The Court of Peeves, Crotchets & Irks

Its not often that reading a supreme court verdict has me ROTFL. Observe as Scalia lays the smackdown in the recent gun-rights case, DC v Heller:

The phrase “bear Arms” also had at the time of the founding an idiomatic meaning that was significantly different from its natural meaning: “to serve as a soldier, do military service, fight” or “to wage war”
…
Giving “bear Arms” its idiomatic meaning [as the dissenting justice do] would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war–an absurdity that no commentator has ever endorsed.
…
Worse still, the phrase “keep and bear Arms” would be incoherent. The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would rather be like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.