[awkx]

Let me try adding a bit of verbiage and see if this makes it clearer:

“The right of the citizens to bear arms, [both] in defense of themselves and [[in defense] of] the State, shall not be questioned.”

The bracketed parts can be elided to produce the text found in the PA Constitution.


Anyhow, syntactially it can be parsed either way; the issue is one of scoping. Let me demonstrate on a syntactically similar example:

The right of the citizens to eat ice cream cones of all flavors shall not be questioned.

If you were going to translate this into standard first-order logic, there are two possibilities:

For every ice cream cone c, it is true that

for every flavor f,

if

cone c has flavor f

then

the right of citizens to eat c shall not be questioned.

and

For every ice cream cone c, it is true that

if

for every flavor f,

cone c has flavor f

then

the right of citizens to eat c shall not be questioned.

English syntax allows both scopings.