History, guns, and the Constitution
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified a long time ago — on December 15, 1791. And yet, as Professor David Kopel has stated, "the Second Amendment today is at an early stage of judicial exposition."
In 2008 and 2010, the United States Supreme Court, in the two landmark cases of District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, stimulated a dormant interest and awareness of the reasoning behind the Second Amendment. As Kopel points out, "[u]nderstanding the United States Constitution requires understanding the British practices that drove the Americans to armed revolution." This is particularly important to understand for anyone who wishes to avoid another armed conflict.
Professor Kopel reviews the history and reasoning behind the Second Amendment in his article How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution, in Volume 6, Number 2 of The Charleston Law Review.
We can discern that broad attempts to disarm the people of a town, or to render them defenseless, are anathema to the Second Amendment; such disarmament is what the British tried to impose, and what the Americans fought a war to ensure could never again happen in America.
Any forced gun registration and/or gun confiscation today would likely provoke a sequel to that first war.
Today, several generations after the American Revolution, there still exists a steadfast 'culture of freedom' within the United States; a culture that remembers and appreciates the sacrifices made on the road to freedom, and one that insists on the discipline and individual responsibility that freedom requires. Not surprisingly, you will find the people of this culture are not only armed, but unwilling to compromise. If anyone would be so foolish as to start a war by trying to disarm the American citizen, let no one be so foolish as to ask why the war started.
-fl