Linguists Agree: Simple Sentences Don’t Mean What They Say, Nor Even What An Overwhelming Majority Of Native Speakers Say They Say

7 Responses to “Linguists Agree: Simple Sentences Don’t Mean What They Say, Nor Even What An Overwhelming Majority Of Native Speakers Say They Say”

1. nk Says:
   January 29th, 2008 at 8:14 am

   It soitanly does, Ollie. Did you catch the part about the “the right of the people to keep arms in a public repository”?

   Heh! If anything is going to raise the heckles of the Justices, who have spent their whole lives construing legal language, this brief will.

2. SayUncle » Linguistics Says:
   January 29th, 2008 at 8:55 am

   [...] this Heller brief passes for science or objective study then the field of linguistics is collectively retarded: [...]

3. Phelps Says:
   January 29th, 2008 at 10:57 am

   So apparently, these guys think that the Founders felt that they had to guarantee the right to serve in the state’s army. I find that incredible.

   And they can’t be right about the “bear arms” definition part either, or the authority given to Congress to declare war means nothing, since any “well regulated” militia has the right to commit acts of war guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

4. Uncle Pinky Says:
   January 29th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

   Heh. Those other commas, well they are just pauses for breath and can be dismissed as such. This one comma right here, it can not be dismissed for it is central to our interpretation. How do we know those others are pauses for breath in a written document and have no other meaning? We say so.

   That’s a pretty laborious brief to rationalize sticking fingers in ears and saying “Nyah-nyah, plain English, we can’t hear you.”

5. Xrlq Says:
   January 29th, 2008 at 7:07 pm

   Phelps, I agree with your first point, and suspect that if forced to answer under oath, the authors of the brief would admit as much. If anyone really had a Second Amendment right to serve in the military, there’d be a huge, lucrative industry of § 1983 cases brought on behalf of every involuntarily discharged soldier, sailor, airman and Marine, not to mention every civilian who has sought to enlist but was turned away.

   Your second point is a bit tricker. I don’t see the authors of the brief arguing that the idiomatic (and supposedly controlling) definition of “bear arms” entails actually waging war independently of Congress. To avoid that result, they fall back on the “well-regulated militia” stuff, which they assume (without evidence) to be regulated by Congress. Under that theory, the people have no right to do anything independently of their well-regulator, who in turn has plenary authority to regulate that right out of existence. Forget the plain language of the amendment, all it means is “Congress shall not disarm its own military unless it wants to.”

6. nk Says:
   January 31st, 2008 at 12:09 pm

   Yes, they’re disingenuous assholes, not to say deliberate liars, equating “bear arms” with “take up arms”. Ignoring that under the common law there was a “gentlemen” class which had the right to “bear arms” all the time, and a peasant class which could only “take up arms” when raised as a levy by their feudal lord or when the Shire Reeve (sheriff) raised the “hue and cry”.

   Still, our abolishing of that distinction, through the Second Amendment, may very well operate also as a right for every able-bodied citizen to “take up arms” in defense of his country — i.e. enlist in the military. It is an argument I would bring were I ever to argue against DADT.

7. BR Says:
   February 7th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

   WOW! These guys really know how to do some research, and yet completely misrepresent the statement at the end of it. They point out that keeping and bearing arms is a necessary precondition to a well-regulated militia, which in turn is necessary to the security of a free state, yet miss the concept. The absolute construction works one way - in order to have a well-regulated militia, you have to keep and bear arms. Great. But there are other reasons to keep and bear arms. A well-regulate milita is not the only one, and this construct does not state that this is the only acceptable reason to keep and bear arms, or place any other limitation on keeping or bearing of arms - just that it is the reason for inclusion of the keeping and bearing arms amendment.

   “Because a softball team is necessary to the playing of a softball game, the right of the people to keep and bear softballs shall not be infringed”

   This doesn’t limit my ability to play catch with someone, or bounce the ball off the fence, or play some other game with a softball - just that we need to have x (people with softballs) to have y (a softball game).

   The right is broader than the explicitly stated reason to have it.

   I also have a real problem with their analysis of “bear arms” implying a military role. All of their examples use a variation on “bear(-ing/bore) arms against…” The military component comes from the “against” portion. Hunting is easily construed as “bearing arms against an animal” - the “against…” phrase defining the nature of it, in this case hunting. There is no such construction in the amendment, therefore the military implication is a stretch here as well.

   These “linguists” only prove that they have a pre-existing position on the subject, and have provided a poor analysis in support of it.

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