"We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding 'interest-balancing' approach. The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of governmenteven the Third Branch of Governmentthe power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad.
"In any event, the meaning of bear arms that petitioners and JUSTICE STEVENS propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning. Rather, they manufacture a hybrid definition, whereby bear arms connotes the actual carrying of arms (and therefore is not really an idiom) but only in the service of an organized militia. No dictionary has ever adopted that definition, and we have been apprised of no source that indicates that it carried that meaning at the time of the founding. But it is easy to see why petitioners and the dissent are driven to the hybrid definition. Giving bear Arms its idiomatic meaning would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage waran absurdity that no commentator has ever endorsed. See L. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights 135 (1999). Worse still, the phrase keep and bear Arms would be incoherent. The word Arms would have two different meanings at once: weapons (as the object of keep) and (as the object of bear) one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying He filled and kicked the bucket to mean He filled the bucket and died. Grotesque."