Okay, thanks. Too bad.
I only came back to this thread to post this:
Funtimes, i hate to make personal responses because they can be miscontrued as an attack unless they are positive in nature. I did make oblique reference to a prior set of remarks by you, but they may have been in a separate thread and you may not have seen them. You cited laws and court cases and whatnot supporting so-called "reasonable" gun control, and I cited my sig line, which I feel strongly overrides any laws, or, for that matter, court cases.
So I find that our differences are a result of differences in ingrained (or perhaps innate) philosophies. I am for the independent, self-sufficient sort of man which the Founders were and had in mind in our new government, and this is apparently reflected in our respective outlooks on gun control.
These differences are apparently not subject to compromise. I look at things one way, and if someone wants to be contentious about my point of view and wish to support their point of view with point-by-point analysis, that's fine, but life's too short for me to deal with anything but the grand scheme of things, rather than with how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, as one would in an academic environment. If you have a problem with what I say, fine. You may dismiss it and me out of hand as a raving lunatic, or you can assume I have enough experience, judgement, and wisdom to speak, not with "auth-or-i-tay," but with a sensitivitiy borne of long experience.
As an example, a while ago I made a remark on another board about how higher sights over a gun barrel give the firearm an apparently flatter trajectory. I got grief from somebody about how that was impossible. "Trajectory is trajectory," was the way he put it and went on at length as to how he was an expert rifleman, etc, etc.
I walked away from that one because I felt it was up to him to compare the points of impact at various ranges with varying sight heights and varying range zeroing. Hell, I wasn't going to do his homework for him.
However, with respect to "well-regulated," I feel loquacious this evening, so I'll point out that meanings change over the centuries, and prior connotative meanings are not necessarily carried through history to modern dictionaries. These are mainly concerned with denotative meanings, not the subtle nuances of word usages which are more difficult to find, and lie more in the realm of semantics and developmental linguistics, not lexicography.
I found your quotation from Blackstone kind of amusing, since I did the subtraction. The quote is from a 1920 edition, and the Constitution was finally ratified in 1779. That's almost a century and a half apart, and while Blackstone originally wrote just about the time of the American Revolution, I hardly think he or later editors would be concerned about a secondary or connotative meaning of "regulation" outside of the context of what he was apparently writing about, that is, legal regulation under the authority of law.
But "regulation" and "well-regulated" have an additional meaning which has rarely been transmitted to this day, except possibly in the world of watchmaking, where "regulating" a watch means to prepare it for accurate use.
Consider the cold chisel you bought at the hardware store yesterday to cut some rebar flush with the concrete in which it is embedded. The cold chisel performs admirably, and does not dull with its use on the rebar. Obviously, it was well-tempered at the factory, with just the right amount of hardness at the tip to perform the cutting action, but softer and more ductile up the shank, where hammer blows would shatter it.
Consider a man who is relatively unflappable, and exhibits a good humor in difficult situations. We could call him well-tempered, as well.
But also consider a piano which has been tuned so that the twelve notes per octave are tuned in such a way that it is possible to play music in most major or minor keys and it will not sound perceptibly out of tune. This is a "well-tempered" piano.
Would you use that phrase that way nowadays if you were not a musician? Of course not, and the term "well-tempered" might well have fallen out of use if it were not for Bach's writing of "The Well-Tempered Clavier (German: Das Wohltemperierte Klavier)."
Hell's bells, you wouldn't even use the term Clavier any more.
So words may have denotative, connotative and semantic loadings and meanings far beyond what are found in modern dictionaries.
I close with this:
http://www.constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htmAnd I am done with this subject.
Terry, "Well-Tempered," 230RN