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Participants in the various debates on firearms, crime, and constitutional law may have noticed that the Second Amendment is often quoted differently by those involved. The two main variations differ in punctuation- specifically, in the number of commas used to separate those twenty-seven words. But which is the correct one? The answer to this question must be found in official records from the early days of the republic. Therefore, a look into the progression of this declaratory and restrictive clause from its inception to its final form is in order.
Before beginning, one must note that common nouns, like "state" and "people," were often capitalized in official and unofficial documents of the era. Also, the letter "f" was at times used in place of the letter "s" in both print and manuscript. For example, "Congress" is sometimes spelled as "Congrefs," as is the case in the parchment copy of the Bill of Rights displayed by the National Archives. The quotations listed here are accurate. With the exception of the omission of quotations marks, versions of what is now known as the Second Amendment in boldface appear with the exact spelling, capitalization, and punctuation as the cited originals.
A Chronological History
During ratification debates on the Constitution in the state conventions, several states proposed amendments to that charter. Anti-Federalist opposition to ratification was particularly strong in the key states of New York and Virginia, and one of their main grievances was that the Constitution lacked a declaration of rights. During the ratification process, Federalist James Madison became a champion of such a declaration, and so it fell to him, as a member of the 1st Congress, to write one. On June 8, 1789, Madison introduced his declaration of rights on the floor of the House. One of its articles read:
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.1
On July 21, John Vining of Delaware was appointed to chair a select committee of eleven to review, and make a report on, the subject of amendments to the Constitution. Each committeeman represented one of the eleven states (Rhode Island and North Carolina had not ratified the Constitution at that time), with James Madison representing Virginia. Unfortunately, no record of the committee's proceedings is known to exist. Seven days later, Vining duly issued the report, one of the amendments reading:
A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms. 2
In debates on the House floor, some congressmen, notably Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and Thomas Scott of Pennsylvania, objected to the conscientious objector clause in the fifth article. They expressed concerns that a future Congress might declare the people religiously scrupulous in a bid to disarm them, and that such persons could not be called up for military duty. However, motions to strike the clause were not carried. On August 21, the House enumerated the Amendments as modified, with the fifth article listed as follows:
5. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the People, being the best security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person. 3
Finally, on August 24, the House of Representatives passed its proposals for amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the Senate for their consideration. The next day, the Senate entered the document into their official journal. The Senate Journal shows Article the Fifth as:
Art. V. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person. 4
On September 4, the Senate debated the amendments proposed by the House, and the conscientious objector clause was quickly stricken. Sadly, these debates were held in secret, so records of them do not exist. The Senators agreed to accept Article the Fifth in this form:
...a well regulated militia, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall net be infringed. 5
In further debates on September 9, the Senate agreed to strike the words, "the best," and replace them with, "necessary to the." Since the third and fourth articles had been combined, the Senators also agreed to rename the amendment as Article the Fourth. The Senate Journal that day carried the article without the word, "best," but also without the replacements, "necessary to." Note that the extraneous commas have been omitted:
A well regulated militia being the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. 6
With two-thirds of the Senate concurring on the proposed amendments, they were sent back to the House for the Representatives' perusal. On September 21, the House notified the Senate that it agreed to some of their amendments, but not all of them. However, they agreed to Article the Fourth in its entirety:
Resolved, That this House doth agree to the second, fourth, eighth, twelfth, thirteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth amendments... 7
By September 25, the Congress had resolved all differences pertaining to the proposed amendments to the Constitution. On that day, a Clerk of the House, William Lambert, put what is now known as the Bill of Rights to parchment. Three days later, it was signed by the Speaker of the House, Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, and the President of the Senate, Vice President John Adams. This parchment copy is held by the National Archives and Records Administration, and shows the following version of the fourth article:
