A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged.” Of all the words that our founding fathers inscribed in 1787, these twenty-four may have been the worst chosen. This is the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
When you read a law, it’s not enough to understand just what the individual words mean: That’s why the National Rifle Association cites only the second half of the amendment. You also have to read for context: When was the law written? What was the state of the nation? The world? What were the particular viewpoints of the writers? What had recent history taught them?
Pro-gun advocates, in particular, read the Second Amendment to the Constitution as if it were written in a vacuum, like it was a gift to future ages written by infallible men. It wasn’t. The founding fathers were writing from their experiences fighting in the American Revolution.
The founders were wary of standing armies. Great Britain had sent troops to fight in the Seven Years War against the French in Quebec. The war left England indebted, so the king decided the colonists could be taxed for their share. When Bostoninans refused to pay taxes to a government in which they had no say, British troops were sent to occupy it. There, the soldiers stole, drank heavily, demanded quartering from private citizens and fought with the colonists, culminating in the Boston Massacre in 1770.
The Continental Army was a force formed solely for revolution. The citizen recruits brought their own weapons to fight with. They had drilled to handle these weapons safely and knew how to care for them. The Continental Army was dissolved in 1783. It was thought that a civilian militia, made up of part-time soldiers, would be all that the nation needed to resist an invasion.
This is why the Second Amendment was written the way it was. In effect, the founders stated: We will give you the right to bear arms. In exchange, you will aid the government in wartime by fighting for the national defense.
This system worked well at first. However, the British attacked the United States again in 1812, and the system broke down. The troops fell before a battle-hardened and well-equipped British force. The British almost won the war and would have conquered the United States if not for Napoleon’s return in 1814. After the conflict, the citizen militias were scrapped and a new United States Army formed in its place.
As it is, the Second Amendment should have been declared null and void at this time, when there was no longer a call for “a well-regulated militia.”
Furthermore, the founding fathers had no conception of technological advances in the centuries to come. There had been only one rapid-firing weapon by 1750 (James Puckle’s multi-barreled musket of 1709 was pitched as an anti-boarding weapon for the Royal Navy — it was rejected). It wouldn’t be until the Civil War in the 1860s and the advent of Gatling’s gun that rapid-fire weapons came to the battlefront. Simply put, in the days that the founders were writing the Bill of Rights, there were no differences between civilian and military firearms. Today, anyone can distinguish between a Winchester hunting rifle and a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. But how do you foresee something that won’t exist for 200 years? Would they have approved of the average citizen owning an AK-47? I don’t think so.
Therefore, here’s a strict interpretation of the amendment as it should be today: You have the right to bear a single-shot, lead-ball, muzzle-loading, black-powder, flint-lock rifle to use as part of a citizen militia in defense of the nation … but since citizen militias don’t exist anymore (and those tanked-up rednecks in Michigan and Montana don’t count), you really don’t have that right at all.