Words of the Second Amendment: Well Regulated Militia (Essay Sample)

Words of the Second Amendment: ‘Well Regulated Militia’
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Constitutional law is about how society should be ordered to facilitate civility among the citizenry and to channel that national character. In the case of the United States, a nation founded on the basis of the collaboration and the association of men of freewill, the constitutionalism of such a society based on chequered powers of the government. In this regard, the Bill of Rights was meant to enforce the limits of the state power as it dealt its business to govern the people. The wordings of the Bill of Rights have been treated to various analyses of constitutionality and constitutionalism. However, it emerges in the final analysis that the spirit of the framers was centred on ensuring the stability and security of a stable free state.
In context, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads ‘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 words of the constitution were framed at a different time and as such the framers should be understood in the context of their predicaments and as such render a meaningful interpretation to the clauses. In contemporary meaning, ‘a well regulated Militia’ could conjure a heavy and intense government regulation of society. However, such an interpretation is not accurate because it was not the intention of the framers to create a nation of very intense government regulation. In the context of the framers, ‘Militia’ was not a word for government regulation and it merely should have an ordinary understanding that such a militia should be well regulated.
The words ‘well regulated’ is depicted by many scholars to have been in common use before 1789 and persisted for many years thereafter. During the time it merely meant that some entity as in proper working state. It meant that the entity being referred to was well calibrated and that it was functioning correctly and met the expectation of persons making inspection to its condition. The government had authority to supervise the manner in which the people were armed but the particular clause was meant to actually render the government powerless in that particular intention to supervise the people. Moreover, it is considered that the constitution empowers the Congress with the power to ‘raise and support’ a standing army but the clause refers to the necessity and the observation that the amendment restrains the state from unduly restraining the people from keeping and bearing arms.
The express intent and the purpose of the bill of rights were to declare the rights of the individual and in so doing, to proscribe the powers of the national government. As such the terms ‘well-regulated’ and ‘militia’ can never be construed to mean that the second amendment granted the national government over the citizens. In fact, ‘militia’ in this sense refers to the citizens with the capability of bearing arms. In the same historical context, George Mason who was one of the Virginians and refused to sign the constitution because it did not expressly come with a bill of rights remarked that ‘who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.’ The Federal Farmer, which comprised individual anti-federalists, believed that the ‘Militia’ represented the people themselves as citizens. Nowhere is it any contemporaneously remarked that the ‘Militia’ represented anything else other than the people. It is further conclusively remarked that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the collective rights of the states and not for private citizens to bear and keep arms. In this consideration, the people are used as a collective term referring to the governed republic’s citizens in plural terms.
In a recent Supreme Court review, it was confirmed that the right to keep and bear arms was abdicated to the individual ‘peoples.’ The same term ‘the people’ is used severally in the constitutional wording from the preamble and a connotation of the citizenry in plural is the interpretation. In this same tempo, ‘well-regulated’ in the context of the noun it modifies therefore situates the ‘militia’ as the people. Furthermore, if we have to impute a meaning to the term ‘well-regulated’ to a present day governmental bureaucracy, the meaning may not suffice because it is laden with countless rules, regulations, supervision and protocol which is inaccurate. Elsewhere in the constitution the term ‘regulate,’ has been used and this gives us a perfect entry point into the analysis of the Second Amendment proper. It is useful to denote that every time the constitution employed the term ‘regulate,’ it specified the very actors and the object to be regulated. As a stark contrast to the Second Amendment clause, the framers used to the term ‘well regulated’ to describe the militia without expressly selecting the actor and the object to be regulated.
In the wording of the constitution, the article ‘a’ is used instead of the definite article ‘the’ in making reference to the militia. It is defined here that the framers never had a particular type of entity as the militia but merely noted that it was of necessity that a well regulated people’s militia that is capable of bearing arms was necessary for the preservation of a free state. From this pedestal of reason, it is explicit that the framers never considered any particular entity as most suited or any rules or mechanism for the militia to deploy the task of securing a free state. Whatever regulations that would suffice to the task of securing a free state would be probably upon the regulated militia to choose from time to time.
Since we find other instances in the Constitution where the terms ‘regulate’ or ‘regulated’ are used, we can derive further clarification of the Second Amendment clause depicting the terminologies in describing the ‘militia.’ The framers knew that the term ‘militia’ had multiple meanings and that the people in mass represented an unorganized militia. But the people would organize themselves in concert and effectively keep and bear arm. They could also do that individually. Such a people was capable of training themselves to shoot accurately and to master advanced military tactics and skills and therefore the constitutional incidence was to qualify its quality by asserting that it ought to be ‘well regulated.’
In conclusion, in keeping the English usage of the time or imputing contemporary meanings, one has to recogn...