Why the Second?

The Second Amendment is the one amendment to the Constitution that the Supreme Court and many on the left have been inclined to read narrowly and in context. The Court, over the decades, has been willing to take an expansive interpretation of constitutional rights and overlook intent and context. The right to privacy, for example, was found hiding in the Constitution. The right to abortion, in turn, was found lurking in the right to privacy. Federal intervention to end segregation was originally found constitutional under a broad interpretation of the interstate commerce clause.

Over the years, many have cheered as the Court looked beyond intent, precedent, and context, to extend constitutional rights and liberties where none had existed before. Many hope that such an expanded an enlightened approach to the Constitution will continue, with one exception; the Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms." The Second Amendment has been mired in strict literalism for years. For some reason, even the most expansive and liberal interpreters of the Constitution seem to stick at the Second Amendment.

Those inclined to urge a broader view of the rights provided under the Constitution, often insist on a narrow and parsed interpretation of the Second Amendment. "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is claimed to only be applicable in regards to militias, not a right possessed by individuals. We are told by the occasionally strict constitutionalists, that the people's right to keep and bear bear arms is entirely predicated on the necessity of a well regulated militia. Where there is no militia, there is no right to keep and bear arms. Under that narrow reading of the Second Amendment, the individual, qua individual, has no constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Where there is no specific mention of an individual right to keep arms, despite what it says in the Constitution, none is inferred.

Many modern constitutional rights have been inferred and deduced from an expansive reading of the Constitution. Penumbras and emanations over the years have flowed from the Constitution like water from a fountain. Why the insistence on a literal and parsed interpretation of the Second Amendment? Why is a document construed to be flexible enough to include rights unimaginable and inconceivable to the Founders interpreted so narrowly on this one issue? This is not a rhetorical question. I really would like to know.