Well it's a response to the people who joke about the 2nd ammendment arms referring to single shot black powder rifles. At the time the constitution was made civillian and other private entities like companies could have the same personal weapons as a soldier aka a rifle, the same artillery aka cannons, and the same type of ship aka old style wooden sailing ships with cannons. So if the 2nd ammendment only applies to things that were around in the 1770's the government should be forbidden from owning anything more modern then also.
The Second Amendment was never about enshrining a right to rebellion.
Finally, we must remember that those who created the United States understood the nature of a revolution--they had participated in one. In the Declaration of Independence they certainly asserted the right "to alter or to abolish" any government.137 But, with a democratic republic created by the Constitution, the need for a violent revolution disappeared. Every two years there would be an opportunity to participate in an orderly process to replace the existing government. Some of the very early state constitutions, written during the Revolution itself, not surprisingly endorsed the right of revolution. However, the framers of 1787 did not endorse such a right. The Constitution does not have a suicide clause in it, and no one intended that it should have such a clause. Indeed, as John Marshall said even before the Convention finished its deliberations, "nothing but the adoption of some efficient plan from the Convention can prevent Anarchy first, & civil Convulsions afterwards."138 After the Convention, Oliver Ellsworth, who would precede Marshall as Chief Justice, summed up this position: "Anarchy, or a want of such government as can protect the interests of the subjects against foreign and domestic injustice, is the worst of all conditions."139 The goal was to prevent anarchy, violence, and rebellions. This prevention was accomplished by controlling the militias and the army and by retaining the right to limit weapons to those who formed "A well regulated Militia."
President Jackson made this point clear during the Nullification Crisis, when warning South Carolina to step back from the brink of secession and constitutional disaster. Responding to the Palmetto State's claim to a Revolutionary-era heritage, Jackson reminded the nullifiers that they were "free members of a flourishing and happy Union,"and that "[t]here [was] no settled design to oppress [them]."140 Jackson's point, which Lincoln would reiterate to the South in 1861, was that the Constitution contemplated numerous ways for unhappy citizens, or even states, to protest federal legislation, but that these means did not include nullification, secession, or any other sort of rebellion.
The Constitution provided for a standing army and for the national government to arm and provide rules and regulations for state militias, which could be federalized when necessary. The Second Amendment allows for these state militias, which were "well regulated" under statutes passed by Congress, but the Amendment was clearly not designed to insure some sort of permanent revolutionary potential. Indeed, allowing for armed, unregulated citizens, who could threaten the public order and the national state, was unnecessary, unwise, and utterly in conflict with the "more perfect Union" the framers had created in Philadelphia. The "father of the Constitution," as Madison is often called, did not draft the Bill of Rights to undo his hard work at Philadelphia.
Paul Finkelman, "A Well Regulated Militia": The Second Amendment in Historical Perspective, 76 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 195, 221-22 (2000)
In 1776, Massachusetts passed, at the behest of the Continental Congress, an act that disarmed "such Persons as are notoriously disaffected to the Cause of America, or who refuse to associate to defend by Arms the United American Colonies."130 The Massachusetts law required "every Male Person above sixteen Years of Age" to subscribe to a "test" of allegiance to the "United American Colonies."131 One who failed to subscribe to this test was "disarmed . . . [of] all such Arms, Ammunition and Warlike Implements, as by the strictest Search can be found in his Possession or belonging to him."132
The Massachusetts law is interesting because it exempts Quakers from signing the test of allegiance administered to all other men.133 To accommodate their religion, Quakers were provided with a different form of declaration.134 Thus, under the circumstances, the right for a Quaker to practice his religion outweighed the state's interest in its preferred test of allegiance. The right to bear arms, however, did not outweigh the state's interest in maintaining security through disarmament of those considered dangerous to the state. Instead, the state's interest in public safety dominated.
