SCHOLARS AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT

"Including these three early articles, a total of eleven articles on the Second Amendment appeared in law journals from 1912 to 1959. All of them reflected what is here labeled the 'court' view of the Second Amendment - namely, that the Second Amendment affects citizens only in connection with citizen service in a government-organized and regulated militia.... Turning to Table I of this Article and the light it sheds on the various collateral claims arising from individualist writings pertaining to the first claim that little or nothing of a scholarly nature has been published on the meaning of the Second Amendment, thirty-nine law journal articles, all referenced in the Index to Legal Periodicals, were published on the Second Amendment from 1912 to 1980. Interestingly, only nine of these took the individualist position....In fact, the Table reveals that the individualist position has proliferated only since the 1980s, with twenty-one individualist articles published from 1980 to 1989, compared to [Page 368] seventeen taking the court view.[102] The numbers jumped again in the 1990s, with fifty-eight articles taking the individualist view, and twenty-nine taking the court view....In the mad scramble to win legitimacy for their arguments, individualist authors have produced an ever-growing stack of articles sculpted to buttress their position. This near-obsessive focus on numbers of publications has allowed them to turn the focus of the debate away from the merits of the arguments themselves, and toward the number of articles, and the pedigrees of the articles' authors. In this Article, I, too, have played the numbers game - but not to declare any winner by virtue of who publishes more. Rather, it is to point out that many of the basic claims made about the Second Amendment literature by individualist writers are simply and demonstrably wrong. Contrary to individualist claims, an extensive body of writing on the Second Amendment has been published well before 1980, extending back more than seven decades;" -Robert J. Spitzer "Lost and Found: Researching the Second Amendment"Chicago-Kent Law Review Symposium on the Second Amendment vol. 76, 2000: 349

"Consider, for example, the term 'people' in the First Amendment¨ú'Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . . . '[180] If it is hard to construe the word 'people' in the Fourth Amendment to be anything but a reference to individuals, it is equally difficult to construe the term in the First Amendment as anything but a collective right. Clearly, the idea of the people assembling contemplates a large [Page 231] number of people and not a single person assembling.
"Thus, linguistically, the term 'people' in the Second Amendment might be interpreted 'either way.' Standing alone, the phrase 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms' could apply to individuals or collectively to 'the people.' But, unlike the use of the word in the Fourth Amendment, the Second Amendment ties the term 'people' to a collective entity, the 'well regulated Militia' which is 'necessary to the security of a free State.' This understanding is also supported by the original wording of the Amendment, which referred to the 'body' of the people. Linguistically, the Amendment can easily be read to concern the 'body'of the people. The Amendment does not say, 'individually armed citizens, being necessary to the security of a free state . . . . ' The Amendment explicitly refers to the 'militia,' a collective organization and a specific kind of militia at that one that is 'well regulated.' It is hard to imagine individuals being 'well regulated' by the government. They are only 'regulated' as a group." -Paul Finkleman "'A Well Regulated Militia': The Second Amendment in Historical Perspective" Chicago-Kent Law Review Symposium on the Second Amendment vol. 76, 2000: 195

"1. Bear Arms. To bear arms is, in itself, a military term. One does not bear arms against a rabbit. The phrase simply translates the Latin arma ferre. The infinitive ferre, to bear, comes from the verb fero. The plural noun arma explains the plural usage in English ('arms'). One does not 'bear arm.' Latin arma is, etymologically, war 'equipment,' and it has no singular forms. 16 By legal and other channels, arma ferre entered deeply into the European language of war. To bear arms is such a synonym for waging war that Shakespeare can call a just war 'just-borne arms' and a civil war 'self-borne arms.' 17 Even outside the phrase 'bear arms,' much of the noun’s use alone echoes Latin phrases: to be under arms (sub armis), the call to arms (ad arma), to follow arms (arma sequi), to take arms (arma capere), to lay down arms (arma ponere). 'Arms' is a profession that one brother chooses as another chooses law or the church. An issue undergoes the arbitrament of arms. In the singular, English 'arm' often means a component of military force (the artillery arm, the cavalry arm)....2. To keep. Gun advocates read 'to keep and bear' disjunctively, and think the verbs refer to entirely separate activities. 'Keep,' for them, means 'possess personally at home'— a lot to load into one word. 28 To support this entirely fanciful construction, they have to neglect the vast literature on militias. It is precisely in that literature that to-keep-and-bear is a description of one connected process. To understand what 'keep' means in a military context, we must recognize how the description of a local militia’s function was always read in contrast to the role of a standing army. Armies, in the ideology of the time, should not be allowed to keep their equipment in readiness." -Gary Wills "To Keep and Bear Arms"