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Page Number: 75.0

8 

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

confirms that the Framers’ single-minded focus in crafting
the constitutional guarantee “to keep and bear arms” was
on  military  uses  of  firearms,  which  they  viewed  in  the
context of service in state militias. 

The  preamble  thus  both  sets  forth  the  object  of  the
Amendment and informs the meaning of the remainder of 
its  text.  Such  text  should  not  be  treated  as mere  surplu­
sage,  for  “[i]t  cannot  be  presumed  that  any  clause  in  the 
constitution is intended to be without effect.”  Marbury v. 
Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 174 (1803). 

The  Court  today  tries  to  denigrate  the  importance  of
this  clause  of  the  Amendment  by  beginning  its  analysis 
with  the  Amendment’s  operative  provision  and  returning 
to the preamble merely “to ensure that our reading of the 
operative  clause  is  consistent  with  the  announced  pur­
pose.”  Ante,  at  5.  That  is  not  how  this  Court  ordinarily 
reads  such  texts,  and  it  is  not  how  the  preamble  would
have  been  viewed  at  the  time  the  Amendment  was 
adopted.  While the Court makes the novel suggestion that
it  need  only  find  some  “logical  connection”  between  the
preamble and the operative provision, it does acknowledge 
that  a  prefatory  clause  may  resolve  an  ambiguity  in  the 
text.  Ante, at 4.7  Without identifying any language in the 

—————— 

7 The  sources  the  Court  cites  simply  do  not  support  the  proposition 
that  some  “logical  connection”  between  the  two  clauses  is  all  that  is 
required.  The  Dwarris  treatise,  for  example,  merely  explains  that 
“[t]he general purview of a statute is not . . . necessarily to be restrained 
by  any  words  introductory  to  the  enacting  clauses.”    F.  Dwarris,  A 
General Treatise on Statutes 268 (P. Potter ed. 1871) (emphasis added). 
The treatise proceeds to caution that “the preamble cannot control the 
enacting part of a statute, which is expressed in clear and unambiguous
terms,  yet,  if  any  doubt  arise  on  the  words  of  the  enacting  part,  the 
preamble  may  be  resorted  to,  to  explain  it.”    Id.,  at  269.    Sutherland 
makes the same point.  Explaining that “[i]n the United States pream­
bles  are  not  as  important  as  they  are  in  England,”  the  treatise  notes
that  in  the  United  States  “the  settled  principle  of  law  is  that  the  pre­
amble cannot control the enacting part of the statute in cases where the