interpretation of the text, so your indication that I chose to tell the discussion about my interpretation seems weird and maybe you're misreading usernames somewhere along the way.

> maybe you're misreading usernames

Sorry for that.

> KPGv2 pointed out the phrasing of the 2nd amendment is not clear.

I thought me and GLdRH replied to KPGv2 stating that the 2nd amendment isn't valid grammar and this results in some of the unclarity.

When you have this:

    X -> [grammar rules 18th century] -> 2nd amendment -> [grammar rules 21th century] -> ...

, then when you want to discuss meaning issues due to grammar rules, you need to use 18th century grammar. I perceived GLdRH to use 21th century grammar to encode the same sentence. The literal text does not need to be modified, since it uses 18th century grammar rules. Only when you want to parse it with 21th century grammar rules, you need to preprocess it to adjust the grammar first. This preprocessing doesn't need to be written back, since the grammar rules of the text haven't changed. We are only circumventing the parser not supporting the texts grammar.

> only the Supreme Court's opinion matters.

This is purely about syntactic issues, not about semantics. The Supreme Court applies also semantics, such as the other legal system definitions of the time. I wasn't replying to that aspect.

No, it doesn't. I said it's grammatically incorrect, not orthographically incorrect. (It's arguably correct orthographically based on the incorrect grammar.)

> [Noun], being [clause], [grammatically correct sentence]

is objectively incorrect English grammar.

Eliding the "being" appositive, you're left with

> [Noun], [sentence].

Unless you're talking to the noun (as in "Hey, you, the well regulated militia! Did you know that the right to keep and bear arms . . . "), it's not grammatically correct.

It also implies that the militia is regulated.

I'm not here to argue about the right to bear arms in the USA, but the 2nd amendment is anything but crystal clear in its language.

Seems pretty clear to me, although I'm neither an american nor a lawyer.

i think making your argument on free speech grounds would be stronger

How so? My point is that US constitutional protections on firearm ownership have undeniably eroded. The presence of text on the page did not prevent this erosion. I'm using gun rights as an example of a situation in which text granting a right becomes irrelevant if people stop believing in the values behind the text.

People do believe in freedom of speech in the US, thankfully, even if they've stopped defending gun rights in some places.

EU free speech protections are in the same position gun rights are in the US, and for surprisingly similar reasons.

when you are talking to a european audience, they tend to be in favor of gun control so they don't care about erosion of those rights (like the people in the US who also favor eroding them, wording of the rules be damned)

HN is to a large extent a popularity contest, and people here are more in favor of free speech than guns. the US record on protecting free speech is very good.

> you are talking to a european audience, they tend to be in favor of gun control so they don't care about erosion of those rights

You have accidentally properly identified the european problem and precisely the reason that chat control will pass: shortsightedness. If people only rise up to protect rights "they need", soon no rights will be left.

In the EU you can have guns, you just must pass some tests, that you know how to use them and you need to store them in separate ways.

But guns are vastly insufficient in this century to overthrow the state, you basically only harm your fellow citizens with them.

Most of the erosion is done through court challenges.

Historically, courts have maintained that legislation is pursued under "good faith". This was the justification for not overturning ACA on the grounds of it being an unconstitutional tax: the lawmakers didn't mean to make it an unapportioned tax, even though it effectively is, so it's okay yall. Washington St just did this with income taxes on capital gains in direct violation of their state constitution a year or two ago.

Where I live, you cannot open carry. That is a direct violation of 2A, but the courts have said it's okay baby because it's not an undue burden to pay a fee and waste a day of your life. Pure nonsense. Just change the constitution for goodness sake.

This simply isn't true. If anything, constitutional protections have dramatically expanded since the amendment was passed.

This is because until the 14th Amendment and the incorporation doctrine, the Bill of Rights only restricted the Federal government, not the States. Prior to the that, state and local governments could (and did) restrict not just firearms, but other rights as well.

Hell, the Bill of Rights still hasn't been fully incorporated, so for instance, despite the 7th Amendment stating otherwise, you don't have the right to a jury trial in civil cases in every state nor the right to indictment by grand jury (5th Amendment).

Of course, some states copied parts of the constitution into their own and had some form of protection, but it was by no means universal. Massachusetts even had a state church until 1833.

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