My Cold, Dead Fingers

Here's what gets me.

Does it have to take an English major to explain the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution and put to rest this unjustifiable crutch of the right-wing, gun-toting fanatics and their conservative supporters?

For those of you who don't remember, Amendment II states "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." Even for those of you who do remember, Amendment II states "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."

That is what it says word for word, comma for comma, capitalization for capitalization. Notice that the subject is "Militia," the verb is "shall not be infringed," and the sentence becomes "A well regulated Militia shall not be infringed."

"What about the bits between commas?" you say? Those are two appositional phrases, and an apposition is "a grammatical construction in which a noun or pronoun is followed by another that explains it."

The subject, a noun (See how it works?), is followed by "being necessary to the security of a free State," and it is followed by "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" in order to explain "a well regulated Militia," the subject of the sentence.

The subject cannot be "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," because you cannot put a single comma between the subject and the verb of a sentence. You cannot write "The dog, ran around the yard." You can write "The dog, being frightened by the gunfire, ran around the yard," because now we have two commas separating the subject and the verb. You can also write "The dog, being frightened by the gunfire, the pet of the neighbor, ran around the yard."

That sentence is not "The pet of the neighbor, ran around the yard," because that would be ungrammatical, just as "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is ungrammatical and therefore not the sentence of Amendment II.

"The right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is an apposition that explains the subject, "a well regulated Militia," just as the other apposition, "being necessary to the security of a free State," does. It is a "Militia" that is "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," which is necessary to the security of a free State and which shall not be infringed.

In other words, the citizens of the United States have the right to keep and bear Arms in "a well regulated Militia," not to stockpile weapons at home and to carry a gun around with them in some Old West mentality.

And what did the sheriff in the Old West do to maintain order? Do the words "Check your guns at the door" strike a familiar note? That didn't mean "Inspect your guns to ensure that they are in proper working order." That meant "Turn your guns in at the door. It's too dangerous for you to carry guns here."

Now, the possibility of everyone having a concealed weapon might deter a few criminal acts, but the probability that hotheads and teenagers carrying a weapon could use it in a moment of unbridled emotion is far greater.

Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), a British jurist and Oxford instructor who was the first at a British university to teach English law as opposed to Roman law (See how those appositions work?), wrote in his great work Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer."

I believe it is better that ten crimes be committed than one innocent victim be killed by a convenient handgun.

Luke Woodham, a teenager in Pearl, Mississippi, who is spending the rest of his life in prison for murdering his mother and two fellow students in October 1997 when he was 16, kept a map on his bedroom wall with the slogan "One Nation Under My Gun." Do we want our immature, impressionable children growing up and believing this heinous claim?

We used to see so-called Amendment II supporters brag "I'll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers."

After a moment of rage, I don't want those cold, dead fingers to be mine.

I rest my case.