Article the Fourth. 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. 8
The above version is used almost exclusively today, but aside from the parchment copy, the author was unable to find any other official documents from that era which carry the amendment with the extra commas. In fact, in the appendix of the Senate Journal, Article the Fourth is entered as reading:
Art. IV. 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.9
Also, the Annals of Congress, formally called The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, show the proposed amendment as follows:
Article the Fourth. 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.10
Further, once two-thirds of both chambers of the Congress agreed to the proposed amendments, the House passed a resolve to request that the President send copies of them to the governors of the eleven states in the Union, and to those of Rhode Island and North Carolina. The Senate concurred on September 26, as recorded in their journal:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States be requested to transmit to the executives of the United States, which have ratified the constitution copies of the amendments proposed by Congress, to be added thereto; and like copies to the executives of the states of Rhode Island and North Carolina.11
Fortunately, an original copy of the amendments proposed by the Congress, and sent to the State of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, does survive. Certified as a true copy by Assembly Secretary Henry Ward, it reads in part:
Article the Fourth, --A well regulated Militia being neceffary to the Security of a free State, the Right of the People to keep and bear Arms fhall not be infringed. 12
And so, the proposed amendments to the Constitution were sent to the states for ratification. When notifying the President that their legislatures or conventions had ratified some or all of the proposed amendments, some states attached certified copies of them. New York, Maryland, South Carolina, and Rhode Island notified the general government that they had ratified the fourth amendment in this form:
Article the Fourth. 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. 13
Articles the First and Second were not ratified by the required three-fourths of the states, but by December 15, 1791, the last ten articles were. These, of course, are now known as the Bill of Rights. Renumbering the amendments was required since the first two had not been ratified. The 1796 revision of The Federalist on the New Constitution reflects the change as such:
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.14
This version is carried throughout the 19th Century, in such legal treatises as Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833) and Thomas Cooley's Principles of Constitutional Law (1898). It is also transcribed in this manner in the 1845 Statutes at Large, although the term "state" is capitalized in that text. The latter are the official source for acts of Congress.15,16, 17
This version still appears today, as is the case with the annotated version of the Constitution they sponsored on the Government Printing Office web site (1992, supplemented in 1996 and 1998). The Second Amendment is shown as reading:
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. 18
(The Senate-sponsored GPO site does carry a "literal print" of the amendments to the Constitution showing the Second Amendment with the additional commas. The punctuation and capitalization of the amendments transcribed there are the same as those found on the parchment copy displayed in the Rotunda of the National Archives.)19
Thus, the correct rendition of the Second Amendment carries but a single comma, after the word "state." It was in this form that those twenty-seven words were written, agreed upon, passed, and ratified.
Why the Commas are Important
It is important to use the proper Second Amendment because it is clearly and flawlessly written in
its original form. Also, the function of the words, "a well regulated militia being necessary to the
security of a free state," are readily discerned when the proper punctuation is used. On the other
hand, the gratuitous addition of commas serve only to render the sentence grammatically incorrect and
unnecessarily ambiguous. These points will be demonstrated later in the Second Amendment Series.
Footnotes:
1. Amendments Offered in Congress by James Madison, June 8, 1789. The Constitution Society.
http://www.constitution.org/bor/amd_jmad.htm, 16 January 2000.
2. Amendments Reported by the Select Committee. July 28, 1789. The Constitution Society.
http://www.constitution.org/bor/amd_scom.htm, 16 January 2000.
3. U.S. House Journal. 1st Cong., 1st sess., 21 August 1789.
4. U.S. Senate Journal. 1st Cong., 1st sess., 25 August 1789.
5. U.S. Senate Journal, 1st Cong., 1st sess., 4 September 1789.
6. U.S. Senate Journal, 1st Cong., 1st sess., 9 September 1789.
7. U.S. House Journal. 1st Cong., 1st sess., 21 September 1789.
8. Bill of Rights. National Archives and Records Administration.
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/billrights/bill.jpg, 22 January 2000.
9. U.S. Senate Journal. 1st Cong., 1st sess., Appendix.
10. Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess., Appendix
11. U.S. Senate Journal. 1st Cong. 1st sess., 26 September 1789.
12. A True Bill. The Constitution for the United States, Its Sources and Its Applications.
http://www.nidlink.com/~bobhard/billofrt.jpg, 27 January 2000.
