A Good Summation on the Second Amendment

[NRATC53]

From Clayton Wood:

They Had to Take the Guns First
The Second Amendment Was Not a Theory. It Was a Memory.
The Second Amendment is usually argued on abstract grounds. Conservatives reach for the text. Progressives reach for the history of mass shootings. Both sides argue about what the Founders intended. Almost nobody asks the prior question: what kind of country did the Founders actually live in, and how did it differ from the places they had broken away from?
The answer changes everything about the debate.
Before the Words, There Were the Conditions
When the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, it was not written by men theorizing about liberty. It was written by men who had actually lived on the edge of a continent where an unarmed family was a dead family. The frontier experience was not a metaphor. It was a daily material reality.
A British or French subject in 1791 lived in a settled, policed, law-ordered society where a firearm was largely unnecessary for survival. England had game laws stretching back centuries that effectively barred the vast majority of the population from owning or using firearms. Gun ownership in Britain was tightly regulated, politically controlled after the Glorious Revolution of 1689, and considered potentially dangerous in the hands of the wrong classes. The government actively suppressed widespread civilian gun ownership because an armed populace had been, within living memory, a precondition of revolution and rebellion.
The American colonies were a different world.
Probate records examined across the colonies in 1774, weighted to represent the entire country, show that gun ownership among propertied white males ranged from 54 to 73 percent depending on region. Women in 1774 owned guns at rates exceeding what some revisionist historians had claimed men owned at any point in the colonial period. The guns that existed were, by the standards of the day, in working condition. The frontier did not allow for ornamental weapons.
The reason was simple. The settlers who pushed west of the established coastal settlements were not soldiers supplied by a government. They were farm families who had to solve their own problems. Bears did not wait for a constable. Cherokee war parties did not send advance notice. The family that could not defend itself did not last long enough to pass anything down. The rifle leaning by the cabin door was not a political statement. It was the same category of tool as the ax and the plow.
The Overmountain Men: A Case Study in What Armed Civilians Can Do
Nothing in American history illustrates this point more clearly than the men who fought at Kings Mountain on October 7, 1780.
The Overmountain Men were frontiersmen from the settlements west of the Blue Ridge in what is now Tennessee, Virginia, and western North Carolina. They were not soldiers. They had no supply train, no Continental Army authorization, and no formal military structure. They were backcountry farmers and hunters who had spent years not volunteering for the revolution, because their lives on the frontier were consuming enough without marching to distant battlefields.
Then Major Patrick Ferguson, one of the best marksmen and most capable officers in the British Army, made a mistake. He sent a message into the overmountain settlements threatening to march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword if they did not surrender. Isaac Shelby rode forty miles to consult with John Sevier. They decided it would be better to go meet Ferguson on his side of the mountains than to wait for him on theirs.
What happened next is worth sitting with. Approximately 1,400 men assembled at Sycamore Shoals with their own rifles, their own horses, and cattle they drove along as a food supply. They hiked over Roan Mountain in early October snow, covered roughly 200 miles in ten days, and surrounded Ferguson's force of about 1,100 Loyalists atop Kings Mountain. The battle lasted one hour and five minutes. Ferguson was shot from his horse by riflemen who could hit a man at 200 to 300 yards. Over 200 Loyalists lay dead. The Patriot victory was so complete that it halted Cornwallis's entire southern strategy and set in motion the chain of events ending at Yorktown.
The British Army brought muskets. Muskets were the standard military weapon of the era, smooth bored, capable of being fired three times a minute, effective at roughly 100 yards. The Overmountain Men brought hunting rifles. Rifles were slower to reload, but accurate at two to three times the range of a musket. The frontier had not been a place where inaccurate weapons served you well. The men who fought at Kings Mountain were skilled with their weapons because their weapons were part of their daily lives, not equipment checked out from a government armory.
This is the Second Amendment in its historical setting. Not a philosophical document. A description of what had already happened. Armed citizens, with weapons equivalent to those carried by the military, had just won a pivotal battle of the American Revolution entirely without the Continental Army's knowledge or involvement.
The 20th Century: What Happens to Unarmed Populations
If the founding era provides the affirmative case for armed citizenship, the 20th century provides the cautionary one. It is the bloodiest century in recorded human history, and the pattern embedded in its worst atrocities is not subtle.
Mao Zedong's first act after consolidating control of China in 1949 was confiscation of all civilian firearms, a policy he had been implementing province by province since 1935. Anyone found with a gun after confiscation was executed. What followed was the death of an estimated 65 million people through execution, imprisonment, engineered famine, and political terror during campaigns like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Mao understood the relationship between weapons and power. Political power, he said, grows out of the barrel of a gun, which is why he made certain that no one in China could access that power except through the Party.
Stalin's Soviet Union followed a similar arc. The Bolsheviks conducted mass gun confiscation during the Russian Civil War, threatening ten years of imprisonment for anyone who concealed a firearm. Only Communist Party members were permitted to own weapons. What followed was the death of roughly 20 million Soviet citizens under Stalin alone, among the estimated 29 million killed by Soviet government across its history.
The Hitler case is more complex and worth getting right, because the honest version is actually more damning than the simplified one. The Weimar Republic had passed strict gun registration laws in the 1920s, and when the Nazis came to power, they used those registration lists to identify and disarm Jews, political opponents, and anyone else classified as an enemy of the state. They actually loosened gun restrictions for the broader German population, understanding correctly that the threat to their power did not come from ordinary Germans but from the specific populations they intended to liquidate. The Weimar gun registry became the tool by which Jewish families were stripped of any means of resistance before the machinery of the Holocaust was set in motion.

