The Meaning of the RKBA - Corpus Linguistics

[MaverickNH]

Dueling Dictionaries and Clashing Corpora | Duke Center for Firearms Law

firearmslaw.duke.edu

The meaning of “…the right to keep and bear arms…” in the Founders’ era will be hotly debated (again) as SCOTUS takes up the NYRPA vs Corlett case. The gun-control advocates are working overtime to confirm that the meaning of the 2ndA in the Founders’ era did not intend that citizens as individuals have the right to carry arms outside their homes. They are using massive databases of scanned & OCR’d documents to prove their point: “… a search of the Corpus of Founding Era American English revealed 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” “[O]nly a handful don’t refer to war, soldiering or organized armed action,” suggesting to some that “the natural meaning of ‘bear arms’ in the framers’ day was military.”

Volokh Conspiracy touches on the matter, concluding “Even a somewhat generous reading of the legal corpus linguistics evidence against Heller could still support an individual right to keep weapons, as well as an individual right to use weapons that have some military connection. This might suggest less protection for handguns and more for military rifles (or even for body armor). In other words, perhaps corpus linguistics indicates that Heller erred in denying the military flavor of the Second Amendment right without erring in concluding that it was an individual one.”

Why Corpus Linguistics Does Not Undermine DC v. Heller (Much)

I recently participated in a conference on the application of legal corpus linguistics to the Second Amendment, a topic I've…

reason.com

Much more was said about what was written centuries ago at A Guest Blog Series from the Center’s Recent Colloquium on Corpus Linguistics and the Second Amendment

I find the fundamental flaw in Corpus Linguistics to be equating what is written with public consensus. While today, the volume and frequency of press (MSM, Tweets, etc.) is totally manipulable (Trump bans, Parler shut-down, etc.), the collected written word may not have reflected public consensus in the Founders’ era, perhaps even more so, as the Press was an expensive bit of hardware with limiting distribution issues. It was not uncommon for a single printed pamphlet or newspaper to be read from a podium to the public. Public consensus was not what was written, but the Yeas and Nays from the listening crowd.

 

[Igotid]

10 U.S. Code § 246 - Militia: composition and classes

www.law.cornell.edu

An awful lot of us are already a member of the militia. Seems pretty militaristic to me…

 

[Uzi2]

The simplest phrase in the entire constitution/bill of rights, yet it garners more attention regarding interpretation than all the rest of the document combined.

I don't care what anyone else, including the supreme court thinks it says. I will always own, keep, possess and carry a gun.

 

[Brewer]

I don't care what anyone else, including the supreme court thinks it says. I will always own, keep, possess and carry a gun.

Because the Second Amendment, along with all the others, does not grant us a right. It enumerates our natural human right. We’re just fortunate to live in a nation founded with that perspective. But no amount of editing would change the natural laws and rights they enumerate. To deny them is to deny our humanity.

 

[MaverickNH]

Corpora and Historical Texts | Duke Center for Firearms Law

firearmslaw.duke.edu

"I think that it is worth noting that most of the participants in this conference, after examining the contemporary usage evidence, agree that some of the claims about the meaning of “bear arms” that were used to support the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Heller are contradicted by usage evidence from the Founding Era. The parry to this thrust is that this conclusion has not convinced every participant that Heller is wrongly decided."

That’s a smugly veiled insult among academics, like - despite overwhelming proof, a few partisan holdouts remain. And Moms are still Demanding Action - but gettin" little. What does that tell you?

Bunch of liberal/progressive academics conclude that the Founders didn’t really think citizens should keep and bear arms - It’s Groundhog Day again!

 

[paul73]

It is a high form of art to take a simplest statement and pervert its meaning into the absolute opposite. And then keep selling it as an ultimate truth.

 

[AHM]

It is a high form of art to take a simplest statement and pervert its meaning into the absolute opposite. And then keep selling it as an ultimate truth.

They better not try that ragtime in front of Ted Cruz, Debate Champ.
<Insert Red Forman/My-Foot/Your-Ass joke here>.

 

[MaverickNH]

Regarding the Strength of the Corpus Evidence (and Noting Issues that the Evidence Doesn’t Resolve) | Duke Center for Firearms Law

firearmslaw.duke.edu

The ploy being manufactured is to say that “bear arms” is used more frequently - some 3-fold more often - in connection with military purposes rather than for “civilian” purposes. Hence, the right is constrained to military/militia service.

Odd then, to put “keep and bear arms” in the same phrase unless one proposes civilians cannot “keep” arms either.

Later, the author challenges the “right of the people” as an individual right versus collective right, noting that a collective “right of the people” is used elsewhere in the Constitution, even if less frequently throughout and nowhere else in the Bill of Rights.

So, the higher frequency of usage of “bear arms” ascribes that right to military/militia but the albeit infrequent use of “right of the people” as a collective right does not trump the more frequent distributive right usage of “the people” as individuals, in his view. Frequency proves “bear arms” as a military/militia right but infrequency of “right of the people” does not invalidate the usage as a collective right.

They call that having one’s cake and eating it too…

 

[FiremanBob]

"Corpus Linguistics" - a method created to rationalize the author's preconceived conclusion.

 

[MaverickNH]

And one token symposium participant was included that wasn’t markedly biased against guns already, who pointed out that Corpus Linguistics analysis can be and is subject to bias in execution. Some Thoughts on Methodology

“Given that few scholars (or jurists) come to the Second Amendment without strongly held views—including possibly writing or litigating on the topic in the past—the likelihood of succumbing to one or both of these psychological vices [Motivated Reasoning and Confirmation Bias] is high. And that is compounded by the fact that much of the corpus linguistic analysis of these historical materials is qualitative in nature: reading through search results to determine what sense of a word or phrase is being used. It is thus human nature to process such evidence in a way that conforms to one’s strongly held, pre-existing views as to what the Second Amendment means. Hence, this tendency undermines some of the objective and empirical benefits of corpus linguistic methodology.”

James Phillips & Josh Blackman decided not to tip their hand quite yet, indicating that their unbiased analysis was not complete at the time of the symposium but will be this Fall. That bugged the heck out of another author, who wrote his own hit piece against Phillips & Blackman, in advance of their study’s completion.

Goldfarb - Comments on blog posts from Duke Colloquium on Corpus Linguistics and the Second Amendment.pdf

Shared with Dropbox

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Nothing enrages Liberals like suggesting they are biased, that the media they consume is biased and that their academic institutions are biased. They know that they are simply right and hold the moral and ethical high ground over Conservatives - racist, homophobic xenophobes with less education and a lower economic output. They write about the Myth of Liberal Bias all the time The Myth of Liberal Media Bias - Future Hindsight