13. U.S. House Journal, 1st Cong., 3rd sess., Appendix Note: Maryland and South Carolina
capitalized the "m" in "Militia."
14. The Federalist on the New Constitution, 1796. The Constitution for the United States, Its
Sources and Its Applications. http://www.nidlink.com/~bobhard/f16b1234.jpg, 17 February 2000.
15. Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution Society.
http://www.constitution.org/js/js_344.htm, 18 February 2000.
16. Quotes from Constitutional Commentators. Gun Cite.
http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndcom.html, 2 February 2000.
17. Statutes at Large 1845, 21.
18. Second Amendment--Bearing Arms. The Constitution of the United States of America.
http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitution/amdt2.html, 18 February 2000.
19. Text of the Amendments (Literal Print). The Constitution of the United States of America.
http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitution/conamt.html, 18 February 2000.
Thanks! Bookmarked!
A previously thread (in February) had a link to this article, without actually posting it. The original had a mistake in one of the footnotes, which has been corrected with this revision.
Hopefully within a few months, the major revision/expanded version will be completed and appear in print.
Thanks. I point this out often but not as thoroughly.
Wonderful compilation.
--Boris
Bump.
Thanks, I have been researching this also and found much the same documents. In addition, there is an 1820 Supreme Court (Houston v. Moore) case regarding the militia which quotes the single comma 2nd. I haven't yet found the *original* source document for this case though, just a qoute in a secondary source. (Help?)
I was hoping to find the State's ratification records, but haven't yet....
Obviously, this is too long to post when pointing out the comma controversy. I've been thinking about a shorter talking head/talking point version:
The Second Amendment was written, passed, and ratified with a single comma. In order to hold the three comma version as correct, one must believe that, by enscrolling a parchment copy of the Bill of Rights, a Clerk of the House has the power to overrule a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress.
How's that?
I'll do a search for Houston v. Moore later.
Right now, I have more than 30 official, single comma versions of the Second Amendment, and am trying to find out exactly when the three comma version replaces it.
Heads up, here's what I was talking about the other night.
Also, the letter "f" was at times used in place of the letter "s" in both print and manuscript.
Actually, it wasn't. The letter "s" was sometimes written or printed so as to somewhat resemble the letter "f", but it was not the same. Other than in L'Enfant Plaza in DC, I've never seen any typography in which the script-s was written identically to an "f"; rather, it is shorter and lacks the crossbar. As for L'Enfant Plaza, the typography there would probably have given an 18th century typesetter nightmares.
In order to hold the three comma version as correct, one must believe that, by enscrolling a parchment copy of the Bill of Rights, a Clerk of the House has the power to overrule a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress. That won't be necessary. The Supreme Court can just come up with some convenient interpretation of whatever they chose trash the amendment.
The Second Amendment was written, passed, and ratified with a single comma. In order to hold the three comma version as correct, one must believe that, by enscrolling a parchment copy of the Bill of Rights, a Clerk of the House has the power to overrule a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress.
How's that?
The same thing happened with U.S. vs Miller. If you read both the syllabus of the decision and the decision itself, you'll see that they are quite different from each other. Unfortunately, other courts have cited the decision while quoting the syllabus; I wonder if there's any way to convince the Court to rewrite the syllabus to accurately reflect the real decision.
Thanks, supercat.
Here is an image of Rhode Island's certified copy. It appears that at the end of a word, the lowercase "s" looks like an "s," but in the middle of words, it looks like an "f."
I've seen that in Miller. A two comma version magically becomes the three comma version.
In court cases, the proper Second Amendment vanishes about 1920.
The fifth
amendment [ed. second amendment] to the constitution, declaring that "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," may not, perhaps, be thought to have any important
bearing (p.53)on this point. If it have, it confirms and illustrates, rather than impugns the
reasoning already suggested.
- Houston v. Moore, 18 U.S. (5 Wheat.) 1 (1820)
As far as I can tell, the correct Second Amendment is used exclusively in state, federal, and Supreme Court decisions until 1876, when a two comma version appears. The first three comma version I could find in a court case is from 1902.