[NRATC53]

... The lesson from Germany is not merely that gun confiscation enables genocide, though it does. It is that gun registration enables selective disarmament, and selective disarmament enables targeted extermination. The people who most need the Second Amendment have historically been the people that some government most wanted to disarm.
Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge enforced total disarmament of the Cambodian population as one of its first acts upon seizing power in 1975, confiscating firearms along with watches, motorcycles, and foreign currency during the initial days of the takeover. Nearly 2 million Cambodians died in the years that followed. Idi Amin restricted weapons to his own loyalists in Uganda and used that monopoly on force to terrorize rivals and ethnic minorities throughout his reign.
The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a policy. Every government that set out to murder significant portions of its own population understood that it needed to remove the practical capacity for resistance first. You cannot load people onto cattle cars if a meaningful fraction of them can shoot back.
The Iran Lesson: 90 Million People, Zero Leverage
This is not purely a historical argument. The evidence is being updated in real time.
Iran has roughly 90 million people. The Islamic Republic has ruled them for 47 years through the machinery of the IRGC, the Basij militia, and systematic political terror. The regime tortured dissidents, executed political prisoners, sent teenage boys across minefields in the Iran-Iraq War, funded terrorist organizations across the region, and for nearly five decades answered every protest movement with lethal force.
When Mahsa Amini died in custody in 2022 and millions of Iranians took to the streets, the protesters threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. They were shot. The regime held.
Iran's 1991 Firearms Law created a licensing regime so restrictive that civilian gun ownership is effectively limited to regime loyalists and a small number of hunters willing to navigate a bureaucratic obstacle course. According to Small Arms Survey data, Iran has roughly 7 civilian firearms per 100 people. The United States has approximately 120 firearms per 100 people, which means America has more guns than people.
Think about what that number means in concrete terms. Tennessee has about 7 million people. If Tennessee's civilian gun ownership rate reflected the national average, Tennesseans possess well over 8 million firearms. The entire population of Iran, 90 million people, has fewer civilian firearms than a state with less than a tenth of their population. They have fewer than any fellow Tennessean's immediate circle of neighbors, to say nothing of the pistols and hunting rifles and shotguns and everything else sitting in gun safes and closets and truck cabs across the state.
When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, and began systematically decapitating the Iranian regime, those 90 million people had essentially no capacity to participate in their own liberation. They could watch. They could hope. They had no practical means to accelerate the end of the people who had been oppressing them for nearly five decades. The most powerful military in the world had to do for them what an armed population might have been able to begin doing for itself.
The Founders did not write the Second Amendment because they were worried about deer. They wrote it because they had just watched what happened to an unarmed colonial population under a government that decided it knew better than the people it governed. They had also just watched what an armed population could do about it. Both lessons were fresh.
The Objection Worth Taking Seriously
The honest critic will say: a population of civilians with hunting rifles and pistols cannot resist a modern military. Tanks, aircraft, artillery, and professional soldiers would overwhelm any civilian resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 was crushed in weeks, and that was against a German military already strained on two fronts. What realistic deterrent value does an armed civilian population provide against a truly determined government?
This is the strongest version of the counterargument, and it deserves a real answer rather than dismissal.
The answer is not that an armed population guarantees victory against a tyrannical government. It does not. The answer is that an armed population changes the political calculus that produces tyrannical governments in the first place, raises the cost of each step toward totalitarian control, and provides friction at every stage of a process that requires a population's practical helplessness to complete.
