Not All Professors are Lefties

Think the word "professor" and one of two images come to mind: either the lucky guy on "Gillian's Island," or some rabble-rousing burned out ex-hippie indoctrinating sheep-like youth to drink from the cesspool of socialist thinking.

That ex-hippie image should not include Dr. Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

The ulitimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to "the people," not the "states." As the language of the Tenth Amendment shows, these two are of course not identical and when the Constitution means "states," it says so. Thus, the "people" are at the core of the Second Amendment are the same "people" at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment, namely Citizens. What's more, the "militia" as used in the Amendment, and in [U.S. Const., Art I, Sect. 8] clause 16, had a very different meaning 200 years ago than in ordinary conversation today. Nowadays, it is quite common to speak loosely of the National Guard as "the state militia," but 200 years ago, any band of paid, semiprofessional, part-time volunteers, like today's Guard, would have been called a "select corps" or "select militia" - and viewed in many quarters as little better than a standing army. In 1789, when used without any qualifying adjective, "the militia" referred to all Citizens capable of bearing arms. The seeming tension between the dependent and the main clauses of the Second Amendment thus evaporates on closer inspection - the "militia" is identical to the "people" in the core sense described above. Indeed, the version of the Amendment that initially passed in the House, only to be stylistically shortened in the Senate, explicitly defined the "militia" as "composed of the body of the People." This is clearly the sense in which "the militia" is used in clause 16 and throughout The Federalist Papers, in keeping with standard usage confirmed by contemporaneous dictionaries, legal and otherwise.

Dr. Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Law, Yale Law School
as written in the Yale Law Journal
The Bill of Rights as a Constitution, 100 Yale L.J. 1166 (1991)

2nd Amendment