Not sure I agree there. The Amendment is written pretty well, IMO. I once read a piece where several grammar experts verified that the grammar was consistent with the plain meaning and general understanding of the 2nd, as unequivocally about the rights of the individual America to own and bear arms, as not only a right of self defense, and of defense of one's nation, but in also defense against ones government propensity for tyranny.
I'll see if I can dig it up for you.
Tim-
I've found a couple that agree with you, but also some that don't. As you're familiar with those that agree, here's a few who don't:
Almost certainly, part of what they had in mind was limiting the powers of the Federal government. The Feds should not be empowered to forbid the people in the individual States to use guns, because that would prevent the States from raising armed defence forces. It would make them impotent. But the framers set a grammatical conundrum for us when they put the main clause in the passive voice: ‘shall not be infringed’. Infringed by whom? If only they had said in active voice, ‘The Federal government shall not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms’, then we could at least be sure of what the subject was, and thus who is constrained by the amendment. By putting the main clause in the passive, they failed to make it clear. An enormous amount hangs on that. It may be that individual States like New York and Texas and California have an absolute right to ban all private gun ownership if their own legislatures deem it wise. Maybe all the Second Amendment denies is the right of the Federal government to require it.
Lingua Franca - 14/12/2002: Grammar and Guns - When Words Fail...
In the case of the Second Amendment, the absolute also shows a clear cause-and-effect relationship: because a well-regulated militia is necessary, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. Add to this the fact that the expression “to bear arms” overwhelmingly occurs in military contexts, not civilian ones, both in the 18th century and today: as the historian Garry Wills (1995) has put it, one does not bear arms against a rabbit. It would thus be hard to discount the militia when interpreting the Second Amendment.
The Web of Language
The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence. Professor Lund is correct that the clause about a well-regulated militia is “absolute,” but only in the sense that it is grammatically independent of the main clause, not that it is logically unrelated. To the contrary, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause.
The founders — most of whom were classically educated — would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras). The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.”
Likewise, when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16freedman.html
This is why I say it's poorly written. Everyone sees it saying what they think it says.