These revised amendments could not have just appeared out of thin air. The judges and justices (and their legal clerks) must have gotten them from somewhere. My search now is for the "smoking comma gun;" that is, the first official statute to carry the change. I've been working on this project for six months, and am in no danger of completing it anytime soon.
Nice post, very well presented. Here are some links that might interest readers of your fine Article.
http://www.saf.org/Constitutions.html#Top
http://www.saf.org/journal/2_survive.html
http://www.saf.org/pub/rkba/books/jfp5ch03.txt
http://www.saf.org/journal/5_histo.html
Regard,
Neal
I could not find a U.S. Supreme Court official web site, however, this one for the Federal Judiciary:
http://www.uscourts.gov/
Possibly the you could contact the Web Master there to inquire about how to go about getting the changes made.
Regards,
Neal
fyi
well, you have the table of contents posted here. At least the search engine link works. Sorry.
FReeper research BUMP!
Thanks, Bob
Regards,
Neal
It's obvious that you spent a great deal of time on closely examining early prints and manuscripts related to the Second Amendment, yet you overlooked some basic bibliographic facts.
The capitalization, in colonial and early federalist documents (especially handwritten documents) of common nouns is a Germanic affectation, brought into the English language in the preceding century by the Hanoverian kings. This practice faded out in America almost immediately after Independence and in England a couple of decades later.
Also an example of Germanic influence on English, especially on handwritten documents, is the peculiar look of the double S in which the first s is elongated so that it resembles the letter f. Actually, it lacks the crossbar of the f, and in handwriting the bottom loop goes the wrong way (compared to an f). In German there is even a special printing character for the double s. This also ceased to appear in American English shortly after Independence.
The very painstaking examination of so many different early specimens of the Second Amendment, looking especially for variants in the punctuation, obviously took a great deal of time and effort. Unfortunately it overlooks the fact that, in that era, punctuation had virtually no legal effect. Up to that time punctuation itself was still unsettled (the semicolon was a relatively recent innovation), and, more significantly, laws were passed in Parliament and Congress by means of reading the one handwritten copy aloud from the Speaker's desk, rather than making copies for every member, so it was legally held at that time that Acts of Parliament effectively had no punctuation at all, so that the punctuation could not be relied on for interpreting the laws. Also, so many of these documents were handwritten, or printed from handwritten copies, that we cannot be sure just how carefully each handwritten copy duplicated the punctuation of the example before it, and it is possible that in a chain of copying the punctuation in the last copy made is different from that of the first copy without any deliberate and authoritative decision being made about the punctuation.
Oddly enough, some people believe that the microscropic differences in the punctuation of various examples of the 16th Amendment as ratifications of different states reported would actually mean that the 16th Amendment was never validly adopted (this notion has already been rejected repeatedly by courts). If the same logic were to be applied to the Second Amendment, it could be argued that the Second Amendment had not been validly adopted either.
Thanks for the grammar lesson. Your points are well taken.
My opinion is that the comma question would be better left in a
Constitutional version of Trivial Pursuit but for the fact that
ant-gunners are using a non-certified version of the Second Amendment to
misconstruct its meaning.
I started looking into this question after some people suggested that the
Constitution had been altered during or shortly after the Civil War. Like
nearly all conspiracy theories, this one is long on speculation and
short on facts. The position is untenable.
What I did find was that every single certified copy of the Second Amendment contained only one comma, after the word "state." The parchment copy (obviously where the three comma version comes from) is not a certified copy, and all twelve of the proposed amendments found therein contain different capitalization and punctuation than those of certified copies.
The certified Second Amendment was used exclusively in every
official document I could find until 1876. Also, the Statutes at Large of 1819 and 1845, which are certified as being correct down to the
last comma and are the official source of the acts of Congress, show the
amendment in this form. (Somewhere along the line, the Statutes must have been changed, and I'm trying to find out exactly when.)
