I agree that it needs to be updated, but more importantly, it should be corrected, because that tortured sentence everybody argues about is NOT the real Second Amendment. There were a number of drafts and modifications, some worse than others, but the final text as passed by Congress and ratified by the states was:
"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."
The scribe who copied it onto what we consider to be the founding Constitution changed some of the capitalization and added a couple of commas, so we ended up with this incoherent mess:
"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."
If you look at the text as passed and ratified, it's two simple clauses, with the first explaining the reason for the second, so the reasoning was clear - the people have a right to bear arms because the country needs a militia. That was true then, but it's not true now since we have a standing army.
If nothing else, this shows the importance of commas and how they can change the meaning of a sentence. There's a big difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat Grandma". |