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.Then they try to couple the militia clause to the right to keep and bear arms clause. That is, they frequently make the claim that we only need to preserve the right to keep and bear arms in such ways as to support the creation of a well regulated militia.
First of all, if try to slice things that way, it parses as a comment or a supporting argument, not a constraint. The constitution is clear: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Period. There's no "unless" in there. There's no "so long as" either. There's nothing that makes it okay to infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Nothing.
Now, you might say "Hey! Wait a minute! There are no other comments in the constitution!" You'd be right and that still would not justify infringement on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. In fact, as you'll see, searching for an interpretation of the second amendment that minimizes the amount of comments actually shows our government to be in a far greater state of infringement than merely restricting the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.
The obvious answer is that this is one of the more important issues. For ages, it has been the case that tyrants start with the restriction of arms. It wasn't just Hitler. It's been pretty much all of them. In one case, it was so bad that the people had to mutate Karate and Kung Fu into Taekwondo in order to dismount the horseback-bound soldiers who oppressed them.
People who fear an armed populace the most usually should have the least voice in how others are governed. That, I think, accounts for the "being necessary to the security of a free State" bit; which seems pretty in-arguably to be a statement of intent rather than a prescription or a proscription.
The other amendments in the Bill of Rights are all grants of multiple rights, not a single one. Even the first amendment works that way. If you consider that one part to be a comment, and look at how the rest of the constitution is written, you'll see a pretty clear statement that makes a lot of sense.
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.
When you strip out the comment you are left with the following.
A well regulated Militia, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
In which case the proscription against the people's right to keep and bear arms being infringed is still in tact but there is another proscription that has been repeatedly violated over the course of US history: the right to maintain a well regulated Militia.
"How so?" one might ask. "We have a National Guard!"
Indeed we do but it has been slowly reorganized to be continuously more "national" and less "guard." That process is likely to continue until, ultimately, the National Guard is completely indistinguishable from the U.S. Army. We're not there yet - the national guard still has some ties to its containing state - but we're working on it?
Why is that a problem? Where in the second amendment does it say it shouldn't be a national militia? To answer that question, we have to come full circle and re-instate the part of the amendment I earlier threw out as "reasoning" instead of law. Instead of adding words, like typical Republicrats and Democans want to do, let's try just adding parentheses and color groupings to assist in parsing:
(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.
If you look at it that way, it's really clear - like all the other amendments, there is no flexibility or wiggle room in its interpretation. It is an ironclad statement with many protections:
- The state has the right to create a well-regulated Militia
- The people have the right to keep and bear arms
- Those rights shall not be infringed
I don't see how you could interpret it any other way.
