I parse “The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state shall not be questioned” as meaning:
Quote:
The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves shall not be questioned, and
the right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of the state shall not be questioned
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“The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves
or the state shall not be questioned” could be interpreted as allowing the gov't the option to choose only one defensive use that it must respect; i.e., it could be interpreted as:
Quote:
The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves shall not be questioned, or
the right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of the state shall not be questioned
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Your proferred interpretation is a syntactically valid one; the sentence, like most other complex sentences, has some potential syntactic ambiguity in it. However, I think it is clear, from the historical record, that the intended meaning is that both defense of oneself and defense of the state are individually protected.