December 27, 2010
Ruling in People v. Person: Parsing the Constitution
To the Editor:
In “Justice Breyer’s Sharp Aim” (Op-Ed, Dec. 22), Pauline Maier offers an excellent critique of the assault on our Constitution by five conservative justices of the Supreme Court as they distort the meaning of the Second Amendment. As Ms. Maier notes, the Second Amendment affirms the right of “people” to keep and bear arms in a well-regulated militia — or the National Guard today.
The word “people” is used in the preamble and in the Second Amendment to describe collective rights. Certainly, the preamble does not convey an “individual” right to establish a Constitution. The Fifth Amendment makes clear the distinction between collective and individual rights by referring to the rights of each “person.”
Do these conservative justices not uphold the intent of our Constitution because they lack familiarity with the grammatical rules of the English language?
Thanks to Ms. Maier and Justice Stephen G. Breyer for their efforts to preserve our Constitution from activist justices who would distort it for political purposes.
Bert O. Richmond
Athens, Ga., Dec. 22, 2010
