Yes, it's there for a reason. First let us examine what the phrase 'well regulated' meant at the time of the writing of the Constitution:Seabass wrote: ↑Fri May 18, 2018 10:27 pmWell then why even include the phrase at all?L'Emmerdeur wrote: ↑Fri May 18, 2018 9:33 pmThe interpretation of the 2nd Amendment as protecting the right of citizens of the US to keep and bear arms irrespective of the issue of 'well regulated militia' is correct, in my opinion.
Why not simply:
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
instead of:
"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."
Even if we accept that the part before the comma gives the reason for the part after it, the word "regulated" has to be there for a reason...
In my opinion the italicized sentence extends the meaning beyond what can be supported. Reasonable government oversight of gun ownership doesn't necessarily infringe the people's right to own guns. Therefore the idea that the government should be 'powerless' to oversee gun ownership is incorrect.The phrase "well-regulated" was in common use long before 1789, and remained so for a century thereafter. It referred to the property of something being in proper working order. Something that was well-regulated was calibrated correctly, functioning as expected. Establishing government oversight of the people's arms was not only not the intent in using the phrase in the 2nd amendment, it was precisely to render the government powerless to do so that the founders wrote it.
[Italics mine. -- L'E]
Next we need to understand what the authors of the Bill of Rights understood by the term 'militia.'
Given the above, it seems inescapable to me that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of people to keep and bear arms, irrespective of what contemporary politics attempts to make of the phrase 'well regulated militia.'When the Constitution was ratified, the Framers unanimously believed that the "militia" included all of the people capable of bearing arms.
George Mason, one of the Virginians who refused to sign the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights, said: "Who are the Militia? They consist now of the whole people." Likewise, the Federal Farmer, one of the most important Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, referred to a "militia, when properly formed, [as] in fact the people themselves." The list goes on and on.
By contrast, nowhere is to be found a contemporaneous definition of the militia, by any of the Framers, as anything other than the "whole body of the people." Indeed, as one commentator said, the notion that the Framers intended the Second Amendment to protect the "collective" right of the states to maintain militias rather than the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms, "remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."
Furthermore, returning to the text of the Second Amendment itself, the right to keep and bear arms is expressly retained by "the people," not the states.
[source]