The United States District Court for the Southern District of California (August 23, 2024) and the Supreme Judicial Court for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (August 27, 2024) reached opposite opinions on whether bladed weapons qualify as arms mentioned in the text of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment reads: 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.
In 2008, the Supreme Court examined the meaning of the words in the amendment. Heller found the meaning of “arms” to be the same at the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment as it is today. From Heller:
Before addressing the verbs “keep” and “bear,” we interpret their object: “Arms.” The 18th-century meaning is no different from the meaning today. The 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined “arms” as “weapons of offence, or armour of defence.” 1 Dictionary of the English Language 107 (4th ed.) (hereinafter Johnson). Timothy Cunningham’s important 1771 legal dictionary defined “arms” as “any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.”
This is directly from the Heller decision. It is not dicta. It is Justice Anthony Scalia directly explaining what the words in the Second Amendment mean. The Massachusetts Supreme Court quotes Scalia, from the Heller decision, in its opinion about whether knives are “arms” referred to in the text of the Second Amendment.
We have shared the announcements individually, but this is a good piece synthesizing the two rulings. Massachusetts (reluctantly) got it right, but California dropped the ball.
Read the whole thing at Ammoland.com
Read the full article here