Regimes do not typically move from constitutional government to genocide in a single step. They move through intermediate stages of registration, selective enforcement, targeted disarmament of specific groups, and escalating coercion. An armed population is not a guarantee against any of those steps. It is a complication at every one of them.
Consider also the specific dynamic the Founders had in mind: not a population resisting an invading army on a conventional battlefield, but citizens resisting a government that had grown tyrannical from within.
The British Army was not an alien invader. It was the government of the colonists. The Overmountain Men were not facing tanks. They were facing the same category of infantry weapon they themselves carried, in roughly equal numbers, with the advantage of knowing the terrain and having personal stakes in the outcome. That is precisely the condition the Second Amendment was designed to preserve.
No one argues that a Winchester deer rifle is a practical match for an M1 Abrams. The argument is that a country where hundreds of millions of civilians are armed is a country where the intermediate steps toward tyranny are politically and practically harder to execute. Gun confiscation requires compliance. Selective disarmament requires a registry. Both require a population that will not shoot back. The Second Amendment is designed, among other things, to ensure that the answer to that last requirement is not guaranteed.
The Straight Line
The argument for the Second Amendment is not sentimental. It is not about rural culture or hunting traditions or constitutional literalism, though all of those things are real. It is about a straight line that runs through American history and through the worst chapters of the 20th century and into the living reality of 2026.
The straight line is this: governments that murder their own people disarm them first. Not always. Not inevitably. But consistently enough that the pattern cannot be dismissed as coincidence. Mao disarmed. Stalin disarmed. Hitler selectively disarmed. Pol Pot disarmed. The Khamenei regime restricted civilian firearms to near zero while the IRGC and Basij maintained the monopoly on force that allowed them to rule 90 million people through terror for nearly five decades.
The American Founders did not write the Second Amendment because they were paranoid. They wrote it because they had read history, and because they had just lived through an experience that confirmed what history taught them. They were men who understood that governments are made of human beings, and human beings given unchecked power reliably abuse it, and that a population that cannot resist provides no practical check on that abuse.
The Overmountain Men who crossed Roan Mountain in the October snow of 1780 did not do so because of a constitutional right. They did it because they were armed, they were skilled, and a British officer had threatened their families. The Second Amendment was written eleven years later partly to ensure that the conditions which made that possible would not be allowed to disappear.
They were right to write it. The 20th century proved why. Iran proves it still.
Thanks for reading. Pray that the folks in Iran who want to fight to free their country get the arms required to do so.

[NRATC53]

Sorry for the split, but it was too long for a single post. I read a LOT of stuff on this and other subjects, and write on them as well, but this piece was well written with no bs filler so I just copied and pasted it, giving credit to the author

[~MG~]

Incredible piece. Thank you for sharing it.

[Dwight]

From my cold dead hands is the statement I live with . . . live by . . . and conceiveably could die by.

I cannot tell you how many guns . . . how much ammo . . . or how much reloading capacity I have . . . but I have some of each . . . am fairly well versed in the use of each . . . and hope I die without ever having to use them.

But if the need comes . . . I'll be there.

And when the argument comes up about an overwhelming military VS us deer hunters . . . if it happens . . . it will be a military of spray and pray . . . with mostly a 100 yd effectiveness . . . VS . . . deer hunters and the like, playing sniper at 400 plus yds.

I'll be with the deer hunters . . . expecting to live thru the engagement.

May God bless,
Dwight

[NRATC53]

If I have a firearm out (except for training and recreational shooting) it means I am out of good options, and am down to my best bad option. Should we come to that, I am well versed in the art of the rifle, and will make full use of all my skills for as long as possible or necessary.

