{"id":69848,"date":"2021-07-17T04:18:19","date_gmt":"2021-07-17T09:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69848"},"modified":"2021-07-17T07:25:40","modified_gmt":"2021-07-17T12:25:40","slug":"69848","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69848","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

This is how lawyers make their living, arguing over ‘fine points’ of language when it’s simpler, and easier to understand that the Bill Of Rights is a list of things the goobermint is\u00a0to keep its hand off of<\/em>, as opposed to how far it could pretzel the language to restrict the freedoms and liberties of the American people.<\/p>\n

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Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Meaning of \u201cBear Arms\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the past decade, research into the ordinary meaning of constitutional terms has been supplemented by\u00a0corpus linguistics<\/em>. There is obvious value in examining large databases of historical texts to determine how a particular group of people used a particular word or phrase at a particular time.<\/p>\n

The text of the Second Amendment protects the right to \u201cbear Arms.\u201d The majority and dissenting justices in\u00a0District of Columbia v. Heller\u00a0<\/em>disagreed over how the phrase \u201cbear Arms\u201d was understood in 1791. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, read the phrase broadly to include protection for the carrying of firearms apart from military service (what Justice Scalia called its \u201cnatural\u201d meaning). Justice Stevens, writing for the dissenting justices, read the phrase narrowly to protect only the carrying of firearms in connection with military service (what the majority and dissent called its \u201cidiomatic\u201d meaning). Both the Scalia and Stevens opinions relied on multiple original sources to support their conclusions, but, at the time, those sources were limited in number.<\/p>\n

Since\u00a0Heller,\u00a0<\/em>the creation of two databases\u2014the Corpus of Founding Era American Usage (COFEA) and the Corpus of Early Modern English (COEME)\u2014has enabled researchers such as\u00a0Dennis Baron<\/a>,\u00a0Neal Goldfarb<\/a>,\u00a0Josh Blackman<\/a>,\u00a0James Phillips<\/a>, and\u00a0Josh Jones<\/a>\u00a0to analyze how the phrase \u201cbear arms\u201d was understood during the founding era (1760-99).<\/p>\n

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These researchers generally agree that \u201cbear arms\u201d was used\u00a0mostly<\/em>\u00a0in its idiomatic or military sense during this period, but not solely or exclusively so. Baron concluded that the natural use of the phrase was \u201calmost always\u201d in a military sense, while Goldfarb found that nearly 95 percent of all uses of \u201cbear arms\u201d conveyed the idiomatic sense relating serving in the military. Blackman and Philips, examining a smaller sample, found that the \u201coverwhelming majority\u201d of uses of were in the military context. Josh Jones, using somewhat different search and coding parameters, found that the figurative or specialized military sense of \u201cbear arms\u201d was used in 66 percent of relevant uses, the literal carrying sense in 21 percent, including both military and civilian contexts, and the remaining 13 percent were too ambiguous to place in either category.<\/p>\n

Heller\u00a0<\/em>rejected the view that \u201cbear Arms\u201d in the Second Amendment exclusively means to carry arms while serving in a state-organized militia. Has\u00a0Heller\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>conclusion been undermined by legal corpus linguistics (LCL)? There are several points to consider in answering this question.<\/p>\n

First, there is no question that \u201cbear arms\u201d was used during the founding period to describe carrying weapons in individual and civilian contexts, outside of service in an organized militia or other military unit. Here are several examples:<\/p>\n