In spite of extensive recent discussion and much legislative action with respect to regulation of the purchase, possession, and transportation of firearms, as well as proposals to substantially curtail ownership of firearms, there is no definitive resolution by the courts of just what right the Second Amendment protects.
FindLaw: U.S. Constitution: Second Amendment
English history made two things clear to the American revolutionaries:
force of arms was the only effective check on government, and standing armies threatened liberty.
Recognition of these premises meant that the force of arms necessary to check government had to be placed in the hands of citizens. The English theorists Blackstone and Harrington advocated these tenants. Because
the public purpose of the right to keep arms was to check government , the right necessarily belonged to the individual and, as a matter of theory, was thought to be absolute in that it could not be abrogated by the prevailing rulers.
These views were adopted by the framers, both Federalists and Antifederalists. Neither group trusted government. Both believed the greatest danger to the new republic was tyrannical government and that the ultimate check on tyranny was an armed population.
It is beyond dispute that the second amendment right was to serve the same public purpose as advocated by the English theorists. The check on all government, not simply the federal government, was the armed population, the militia. Government would not be accorded the power to create a select militia since such a body would become the government's instrument. The whole of the population would comprise the militia.
As the constitutional debates prove, the framers recognized that the common public purpose of preserving freedom would be served by protecting each individual's right to arms, thus empowering the people to resist tyranny and preserve the republic. The intent was not to create a right for other (p.1039)governments, the individual states; it was to preserve the people's right to a free state, just as it says.
Valparaiso Univ. Law Review
THE HISTORY OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT
"I think the truth must now be obvious that our people are
too happy at home to enter into regular service, and that
we cannot be defended but by making every citizen a soldier, as the Greeks and Romans who had no standing armies; and that in doing this all must be marshaled, classed by their ages, and every service ascribed to its competent class."
--Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1814.
"This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it."
- Madison
http://www.jmu.edu/madison/center/m...federalist/federalist_papers/federalist46.htm
"For a people who are free and who mean to remain so,
a well-organized and armed militia is their best security . It is, therefore, incumbent on us at every meeting [of Congress] to revise the condition of the militia and to ask ourselves if it is prepared to repel a powerful enemy at every point of our territories exposed to invasion... Congress alone have power to produce a uniform state of preparation in this great organ of defense. The interests which they so deeply feel in their own and their country's security will present this as among the most important objects of their deliberation."
--Thomas Jefferson: 8th Annual Message, 1808. ME 3:482
"It is more a subject of joy [than of regret] that we have so few of the desperate characters which compose modern regular armies. But it proves more forcibly the
necessity of obliging every citizen to be a soldier ; this was the case with the Greeks and Romans and must be that of every free State. Where there is no oppression there can be no pauper hirelings."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1813.
"A
well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our Government , and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration."
--Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801
