Interpretation can be a tricky art. It happens everyday at work, at home and anywhere else where humans make contact and speak to one another. Something is said and most of the time everyone in earshot understands what is meant. However there are those times when something is said and each and every one believes something different was meant. It can be an occasional problem between spouses but that is a different article altogether. Interpreting something someone said in person is light years different from interpreting written words. The only way to properly interpret written words is to have more than one source to properly extract exactly what was meant from what was said. If it is a children's book no one cares but if it is an important document, say the Bible or the Constitution of the United States of America then you must have some cross referencing sources.

     Interpretation is so important because if what was written is law, it was written for a reason, and through the prism of experiences of the people that wrote it. In the case of the Constitution it was written for a nation to last forever. This is called the "Spirit of the Law". "Spirit" meaning what the authors actually meant by the words. Problems arise when the letter of the law is only practiced and the spirit of the law is ignored. "Thou shalt not kill" is very blunt. How could you possibly extrapolate anything other than do not kill out of that? Well as we all know killing is not always murder. Killing in self defense is allowed. Killing by accident is not always a culpable offense. Do you see how someone could take the 5th Commandment and complicate it? Lawyers do this for a living. Bill Clinton was able to complicate the single word "is". The parsing of words to get a desired outcome, is older than prostitution.

     The Second Amendment seems to be the eternal target of the left and I know why. It's not because they do not know the "spirit of the law" of the Second Amendment. They know what the Founding Fathers meant. The leftists want to change it from it's intended meaning to an alternate meaning in order to deny all of us the right to bear arms. Here are the actual letters of the law of the Second Amendment:

     "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." 

     It says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and that is what they meant. The leftists say that only the military should keep and bear arms because the military is the Militia and they say also that the not only does it mean the military but because it says "well regulated Militia" it absolutely means just the "regulated" military. The only problem with the leftist lawyer argument is that nagging phrase "the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms". 

     To properly understand what the Second Amendment means in it's entirety, you have to understand the circumstances and motivations of the people that wrote it. In the late 1700's when the Declaration of Independence was written, we didn't have the US Army or the Navy or the Marine Corps. General George Washington put together an army of Patriotic civilian volunteers. In fact, after the Revolutionary War all of the Army disbanded and went home. Very few of these men had any military training and considering this, it is a miracle they won. They won because along the way they learned military protocol and wanted to win more than the British troops. A well regulated Militia would have to have people that knew how to shoot straight and load fast. They would also have to be able to assemble quickly and know proper military protocol.

     The Second Amendment was written because the Founders hated tyranny and never wanted a central government in the U.S. to be able to subdue us by lawfully taking away our only means to crush tyranny, firearms. The Founders also did not envision the enormous standing army we now keep. However the law applies today as it did back then. Our only means of defeating a tyrannical government would be with firearms. The Founders believed that if it became necessary to again raise an army, the leaders of the time would gather up volunteer civilians and their firearms and go forward. There exists plenty of official and personal writing examples that prove that they intended for all law abiding citizens to have the right to keep and bear arms.

     The Constitution has been twisted by the leftists and now we have the problems that the Founders warned us about. The only way to stop them is to point out to everybody we run into that what is going on today will have a dramatic affect on the future of our country. We continue as the greatest country on earth or we retreat into the dustbin of history on the letter or the spirit of the law, the Constitution.