Opinion ID: 2094981
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 12

Heading: The Failure of the Framers to Include Qualifying Language in Article 1, Section 22, of the Constitution Shows Their Intent to Guarantee the People of This State Their Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms for Any Lawful Purpose

Text: Although the framers of our constitution certainly were aware of the wording of the Second Amendment to United States Constitution when they drafted the language of art. 1, sec. 22, and omitted the Second Amendment's prefatory militia clause from our constitution, the historical evidence suggests that they also were aware of the various constitutions of the other states, some of which included limiting language in their analogous arms-bearing clauses. Nevertheless, the framers of our constitution chose to omit such potentially limiting language from the unqualified phrasing set forth in art. 1, sec. 22. Thus, they failed to include any reference to a limited purpose for which the right of the people to bear arms could be exercised. It is appropriate to consider the omission of any qualifying language from such an enactment, when the framers clearly had the opportunity to adopt the potentially limiting phraseology used in analogous provisions of other extant constitutions, yet they failed to do so. For example, in State v. Feng, 421 A.2d 1258, 1264 (R.I.1980), this Court held [w]e shall not interpret a statute to include a matter omitted unless the clear purpose of the legislation would fail without the implication. Here, by a parity of reasoning, certain state and federal constitutional provisions containing arms-bearing language were extant when Rhode Island adopted its original constitution in 1842. Unlike the constitution adopted in this state, several of these other constitutions linked their arms-bearing language with some specified but limited purposes, such as the common defense or militia service. [49] Thus, to take the most well-known example of such a provision, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution said then (as it does now): A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. (Emphasis added.) Unlike this provision in the federal constitution and unlike the analogous provisions in several other state constitutions of that period, our constitution does not cobble its right-to-bear-arms provision to common-defense language or to clauses describing the necessity of a well-regulated militia to the security of a free state. The historical record of the Rhode Island constitutional conventions that led to the adoption of the constitution shows that the delegates examined the laws and constitutions of neighboring states when drafting Rhode Island's original constitutional language. With respect to its suffrage provisions, for example, Mr. Ennis, a delegate from Newport, commented during the convention debates that [t]his State ought to be as liberal as neighboring States. See Debates and Proceedings in the State Convention, Held at Newport, September 13-22, 1842, at 53, in Rhode Island Constitution, Vol. 7 (collected documents bound by E.R. Potter, available in the State Law Library). Again, in debating the language of article 1, Mr. Ennis said in defense of his proposition these doctrines were not new or singular    [t]hey were incorporated in other constitutions, and had been asserted by writers upon constitutional law. Debates and Proceedings at 29. When debating the formation of the Legislature, Mr. Simmons of Johnston proposed a division of power resembl[ing] that in the Constitution of the United States   . Debates and Proceedings at 31. The record of these debates provides tangible evidence that the drafters considered both the constitutions of other states and the Constitution of the United States when they chose the language to use in the Rhode Island Constitution. Because these preexisting constitutional sources were available for the framers to draw upon, and because the record of the Rhode Island constitutional debate indicates that the texts of other state constitutions and of the federal constitution were familiar to and were consulted by the framers, it is significant that they failed to include any reference to the militia, or to any other potential common defense limitation on the purpose for which the people could bear arms in the language they chose for art. 1, sec. 22. As this Court observed in Feng, the failure of the framers to include such purposive language indicates a rejection of such limitations, rather than an implicit acceptance. See Feng, 421 A.2d at 1264. In sum, the constitution's unqualified arms-bearing language is evidence of the framers' intent to safeguard a broader right to the people of Rhode Island to bear arms than that provided for in other extant constitutions at that time that limited the right for the common defense, for self-defense, or for militia-related purposes. In any event, the use in 1842 of arms-bearing language in other extant state constitutions when referring to the people's right of self-defense conclusively refutes any notion that the term bear arms could be used only in a military context when Rhode Island adopted its constitution in 1842. Significantly, despite a flood of court decisions on this subject, a torrent of law review articles and books about the right to bear arms, and innumerable amendments and readoptions of our own and other state constitutions since 1842, the framers and the people of this state never have seen fit to qualify, limit, or restrict the original right to keep and bear arms language in the constitution to a military or common-defense purpose. Lacking any language potentially limiting or qualifying the right to bear arms, art. 1, sec. 22 of the constitution  the only provision in our constitution discussing the right of the people to keep and bear arms  should not acquire such restrictive barnacles by judicial interpretation, especially when the framers, who were aware of these other constitutions, chose to omit their qualifying language from the constitution that they drafted for Rhode Island. Accordingly, this Court should not so limit and restrict what the constitution does not so limit or restrict.