What Do Those Commas Mean?!

The SC debated the Second Amendment today. Amendment Deux is by far the worst-written part of the Constitution. It is simply ungrammatical. The problem is very basic: if you're going to insert two commas around a clause inside a sentence, the rest of the sentence outside the commas must be read as a complete sentence on its own. But this doesn't work here.

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.

No good. You can't very well say "A well regulated militia the right of the people..." It just don't parse! But grammar aside, it's really hard to tell what the authors were trying to get at exactly. It's all complicated by the fact that the Bill of Rights were intended to apply to the federal government only, but over the course of the 20th century this distinction went out the window. The most obvious meaning of the amendment is that states have broad powers to regulate firearms within their jurisdiction while the federal government has no proper role in this business whatever.

Based on this reading of it I'd say a reasonable 2nd Amendment ruling in this case would be that the District of Columbia (here being treated as if it were a state) has every right to implement whatever insane gun control measure it wishes. People who don't like it are free to move (and well advised to, at that). That's how federalism is supposed to work. But since a) the Bill of Rights are expected to apply equally to the federal and state governments and b)some regulation of firearms is expected at each level of government then we can expect a ruling that will give a fairly broad individual right to own and possess functional firearms while allowing governments to impose "reasonable" restrictions based on local circumstances. And that would pretty much describe the current situation across the country outside of the nation's capital.