None of the other amendments are phrased in the way “A being necessary to B, so C”.
I.e. The third amendment it doesn’t say “Being harassed by drunk soldiers sucks, so no soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
Why did the framers phrase the 2nd Amendment in this way?
The Framers didn’t frame it. Bill of Rights was passed by the First Congress as a political ploy to reconcile Antifederalists without actually conceding any restrictions on federal power that was the central goal of opponents of the Constitution. Our 2nd Amendment is a safely neutered version of the 17th article of a declaration of rights proposed by the North Carolina ratification convention. (The day before they voted to reject the Constitution!)
“That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”
The Second Amendment was written by James Madison and it was somewhat cribbed from the 1776 Constitution of Virginia [he was borrowing from himself though, Madison along with George Mason also wrote the 1776 Virginia Constitution.] There was a practice in some State constitutions, when laying out certain rights, to include a “prefatory clause” in the form of what you have with the Second Amendment. This clause serves to give up some example or reason as to why the right is necessary.
The SCOTUS I believe cited this practice in its Heller decision.
The text from the 1776 Constitution of Virginia reads:
I have no idea why this practice, that you can see in other American constitutions of the time, is only present in the Second Amendment in the Federal constitution. I should also note the above quoted passage is a good example of how the way the Founder’s wrote sadly (at least for us) can leave their meaning ambiguous. Is that clause from the 1776 Constitution of Virginia’s Bill of Rights designed to protect the citizens right to be armed? That’s not unambiguously answered just from reading the text (a similar problem to the Federal Second Amendment.)
According to this, the quote is from Virginia’s submittal for a Bill of Rights, not North Carolina. It matches verbatim, except for where some commas are placed.
That’s a nice resource. I didn’t remember that the Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island conventions all proposed militia amendments. IIRC all of the state proposals were submitted to Madison’s committee. So the 2nd Amendment came through one or all of them from earlier versions as your handy resource and Martin Hyde demonstrate. Thanks.