First, there is no doubt that the term “load-bearing weapons” was used during the founding period to describe the carrying of weapons in individual and civilian contexts outside of service in an organized militia or other military unit. Here are some examples: In a landmark 2008 decision on this issue, District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court was sharply divided. Justice Antonin Scalia`s majority opinion concluded, among other things, that the term “bearing arms” would always refer to service in a militia. But even the carrying of weapons — the phrase used in the Second Amendment — could sometimes refer to an individual right. The dissenting opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens suggested that the phrase “possessing and bearing arms” was a fixed concept of art that always referred to militia service. Was Stevens` linguistic intuition correct? Lol The term Keep and Bear Arms was a new term. It does not appear anywhere in COEME – more than 1 billion words of British English spanning three centuries. And before 1789, when the Second Amendment was introduced, the term was only used in COFEA twice: first in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights of 1780, and then in a proposed constitutional amendment by the Virginia Ratification Convention. In short, Keep and Bear Arms was not an artistic term with a fixed meaning. In fact, the meaning of this term was quite unstable at the time, as it had hardly been used in other government documents. Ultimately, a careful investigation into the Second Amendment should treat the possession and carrying of firearms as two separate language units, and therefore two separate rights. For example, Neal Goldfarb concluded that at least 95% of all uses of “bear weapons” between 1760 and 1799 conveyed the idiomatic meaning of military service.

But Goldfarb excluded any use of “bear guns” from his analysis when the phrase appeared in the text of a proposed or ratified federal or state constitutional provision that protected that right because he felt those uses were not relevant to his analysis. When another researcher, Josh Jones, included and coded these and other uses omitted by the color gold, he noted that “although the particular meaning of bear weapons (i.e., service in the military or participation in collective armed conflicts) appears to have been used much more frequently than the meaning of carrying bear weapons, the latter still seem to have been used more frequently, than previous research suggested. Jones` own research shows that “more than one-fifth of the recorded uses of bear weapons in COFEA used the term in the sense of carrying. While the meaning of literal support should always be recognized as the minority meaning, it is not an almost non-existent meaning, as Goldcolor and others suggest. Scalia concluded that the term “unambiguous” bearing weapons had a military meaning “only if the preposition `against` followed.” The second amendment, on the other hand, does not use the word. Therefore, Scalia argued that the term “bear arms” in itself refers to an individual right. To test this claim, we combed THROUGH COFEA according to a certain pattern and found documents in which the bear and the weapon (and their variants) appear six words apart. In this way, we were able to find documents with grammatical constructions, such as the coat of arms was worn. In about 90% of our dataset, the term bear weapons had a militia-related meaning, which strongly implies that bear weapons were generally used to refer to collective military activities, not individual use.

(Whether these results show that the wording of the Second Amendment excludes individual right is a more complicated question.) Third, the most relevant legal context for the ordinary meaning of “bearing arms” in the Second Amendment is found in several contemporary state constitutions, as well as in a proposed amendment to the Pennsylvania Federal Constitution. These founding sources used the term “bear weapons” to describe the right to bear arms for non-military purposes. They are particularly important because they occur in the context of defining the scope of constitutional rights to arms. We couldn`t find a dominant use of what Keep Arms meant when it was founded. Even though Scalia was wrong about the most common meaning of bear weapons, he may still have been right to hold guns. Based on our findings, an average citizen of the founding period would likely have understood the term “keeping firearms” to refer to the possession of weapons for military and personal purposes. Endure, suffer, endure, stay, tolerate, be mean, endure something tempting or painful. The bear usually involves the power to hold without flinching or breaking. Forced to endure a tragic loss often indicates acceptance or passivity rather than courage or patience to endure.

To suffer many insults means to go through trials and difficulties with firmness or determination. Years of rejection suggest acceptance without resistance or protest. Tolerance suggests successfully overcoming or controlling an impulse to resist, avoid, or annoy something hurtful or tasteless. The refusal to tolerate such treatment further emphasizes the ability to endure without serenity or contractions. Fourth, although LCL provides one of the many useful tools for determining the meaning of words or phrases used by original speakers, it has various methodological limitations. One of the limitations is that lawyers have to formulate research parameters and make coding decisions that are inevitably influenced by the researcher`s judgment, intuition, and biases. In addition, we found that bear guns often took on military significance without being tracked. Thus, the word, on the other hand, was sufficient, but not necessary, to give the term bearing arms a meaning related to the militia.

Scalia was wrong with this particular claim. Given these and other examples of “bear weapons” used outside the military or militia context, the LCL`s debate about the meaning of “bear weapons” revolves largely around the contradictory arguments that find frequency against context in Kevin Tobias` excellent diagram in the opening post of this series. If the drafters had wanted to broaden the meaning of the term “bearing arms” to include civilian property and use, they could have done so by adding phrases such as “to defend oneself,” as was done in the Pennsylvania and Vermont Bills of Rights. The unchanged use of “bear weapons, on the other hand, most naturally refers to a military purpose, as evidenced by their use in literally dozens of contemporary texts.