Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 174

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Cite as: 524 U. S. 125 (1998)

129

Opinion of the Court

The greatest of writers have used the word with this
meaning. See, e. g., The King James Bible, 2 Kings 9:28
(“[H]is servants carried him in a chariot to Jerusalem”); id.,
Isaiah 30:6 (“[T]hey will carry their riches upon the shoul-
ders of young asses”). Robinson Crusoe says, “[w]ith my
boat, I carry’d away every Thing.” D. Defoe, Robinson
Crusoe 174 (J. Crowley ed. 1972). And the owners of Quee-
queg’s ship, Melville writes, “had lent him a [wheelbarrow],
in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding-house.”
H. Melville, Moby Dick 43 (U. Chicago 1952). This Court,
too, has spoken of the “carrying” of drugs in a car or in
its “trunk.” California v. Acevedo, 500 U. S. 565, 572–573
(1991); Florida v. Jimeno, 500 U. S. 248, 249 (1991).

These examples do not speak directly about carrying guns.
But there is nothing linguistically special about the fact that
weapons, rather than drugs, are being carried. Robinson
Crusoe might have carried a gun in his boat; Queequeg might
have borrowed a wheelbarrow in which to carry not a chest
but a harpoon. And, to make certain that there is no special
ordinary English restriction (unmentioned in dictionaries)
upon the use of “carry” in respect to guns, we have surveyed
modern press usage, albeit crudely, by searching computer-
ized newspaper data bases—both the New York Times data
base in Lexis/Nexis, and the “US News” data base in West-
law. We looked for sentences in which the words “carry,”
“vehicle,” and “weapon” (or variations thereof) all appear.
We found thousands of such sentences, and random sampling
suggests that many, perhaps more than one-third, are sen-
tences used to convey the meaning at issue here, i. e., the
carrying of guns in a car.

The New York Times, for example, writes about “an
ex-con” who “arrives home driving a stolen car and carrying
a load of handguns,” Mar. 21, 1992, section 1, p. 18, col. 1, and
an “ofﬁcial peace ofﬁcer who carries a shotgun in his boat,”
June 19, 1988, section 12WC, p. 2, col. 1; cf. The New York