[NRATC53]

ut wait there's more:

The American Revolution against British Gun Control

By David B. Kopel*
Administrative and Regulatory Law News (American Bar Association). Vol. 37, no. 4, Summer 2012. More by Kopel on the right to arms in the Founding Era.
This Article reviews the British gun control program that precipitated the American Revolution: the 1774 import ban on firearms and gunpowder; the 1774-75 confiscations of firearms and gunpowder; and the use of violence to effectuate the confiscations. It was these events that changed a situation of political tension into a shooting war. Each of these British abuses provides insights into the scope of the modern Second Amendment.
Furious at the December 1773 Boston Tea Party, Parliament in 1774 passed the Coercive Acts. The particular provisions of the Coercive Acts were offensive to Americans, but it was the possibility that the British might deploy the army to enforce them that primed many colonists for armed resistance. The Patriots of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, resolved: "That in the event of Great Britain attempting to force unjust laws upon us by the strength of arms, our cause we leave to heaven and our rifles." A South Carolina newspaper essay, reprinted in Virginia, urged that any law that had to be enforced by the military was necessarily illegitimate.
The Royal Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had forbidden town meetings from taking place more than once a year. When he dispatched the Redcoats to break up an illegal town meeting in Salem, 3000 armed Americans appeared in response, and the British retreated. Gage's aide John Andrews explained that everyone in the area aged 16 years or older owned a gun and plenty of gunpowder.
Military rule would be difficult to impose on an armed populace. Gage had only 2,000 troops in Boston. There were thousands of armed men in Boston alone, and more in the surrounding area. One response to the problem was to deprive the Americans of gunpowder.
Modern "smokeless" gunpowder is stable under most conditions. The "black powder" of the 18th Century was far more volatile. Accordingly, large quantities of black powder were often stored in a town's "powder house," typically a reinforced brick building. The powder house would hold merchants' reserves, large quantities stored by individuals, as well as powder for use by the local militia. Although colonial laws generally required militiamen (and sometimes all householders, too) to have their own firearm and a minimum quantity of powder, not everyone could afford it. Consequently, the government sometimes supplied "public arms" and powder to individual militiamen. Policies varied on whether militiamen who had been given public arms would keep them at home. Public arms would often be stored in a special armory, which might also be the powder house.
Before dawn on September 1, 1774, 260 of Gage's Redcoats sailed up the Mystic River and seized hundreds of barrels of powder from the Charlestown powder house.
The "Powder Alarm," as it became known, was a serious provocation. By the end of the day, 20,000 militiamen had mobilized and started marching towards Boston. In Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, rumors quickly spread that the Powder Alarm had actually involved fighting in the streets of Boston. More accurate reports reached the militia companies before that militia reached Boston, and so the war did not begin in September. The message, though, was unmistakable: If the British used violence to seize arms or powder, the Americans would treat that violent seizure as an act of war, and would fight. And that is exactly what happened several months later, on April 19, 1775.
Five days after the Powder Alarm, on September 6, the militia of the towns of Worcester County assembled on the Worcester Common. Backed by the formidable array, the Worcester Convention took over the reins of government, and ordered the resignations of all militia officers, who had received their commissions from the Royal Governor. The officers promptly resigned and then received new commissions from the Worcester Convention.
That same day, the people of Suffolk County (which includes Boston) assembled and adopted the Suffolk Resolves. The 19-point Resolves complained about the Powder Alarm, and then took control of the local militia away from the Royal Governor (by replacing the Governor's appointed officers with officers elected by the militia) and resolved to engage in group practice with arms at least weekly.
The First Continental Congress, which had just assembled in Philadelphia, unanimously endorsed the Suffolk Resolves and urged all the other colonies to send supplies to help the Bostonians.

