The Second Amendment

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Term Paper Title	The Second Amendment
# of Words	636
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.54

The Second Amendment
The right to bear arms
     The Second Amendment is quite plain to most of us.  “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.” No one has ever described the Constitution as a marvel of clarity, and the Second Amendment is perhaps, one of the worst drafted of all its provisions.  What is special about the Amendment is the inclusion of an opening clause -- a preamble, if you will -- that seems to set out its purpose.
It would be impossible to make sense of the Constitution if we did not engage in the ascription of purpose.  Indeed, the major debates about The First Amendment arise precisely when one tries to discern a purpose, given that "literalism" is a hopelessly failing approach to interpreting it.  We usually do not even recognize punishment of fraud -- a classic speech act -- as a free speech problem because we so sensibly assume that the purpose of the First Amendment could not have been, for example, to protect the circulation of patently deceptive information to potential investors in commercial enterprises.
87% of us, the common people understand that this Amendment refers to an individual right.  The problem is, Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and our federal judiciary have reduced the “right” almost to a nullity.  Those individuals are almost all members of a class of people that at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights were considered only one step above the occupation of the common thief.
To put it mildly, the Second Amendment is not at the forefront of constitutional discussion, at least as registered in what the academy regards as the venues for such discussion --law reviews, casebooks, and other scholarly legal publications.  Most scholars do not take the second amendment se...

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