re: #259 A Mom Anon

Can someone explain to me how banning military/police type weapons and ammo violates anyone’s rights under the Constitution? I’m trying to figure that out. Unless you’re part of law enforcement or the military, or part of that “well regulated militia”(which no longer exists because we have a standing military and police forces) then your “need”for such weapons is imaginary. I get the hobby aspect of it, but if that’s your thing, then you keep the weapons at the gun range with your fellow hobbyists. I don’t know what the answers are, but the proliferation of guns is a big clue as to why this horror keeps on and on. Other countries don’t have this problem to the degree we do and it seems to me the biggest difference is our easy access to guns.

There was an interesting thread on reddit the other day. Usually “orginialist” interpretations of what the founders envisioned are just revisionist history but I think the first comment does a decent job of interpretation

In 1791, when the 2nd amendment was truly about militias and muskets, was there any debate about gun control?

…the founders viewed armament a lot more similarly to how the Swiss view it today: an individual responsibility as part of a collective right.

So what changed? In a lot of ways, the Civil War changed things. The NRA was actually formed after the Civil War. The Civil War, and the 14th Amendment, was actually what sort of gave rise to the view of the Bill of Rights as being individual rights rather than collective ones
….
Originally, the Second Amendment was viewed much more as a collective right. The important thing was that individuals be armed as part of a group responsibility. IOW, you needed to have a gun in case you were needed to help overthrow a tyrannical government.

After the Civil War, the whole discussion about collective versus individual rights changed, and having a gun became much more about self defense. This was in direct response to the newly Reconstructed South.

Your individual state could regulate your guns, but the feds couldn’t. Projecting the phrase “gun rights” back in time is really problematic, pretty much for this reason. It was somewhat common in the south for it to be illegal for Black men to own guns—even free Blacks. To a much lesser extent, the same was true for women. It wasn’t so much that you had “gun rights” so much at all, since there was no thought that taking guns away from Blacks was in any way threatening the gun ownership of Whites.

There’s some food for thought here. Also I might question the original meaning of “regulated”. I don;t think the founders were thinking of the word in the modern sense of regulations and restrictions but may have been intended regulated in the military sense (rehearsed, practiced, chain of command, etc)