[NRATC53]

Governor Gage directed the Redcoats to begin general, warrantless searches for arms and ammunition. According to the Boston Gazette, of all General Gage's offenses, "what most irritated the People" was "seizing their Arms and Ammunition."
When the Massachusetts Assembly convened, General Gage declared it illegal, so the representatives reassembled as the "Provincial Congress." On October 26, 1774, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress adopted a resolution condemning military rule, and criticizing Gage for "unlawfully seizing and retaining large quantities of ammunition in the arsenal at Boston." The Provincial Congress urged all militia companies to organize and elect their own officers. At least a quarter of the militia (the famous Minute Men) were directed to "equip and hold themselves in readiness to march at the shortest notice." The Provincial Congress further declared that everyone who did not already have a gun should get one, and start practicing with it diligently.
In flagrant defiance of royal authority, the Provincial Congress appointed a Committee of Safety and vested it with the power to call forth the militia. The militia of Massachusetts was now the instrument of what was becoming an independent government of Massachusetts.
Lord Dartmouth, the Royal Secretary of State for America, sent Gage a letter on October 17, 1774, urging him to disarm New England. Gage replied that he would like to do so, but it was impossible without the use of force. After Gage's letter was made public by a reading in the British House of Commons, it was publicized in America as proof of Britain's malign intentions.
Two days after Lord Dartmouth dispatched his disarmament recommendation, King George III and his ministers blocked importation of arms and ammunition to America. Read literally, the order merely required a permit to export arms or ammunition from Great Britain to America. In practice, no permits were granted.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was masterminding the surreptitious import of arms and ammunition from the Netherlands, France, and Spain.
The patriotic Boston Committee of Correspondence learned of the arms embargo and promptly dispatched Paul Revere to New Hampshire, with the warning that two British ships were headed to Fort William and Mary, near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to seize firearms, cannons, and gunpowder. On December 14, 1774, 400 New Hampshire patriots preemptively captured all the material at the fort. A New Hampshire newspaper argued that the capture was prudent and proper, reminding readers that the ancient Carthaginians had consented to "deliver up all their Arms to the Romans" and were decimated by the Romans soon after.
In Parliament, a moderate minority favored conciliation with America. Among the moderates was the Duke of Manchester, who warned that America now had three million people, and most of them were trained to use arms. He was certain they could produce a stronger army than Great Britain.
The Massachusetts Provincial Congress offered to purchase as many arms and bayonets as could be delivered to the next session of the Congress. Massachusetts also urged American gunsmiths "diligently to apply themselves" to making guns for everyone who did not already have a gun. A few weeks earlier, the Congress had resolved: "That it be strongly recommended, to all the inhabitants of this colony, to be diligently attentive to learning the use of arms . . . ."
Derived from political and legal philosophers such as John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Edward Coke, the ideology underlying all forms of American resistance was explicitly premised on the right of self-defense of all inalienable rights; from the self-defense foundation was constructed a political theory in which the people were the masters and government the servant, so that the people have the right to remove a disobedient servant.
The British government was not, in a purely formal sense, attempting to abolish the Americans' common law right of self-defense. Yet in practice, that was precisely what the British were attempting. First, by disarming the Americans, the British were attempting to make the practical exercise of the right of personal self-defense much more difficult. Second, and more fundamentally, the Americans made no distinction between self-defense against a lone criminal or against a criminal government. To the Americans, and to their British Whig ancestors, the right of self-defense necessarily implied the right of armed self-defense against tyranny.
The troubles in New England inflamed the other colonies. Patrick Henry's great speech to the Virginia legislature on March 23, 1775, argued that the British plainly meant to subjugate America by force. Because every attempt by the Americans at peaceful reconciliation had been rebuffed, the only remaining alternatives for the Americans were to accept slavery or to take up arms. If the Americans did not act soon, the British would soon disarm them, and all hope would be lost. "The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us," he promised.
The Convention formed a committee--including Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson--"to prepare a plan for the embodying, arming, and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient" to defend the commonwealth. The Convention urged "that every Man be provided with a good Rifle" and "that every Horseman be provided . . . with Pistols and Holsters, a Carbine, or other Firelock." When the Virginia militiamen assembled a few weeks later, many wore canvas hunting shirts adorned with the motto "Liberty or Death."
In South Carolina, patriots established a government, headed by the "General Committee." The Committee described the British arms embargo as a plot to disarm the Americans in order to enslave them. Thus, the Committee recommended that "all persons" should "immediately" provide themselves with a large quantity of ammunition.
Without formal legal authorization, