Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
Page Number: 84

Cite as:  554 U. S. ____ (2008) 

17 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

from  settled  law  to  come  forward  with  persuasive  new 
arguments  or  evidence.    The  textual  analysis  offered  by
respondent  and  embraced  by  the  Court  falls  far  short  of 
sustaining that heavy burden.14  And the Court’s emphatic 
reliance  on  the  claim  “that  the  Second  Amendment  . . . 
codified  a  pre-existing  right,”  ante,  at  19,  is  of  course  be­
side the point because the right to keep and bear arms for
service in a state militia was also a pre-existing right. 

Indeed,  not  a  word  in  the  constitutional  text  even  ar­
guably  supports  the  Court’s  overwrought  and  novel  de­
scription  of  the  Second  Amendment  as  “elevat[ing]  above 
all  other  interests”  “the  right  of  law-abiding,  responsible 
citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”  Ante, 
at 63. 

II 

The  proper  allocation  of  military  power  in  the  new 
Nation  was  an  issue  of  central  concern  for  the  Framers. 
The  compromises  they  ultimately  reached,  reflected  in
Article  I’s  Militia  Clauses  and  the  Second  Amendment, 
represent  quintessential  examples  of  the  Framers’  “split­
ting the atom of sovereignty.” 15 

—————— 

14 The  Court’s  atomistic,  word-by-word  approach  to  construing  the 
Amendment  calls  to  mind  the  parable  of  the  six  blind  men  and  the
elephant,  famously  set  in  verse  by  John  Godfrey  Saxe.    The  Poems  of 
John  Godfrey  Saxe  135–136  (1873).    In  the  parable,  each  blind  man
approaches a single elephant; touching a different part of the elephant’s 
body  in  isolation,  each  concludes  that  he  has  learned  its  true  nature.
One touches the animal’s leg, and concludes that the elephant is like a
tree; another touches the trunk and decides that the elephant is like a 
snake; and so on.  Each of them, of course, has fundamentally failed to 
grasp the nature of the creature. 

15 By “ ‘split[ting] the atom of sovereignty,’ ” the Framers created “ ‘two 
political  capacities,  one  state  and  one  federal,  each  protected  from 
incursion  by  the  other.    The  resulting  Constitution  created  a  legal 
system  unprecedented  in  form  and  design,  establishing  two  orders  of
government,  each  with  its  own  direct  relationship,  its  own  privity,  its 
own  set  of  mutual  rights  and  obligations  to  the  people  who  sustain  it