The single comma version of the Second Amendment should be used until someone proves that the Congress changed it after Sept. 9, 1789. This would have required a 2/3 majority in both Houses, and there is no evidence that such a vote took place.
As an example of using the three comma version to misconstruct this
amendment, I offer Judge Robert Bork, in Slouching Towards [sic] Gomorrah:
The Second Amendment states somewhat ambiguously: "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
first part of the Amendment supports proponents of gun control by seeming to make the possession of
firearms contingent upon being a member of a state-regulated militia. The next part is cited by
opponents of gun control as a guarantee of the individual's right to possess such weapons, since he can
always be called to militia service. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that there is no individual
right to own a firearm. The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves
against a possible tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth
bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to
serve that purpose.
(Every sentence save one in the above passage is false. Bork also said the Ninth Amendment was too ambiguous to read anything from.)
I've read some of the "Sixteenth Amendment Never
Ratified" posts. My point is opposite; all certified copies of the Second Amendment utilize the same punctuation (capitalization varies slightly), and
only in the early 20th Century did this version fall
out of use.
Bump. Here is one of the best disections of the 2nd Amendment. You need to read this one.
For those of you wondering about why some insignifigant commas in an archaic sentence continues to cause controversy among Second Amendment supporters, please read the following narrative:
I became involved with the Second Amendment-comma question last year. Some people were stating that extra commas had been surreptitiously added to the amendment in the 19th Century. This interested me enough to send an e-mail request for more informaiton from one of the primary accusers. He never replied.
Since no one else seemed interested in finding out if this allegation was true, I took up the banner. A friend, who is a government researcher, helped me get started. Thus began research project that lasted more than sixty days, which culminated with an article titled, "Down to the Last Second (Amendment)." (See above.) The study continues...
Results of this research include:
- That the three comma version of the Second Amendment, which is most commonly used today, obviously comes from the parchment copy of the proposed amendments written by Clerk of the House William Lambert on September 25, 1789. The allegation that Abraham Lincoln or Andrew Johnson marked up the Constitution is unsubstantiated.
- That the Senate Journal shows that the Senate removed the extra commas on September 9, 1789, and nothing suggests that the extra punctuation was replaced.
- That the certified copy of the proposed amendments sent to the State of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations contains a single comma in Article the Fourth.
- That the notifications of ratification by the States of New York, Maryland, South Carolina, and Rhode Island contained certified copies of the amendments they ratified, and all of them show Article the Fourth as containing a single comma.
- That, from ratification of the Bill of Rights to 1876, I cannot find a single official transcription (in the Statutes at Large, Consitutional treatises, state and federal court cases, etc.) of the Second Amendment that contains more than one comma.
- That in 1876, for the first time, a two comma version of the amendment appears in the Arkansas court case, Fife v. State. (This version was rarely used.)
- That the three comma version of the Second Amendment did not appear in any official document I could find (save the parchment copy noted above) until 1902, in the Idaho Supreme Court case In re Brickey.
- That usage of the single comma Second Amendment largely died out in the 1910's and 1920's.
- That misconstruction of the amendment (holding that it applied only to members of the militia) first gained acceptance with the Kansas Supreme Court in 1905, in City of Salina v. Blaksley.
- That anti-gunners use the three comma Second Amendment to claim that it is "ambiguous" (e.g., Robert Bork) and interpret it as guaranteeing the right of government forces to be armed.
Some people think the comma question is trivial, and point out that use of commas and semi-colons wasn't set in 1789; therefore the pursuit of Constitutional punctuation is an exercise in futility (or even asinity). I earnestly agree with them, and would not waste time on the subject but for the fact that people use the parchment copy transcription to misconstruct a clearly written sentence.
The most egregious example of this is to be found in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case Hickman v. Block, 81 F.3d 98 (9th Cir. 1996):
...The Court's understanding follows a plain reading of the Amendment's text. The
Amendment's second clause declares that the goal is to preserve the security of "a free
state;" its first clause establishes the premise that well-regulated militia are necessary to
this end. Thus it is only in furtherance of state security that "the right of the people to keep
and bear arms" is finally proclaimed.