Disarmament was not limited to the arguably extraordinary period of the American Revolution. In 1787, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law setting out the terms for pardons by the governor for persons who had been involved in Shays's rebellion against the state in the previous year.135 Those who had taken up arms against the state were, with some exceptions, able to seek a pardon from the governor.136 To obtain the pardon, however, a person needed to take an oath of allegiance to the state and deliver his arms to the state for a *508 period of three years.137 In addition, during the same time period, the person would be unable to serve as a juror, hold government office, or vote "for any officer, civil or military."138
The nature of the other disqualifications that went along with disarmament only underscores the civic character of the right to bear arms. Those seeking pardon were not robbed of a right to free speech or free exercise of their religion, rights indisputably associated with individuals. Instead, the penalties deal more with the rights and obligations associated with a citizen's duty to society: participation in government as a political official, participation in the legal process as a juror, participation in the electoral process as a voter, and participation in the militia.139 The law demonstrates that in a well regulated society, the state could disarm those it deemed likely to disrupt society. These types of statutes raise serious questions about the claim of some modern Second Amendment scholars that the right to bear arms was somehow intended to facilitate an individual right of revolution.140 Quite the opposite was the case. To enjoy the right to bear arms, one had to renounce such revolutionary aspirations. While one might argue such a case if the Second Amendment had been authored by Daniel Shays and his supporters, such radical voices were noticeably absent in the First Congress that drafted the Bill of Rights.141
Saul Cornell & Nathan DeDino, A Well Regulated Right: The Early American Origins of Gun Control, 73 Fordham L. Rev. 487, 507-08 (2004)
So the Founding Fathers allowed for the requirement of
literal loyalty oaths, and refusing to swear loyalty to America would lead the state to ban you from owning guns. Given that this is acceptable behavior according to the Founding Fathers, it's clear that you have the same 'right' to revolution as you have the 'right' to mass murder. None at all.
Gun rights legal scholars have made a number of remarkable, almost phantasmagorical claims about the meaning of the term "well regulated." Perhaps the most far-fetched of these is the suggestion that well regulated did not mean government-controlled, but only properly disciplined and drilled.109 In the view of Don Kates and Randy Barnett, it makes no sense to read the Second Amendment "as authorizing regulation of arms."110 The authors of this curious interpretation of the Second Amendment have constructed a fantasy world where words mean their opposite, and regulation is really anti-regulation. This version of early American history more closely resembles the Bizarro world described in Superman comic books and rendered in hilarious terms in America's best-loved postmodern situation comedy Seinfeld, than it does the constitutional thought of the Founding Era.111 After reading bizarre claims like this, one can readily understand why historian Jack Rakove has likened the world of Second Amendment scholarship to a scholarly Twilight Zone.112 Arguments such as those of Kates and Barnett are an example of history extra-lite, to borrow Martin Flaherty's apt characterization of so much legal scholarship produced in an originalist vein.113 Finding evidence to show that the Bizarro Second Amendment is a fiction *505 created by modern gun rights scholarship, and not an accurate representation of early American history, is not difficult. If one simply looks at the gun laws adopted in the Founding Era and early Republic, the evidence for robust regulation is extensive.114 If American history fit the Bizarro model, then gun regulation after the adoption of the Second Amendment would have virtually disappeared.115 In reality, the decades after ratification of the Second Amendment saw increased, not decreased, levels of regulation.116
Saul Cornell & Nathan DeDino, A Well Regulated Right: The Early American Origins of Gun Control, 73 Fordham L. Rev. 487, 504-05 (2004)
During the American Revolution, several states passed laws providing for the confiscation of weapons owned by persons refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the state or the United States.
Saul Cornell & Nathan DeDino, A Well Regulated Right: The Early American Origins of Gun Control, 73 Fordham L. Rev. 487, 506 (2004)
After the passing of the Second Amendment,
with the tacit or explicit approval of the federal government, the states regulated guns
even more thoroughly. This is because the right the Second Amendment protects is the
state right to operate a militia, not the
personal right to own guns. If the Second Amendment was about creating a right to rebellion, the drafters of the United States Constitution would not have endorsed a state deciding to force literal loyalty oaths on its population, then take away every single gun of every single person who refused to take that oath. But you know, apparently the people who actually drafted the constitution thought that the Second Amendment was entirely compatible with taking away guns from people you didn't like, or who were a threat to the government.
And there is basically literally no discussion, at all, about some individual need to own firearms to protect against oppression. There's a lot of discussion about the fear of the states being disarmed by the federal government, which makes sense given the Second Amendment was about preventing the United States from disarming state militias in favor of a federal standing army, not about any sort of individual right to own weapons.
Honestly, if we were interpreting the Second Amendment honestly, California could ban all civilian ownership of all guns forever, and that would be 100% okay, but if California tried to build its own nuclear deterrent independent of the US and the US government told it that it couldn't do so, that would violate the Second Amendment.
