For several weeks gun enthusiasts have been nervously watching the U.S. Supreme Court. The highest court has flirted with granting certiorari and agreeing to hear two noteworthy gun-related cases: Snope v. Brown and Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island. Both cases involve statewide bans on semiautomatics and ammunition. So far, the courts have only relisted the cases, keeping the dockets—and those nervously refreshing the court's website—in a suspenseful procedural limbo.
If the Court accepts these cases, the justices will undoubtedly revisit the current precedent established in 2008 by District of Colombia v. Heller. This landmark decision not only acknowledged and affirmed the individual right to firearms protected by the Second Amendment but also resurrected an age-old debate about the amendment's curious grammatical structure.
The Second Amendment's stilted syntax often inspires critics to wax grammatical. "The text of the amendment…is, as a whole, ungrammatical," writes Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's chief legal analyst. Some even argue that corpus linguistics—the study of language by analyzing vast collections of historical texts—safely rejects the current jurisprudence affirming an individual right to firearm ownership. (Spoiler alert: It doesn't, as David Kopel and Will Baude of The Volokh Conspiracy can confirm.)