(Sure, this interpretation flies in the face of the English language, the rules of grammar, the intent of the Framers, almost every Constitutional scholar (living or dead), and 150 years of jurisprudence, but that's what you get when you have a "living" Constitution.)
Also note that carrying three commas in the Second Amendment renders the sentence grammatically incorrect. The first separates a restrictive participle phrase from its subject, while the third un-necessarily separates the subject of the sentence from its predicate.
Now one might see why many of us insist on using the Second Amendment as it was written and ratified, and why tangofox sometimes chases windmills.
BUMP!!!!!!!!!!!
It's asininity, you fool.
The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that there is no individual right to own a firearm. Does he cite any specific USSC decisions to support that statement? Many lower courts have held that opinion, and have usually cited Miller as precedent for their ruling, but as far as I have been able to determine, the court did not make that ruling in Miller, or anywhere else. In fact, the wording of the Miller decision seems to imply just the opposite, appearing to clearly say that if the firearm in question had some reasonable utility as a militia weapon, Mr. Miller would have been within his rights in possessing it. Since there was no one representing Mr. Miller before the court, no one presented evidence that the firearm was a commonly used military weapon. It seems that if that had been the case, Miller might well have been the defining case on the 2nd amendment, and it appears that the decision would have been in our (gun owners) favor. It could turn out to be that the fact that Mr. Miller's attorney did not attend the court's hearing of the government's appeal is the thing that will determine the future of our RKBA. What has happened to Bork in the last few years? I saw him discussing the 2nd amendment in a TV interview not long after his nomination was rejected, and he said at that time that the 2nd amendment does protect an individual right. I well remember him saying then that he would not have a problem with the Brady bill if it were enacted, because it would not prevent anyone who had a right to own a gun from buying one. Sort of a left-handed way of saying that a law-abiding person has a right to own guns. He seems to have changed his mind since that interview. That seems a little odd, since so many other constitutional scholars, many of them liberals, have recently taken the position that the individual right view of the 2nd is the correct interpretation.
Now one might see why many of us insist on using the Second Amendment as it was written and ratified, and why tangofox sometimes chases windmills. I don't see it that way at all. I think it is very important that all the amendments be preserved exactly as they were worded and punctuated when they were accepted by congress and ratified by the states. And especially so in the case of the 2nd amendment, which is so dependent on proper punctuation to convey it's intended meaning. You are doing the Lord's work on this IMHO, keep working at it until you can prove absolutely that the one comma version is the original amendment as it was passed and ratified. To my mind, you have already done so, but I admit I am prejudiced. BTW, is it possible for you to somehow present the defendent's lawyers in the Emerson case with the results of your research, and the evidence you have turned up supporting a one comma amendment? If such a thing were possible, your research could possibly help convince the court of the true intentions of the authors. Maybe I am just daydreaming, but give it some thought.
Why wait for Emerson to go to the Supreme Court? I am going there on July 3. Read our petition and sign it if you want to do something. http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39324bcd1290.htm
Yours in Liberty, Don
Re. post #30 Done. I only wish I had found this earlier, I could have circulated it more extensively before the mailing deadline. I have been away quite a bit lately, and I have to leave again in a couple of days, so I may not be able to get many co-signers. Nevertheless, I will do what I can in the time still left.
It appears that at the end of a word, the lowercase "s" looks like an "s," but in the middle of words, it looks like an "f."
Correct. A look at the facsimile of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica confirms that.
Tangofox, Also, include a URL to any site you may have,
so people can access the rest of your work from this fine piece. Respectfully, Angel Shamaya
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There still seems to be some confusion as to the proper transcription of the Second Amendment. Here is a repost of an article on this topic that appeared last February. It has been slightly revised.
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To: supercat
For all you constitutional researchers, I found a good site, the Government Printing Office sponsoring the Senate, on the Constitution. Lots of good and interesting stuff. Perhaps you may have it, perhaps not. Sort of hard to access files in toto however, several thousand pages in numbers of files. Play with the URL’s. Look at the bottom of the table of contents for the search engine.
