It is therefore especially interesting to note what kinds of contortions Wills must perform in order to support his wish that the federal government may confiscate handguns from law-abiding citizens. The Wills article has been cited by Federal District Judge Jack Weinstein, and is perhaps the most-cited professorial article used in arguments against the Second Amendment as protecting a meaningful right of the people. One of Wills's main points is that the language of the Second Amendment itself is contrary to an individual right. If you look up every word from the Second Amendment in Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language , then you get a rather plain statement of the Standard Model of the Second Amendment. Since Garry Wills argues that resistance of a tyrannical government would be treason, it is not surprising that Wills prefers not to engage Noah Webster in much detail.
Wills takes a rather different approach to language.
The most obvious objection to this approach is that the Constitution was written in English, and intended to be comprehensible to the entire American population, much of which did not speak Latin. Nor is there any historical evidence that Madison hinted about a secret non-meaning of the Second Amendment which could be uncovered by translating the Amendment into Latin. Of course many of the Founders, Madison included, were college-educated, and could read Latin fluently. But many of them could also read Greek, which was an essential part of the college curriculum of the time. Madison also knew French, Spanish, and Hebrew, as did many other educated men of the period.