Federalist Papers, personal diaries, letters to the editor, public speeches, letters to other Framers, etc all show the same thing about the 2nd Amendmant. The Founding Fathers, with direct and purposeful intent, meant the 2nd Amendmant specifically to keep the governement from confiscating the arms of the individual citizen of this great nation.
I live about 40 minutes away from Williamsburg in Virginia. Yorktown Battleground is about as far away. Monticello is a few hours away, and DC is within 3 hours. A HELL of a lot of early American history happened in my locale and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some doyenne that will recount some obscura about the War of Independence. I can drive down to Colonial Williamsburg right now and see the armoury of the colonial capitol and see the spot where the colonial Governor stored the confiscated arms of local Virginians. I can also see the building that those Virginians raided to get their legal property back, in one of the early blows of the Revolution.
Many of the Framers were Virginians, and a number were affected by that moment of confiscation. Quite a number wrote about it and used it as an example of sheer governmental tyranny. They recognized that an unarmed populace was a collection of victims waiting to be oppressed. This is where the 2nd Amendmant came from, not some vague desire to provide protection for militia. The logic is even more evident when you realize, as was mentioned before, what the definition of the militia was back then.
The 2nd, like every other right, is an individual right. Understand the consistency of the document.
|