Before I post that however, let me make two comments.
1. No matter how many comma’s, the intent is clear.
2. The ‘s’ versus ‘f’ controversy. It appears to me that there was a character similar to an ‘f’ at the time which was used for a double ‘s’. It has since evolved to a double ‘s’, perhaps to avoid confusion with an ‘f’.
Ok, here is the table of contents. 1
From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access
[U.S. Constitution - Analysis and Interpretation]
[Preliminary Pages]
[Page xxiii-xxiv]
[[Page xxiii]]
CONTENTS
__________
(For contents in detail, see separate table of contents at beginning of
each Article and Amendment)
Page
Public Law 91-589......................................... v
Introduction to the 1992 edition.......................... ix
Historical note on formation of the Constitution.......... xv
Text of the Constitution (literal print).................. 1
Text of the amendments (literal print).................... 23
Proposed amendments not ratified by the States............ 45
The Constitution with Annotations......................... 51
<strong>Preamble</strong>.................................................. 53
Article I. Legislative Department......................... 55
Article II. Executive Department.......................... 409
Article III. Judicial Department.......................... 593
Article IV. States' relations............................. 829
Article V. Mode of amendment.............................. 895
Article VI. Prior debts, national supremacy, oaths of
office................................................... 915
Article VII. Ratification................................. 949
Amendments to the Constitution............................ 951
First Amendment--Religion and expression.................. 965
Second Amendment--Bearing arms............................ 1193
Third Amendment--Quartering soldiers...................... 1195
Fourth Amendment--Search and seizure...................... 1197
Fifth Amendment--Rights of persons........................ 1271
Sixth Amendment--Rights of accused in criminal
prosecutions............................................. 1397
Seventh Amendment--Civil trials........................... 1449
Eighth Amendment--Further guarantees in criminal cases.... 1465
Ninth Amendment--Unenumerated rights...................... 1501
Tenth Amendment--Reserved powers.......................... 1507
Eleventh Amendment--Suits against States.................. 1519
Twelfth Amendment--Election of President.................. 1547
Thirteenth Amendment--Slavery and involuntary servitude... 1549
Fourteenth Amendment--Rights guaranteed: Privileges and
immunities of citizenship, due process, and equal
protection............................................... 1559
Fifteenth Amendment--Rights of citizens to vote........... 1937
Sixteenth Amendment--Income tax........................... 1951
Seventeenth Amendment--Popular election of Senators....... 1965
Eighteenth Amendment--Prohibition of intoxicating liquors. 1967
Nineteenth Amendment--Women's suffrage rights............. 1971
Twentieth Amendment--Terms of President, Vice President,
Members of Congress: Presidential vacancy................ 1973
Twenty-first Amendment--Repeal of eighteenth amendment.... 1977
Twenty-second Amendment--Presidential tenure.............. 1985
Twenty-third Amendment--Presidential electors for the
District of Columbia..................................... 1987
Twenty-fourth Amendment--Abolition of the poll tax
qualification in Federal elections....................... 1989
Twenty-fifth Amendment--Presidential vacancy, disability,
and inability............................................ 1991
Twenty-sixth Amendment--Reduction of voting age
qualification............................................ 1995
Twenty-seventh Amendment--Congressional Pay Limitation.... 1997
Acts of Congress held unconstitutional in whole or in part
by the Supreme Court of the United States................ 1999
[[Page xxiv]]
State constitutional and statutory provisions and
municipal ordinances held unconstitutional on their face
or as administered....................................... 2033
Supreme Court decisions overruled by subsequent decision.. 2243
Table of cases............................................ 2257
Index..................................................... 2407
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To: tangofox
Would you be willing to allow this article to be posted on KeepAndBearArms.com,
specifically in our Second
Amendment archive? If so, please email me your best
version. And any time you revise, I'll personally update it for you, too.
KeepAndBearArms.com
Director@KeepAndBearArms.com
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