26 June—Today marks the fifteenth anniversary—a.k.a. the fifteen-year anniversary—of the U.S. Supreme Court’s long-awaited and momentous 2008 decision in District of Columbia et al. v. Heller, popularly known as Heller. It affirmed that under the Second Amendment private citizens, even with no relationship to a local militia, have the right to possess ordinary weapons (within reason), including handguns, and use them for lawful, historically established situations such as self-defense in a home.

The question before SCOTUS was, do the provisions of the District of Columbia Code that restrict the licensing of handguns and require licensed firearms stored in the home to be kept nonfunctional violate the Second Amendment?

The determination of SCOTUS was, the ban on registering handguns and the requirement to keep guns in the home disassembled or nonfunctional with a trigger lock violate the Second Amendment, but the right to keep and bear arms was nevertheless not absolute—within reason, of course.

To refresh your memory, here’s the Second Amendment: “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.”

Most—on second thought, make that all—of the monumental problems in interpreting the Second Amendment arise from the “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free state” clause, the only instance of a prefatory expression of purpose in the entire Constitution. The anti-gun people maintain that the militia clause clearly and effectively limits the reach of the amendment’s operative clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia’s lengthy, closely-reasoned opinion includes a painstaking and brilliant study in what’s essentially comparative historic linguistics of a single language. The research must have driven his clerks up a wall, but the result was well worth it.

Justice Scalia naturally noted the uniqueness of the prefatory clause in the Constitution but opined that a prefatory statement of purpose, common in legal documents, neither limits nor expands the scope of the operative clause.

It’s as easy as that. But, unless I’ve missed something, Nino missed the grammatical rule that the immediate antecedent gives its meaning to the following function. Thus, what shall not be infringed? Not the militia, but “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” which immediately precedes it. James Madison, being a Princeton man (before it was Princeton), must have been aware of that rule.

Anyway, the late Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a somewhat less lengthy, less linguistic, less closely reasoned dissenting opinion that must have driven his clerks crazy doing research. At the very least, it makes for interesting reading . . .