"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."
The Constitution
of the United States of America, amendment 2
I believe
that it was the young Lord Acton who remarked that “ablatives confuse me, and
ablatives absolute confuse me absolutely”.
It must have been around 1844. He
would have been about ten years old, and having a hell of a time with his Latin
course at Oscott College. He had a
point. I thought of this while watching
a video of Mr. Trump’s loyal speech to convened members of the National Rifle
Association, whose endorsement he had just received. He promised his audience that he would not
let them down in supporting their gun rights, but that the same could not be
said about his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. “Hillary wants to
disarm vulnerable Americans in high-crime neighborhoods….Whether it’s a young
single mom in Florida or a grandmother in Ohio, Hillary wants them to be
defenseless, wants to take away any chance they have of survival. . . . And
that’s why we’re going to call her ‘Heartless Hillary.’ ”
A person who would
willfully take away any chance for
the survival of Ohio grandmothers would be heartless indeed. I suppose that single moms in Florida fall
more into the category of the judgment call.
Ms. Clinton did not take this lying down, however. “You're wrong,” she tweeted in Trump’s
direction. “We can uphold Second Amendment rights while preventing senseless
gun violence.”
The dramatic
“evolution” of positions taken by American politicians is a feature of our
political life. I seem to remember that
Mr. Trump, not all that long ago, was favoring a prudential approach to the gun
issue. And as an Arkansan I can
guarantee you that Hillary Clinton was not espousing any form of gun control when she was the first lady of my
state. Au contraire, as the great W. C. Fields always used to say. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and
political candidates get blown about rather more than others.
I myself am less
interested in the rights of the second amendment than in its wrongs, beginning
with its syntactical solecism but including also the chaos of its punctuation. Getting to the bottom of this necessitates a
brief chapter in the history of education.
European pedagogues of the Enlightenment period stressed the
classics. To be considered moderately
educated one had to be able to read Latin easily. To be well educated meant you could write it
flawlessly as well. Young men spent a
great deal of time studying Latin. Many
pedants, unfortunately, considered Latin vastly superior to the vulgar tongues
and tried to impose its rules on the local native language. In England that was English.
There is in Latin a
common construction called the ablative
absolute. Eighteenth-century writers
of formal prose seem to have thought it ought to be common in English as
well—despite the fact that modern English shed its system of noun declensions
centuries earlier, and thus didn’t have ablatives. According to the latest edition of Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar, “The
so-called Ablative Absolute is an Ablative combined with a participle, and
serves to modify the verbal predicate of a sentence.” That’s perfectly clear, I’m sure. But of course the reason the nominal form is absolute (i.e., “standing apart from a
normal or usual syntactical relation with other words or sentence elements”) is
that it stands apart from a normal or usual syntactical relation with other
words or sentence elements. Therefore
though we can through a strenuous act of imagination conclude that the noun of a well
regulated Militia is or in a parallel linguistic universe might be in the
ablative case and that it combines with the participle being, there is absolutely no living Nobelist in literature, Harvard
law professor, or other clairvoyant who can tell you for sure what it has to do
with the right of the people to keep and
bear Arms.
Then there is the
problem of the rampaging constitutional comma.
There is a current English ablative absolute respectable enough to have
been adopted as the name of a program on NPR: the phrase all things considered. Under
no circumstance would you say “all things comma
considered” any more than you would say “all things comma bright and
beautiful”. But note that the
infallible Founders have “A well regulated Militia comma being…”
Did they lose confidence in the absolutism of their ablative or did they, as I
suspect, throw in a comma every now and then just for the hell of it? What other explanation can you offer for the
third and final, comma, in, the, second, amendment? The subject of the principal clause of the second amendment is the right to bear arms.
Its predicate is “shall not be infringed”. Why, o tell me why, is there a comma between
them?
In
an earlier blog post I already expressed the opinion that the second amendment
should be repealed (as was the eighteenth, concerning the prohibition of alcoholic
drink) employing the constitutional process most of the Founders thought would
be frequently used, but which has been seldom invoked since the Constitution
mysteriously changed its status from that of an excellent utilitarian handbook
for that of a sacred text in a revealed religion. I realize that my suggestion is a
non-starter. My fallback position is
this: would somebody, please, parse
the second amendment.
