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28  NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSN., INC. v. BRUEN 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

be  exercised  not  by  individuals  acting  privately  or  inde-
pendently, but as a militia organized by their elected repre-
sentatives,” i.e., Parliament.  Id., at 7–8.  The Court, not an 
expert  in  history,  had  misread  Blackstone  and  other 
sources explaining the English Bill of Rights. 

And  that  was  not  the  Heller  Court’s  only  questionable
judgment.  The majority rejected Justice Stevens’ argument 
that the Second Amendment’s use of the words “bear Arms” 
drew  on  an  idiomatic  meaning  that,  at  the  time  of  the 
founding, commonly referred to military service.  554 U. S., 
at  586.  Linguistics  experts  now  tell  us  that  the  majority 
was wrong to do so.  See, e.g., Brief for Corpus Linguistics
Professors and Experts as Amici Curiae (Brief for Linguis-
tics Professors); Brief for Neal Goldfarb as Amicus Curiae; 
Brief  for  Americans  Against  Gun  Violence  as  Amicus  Cu-
riae  13–15.  Since  Heller  was  decided,  experts  have
searched  over  120,000  founding-era  texts  from  between
1760 and 1799, as well as 40,000 texts from sources dating 
as far back as 1475, for historical uses of the phrase “bear 
arms,” and they concluded that the phrase was overwhelm-
ingly  used  to  refer  to  “ ‘war,  soldiering,  or  other  forms  of 
armed action by a group rather than an individual.’ ”  Brief 
for Linguistics Professors 11, 14; see also D. Baron, Corpus
Evidence Illuminates the Meaning of Bear Arms, 46 Has-
tings  Const.  L. Q.  509,  510  (2019)  (“Non-military  uses  of 
bear arms in reference to hunting or personal self-defense
are not just rare, they are almost nonexistent”); id., at 510– 
511 (reporting 900 instances in which “bear arms” was used
to refer to military or collective use of firearms and only 7 
instances that were either ambiguous or without a military
connotation).

These are just two examples.  Other scholars have con-
tinued to write books and articles arguing that the Court’s
decision in Heller misread the text and history of the Second 
Amendment.  See generally, e.g., M. Waldman, The Second 
Amendment (2014); S. Cornell, The Changing Meaning of