But in 2008, the Supreme Court found in District of Columbia v. Heller that the amendment instead supports an individual right to own a gun for any lawful purpose, a right that has nothing to do with military service.

He explained in his opinion: “Although [‘bear arms’] implies that the carrying of the weapon is for the purpose of ‘offensive or defensive action,’ it in no way connotes participation in a structured military organization.

A search of Brigham Young University’s new online Corpus of Founding Era American English, with more than 95,000 texts and 138 million words, yields 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” BYU’s Corpus of Early Modern English, with 40,000 texts and close to 1.3 billion words, shows 1,572 instances of the phrase.

And in 1840, in an early right- ­to-bear-arms case, Tennessee Supreme Court Judge Nathan Green wrote: “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk and buffaloes, might carry his rifle every day, for forty years, and, yet, it would never be said of him, that he had borne arms, much less could it be said, that a private citizen bears arms, because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

I mean, is that the way they talk?” Clement finally conceded that no, that was not the way they talked: “Well, I will grant you this, that ‘bear arms’ in its unmodified form is most naturally understood to have a military context.” Souter did not need to point out the obvious: “Bear arms” appears in its unmodified form in the Second Amendment.

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