The last version of the amendment before the final reads:
A well regulated militia, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. (From that article about the development of the Amendment (link in post 214). Although I have an earlier version of that same article mentioning this without the word "best" as the version of the amendment closest to the final chronologically)
The final version is:
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.
What could be the reason for changing "the best security" to "necessary to the security" and capitalizing the word "state"? For the first part of the question above, in an earlier post, I suggested that the reason could be to avoid understanding "the best" as referring to some unpractical pure/theoretical freedom need, but the blundering I have been making recently here led me to an additional view. This view also supports seeing adjusting that part of the amendment for the kind of environment change consideration, for which my position stands. The "the best security" in the first version above could be understood as describing quality without necessarily a role. In other words, the "of a free state" part could be taken as referring to merely the state to which the militia belongs but not necessarily to that the militia serves as the security there. The final version puts higher priority to describing the role that the militia should take and less priority to where (in terms of relative specificity) that role takes place. It does that by using "necessary to" to sever that dual meaning of role and belonging versus just belonging connection between the "militia" and the "free state" and instead replaces it with defining the role that the militia should be fulfilling, while using only specificity at the level of describing the target where that role should happen as one of the States.
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