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2007

A CONSTITUTIONAL CONUNDRUM OF SECOND AMENDMENT COMMAS

A SHORT EPISTOLARY REPORT


William W. Van Alstyne

THE FOLLOWING CONSTITUTIONAL EPISTOLARY travelogue on commas begins with an original email inquiry from Dan Gifford posted to an email list of Second Amendment addressees in late March, 2007, soon after the decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Parker v. District of Columbia.1 The decision in Parker is the first to apply the Second Amendment to hold a federal gun law to be invalid. The particular law, enacted in the District of Columbia, forbade anyone to keep any operable handgun at home, regardless of the homeowner’s competence, complete lack of any criminal record, or evidence of prior abuse or misuse of firearms. In holding that the District had overreached any adequate justification sufficient to sustain such a measure as thisconsistent with the Second Amendment, the court of appeals made some use even of the particular comma placements within the Second Amendment. The comma commentary was far from being the sole source of the court’s compelling review and rejection of the challenged law. The reader is certainly encouraged to read the entire opinion for the rest of the court’s reasoning, but that is not the object of the following observations and remarks. Rather, they – the observations and remarks offered here – are merely as they purport to be, i.e., light liftings from an ongoing exchange of letters on the comma controversy. And so they begin as they do, with the first posted note by Dan Gifford, raising an interesting point the reader is now invited to consider and then invited also to read further (but of course only if so inclined).

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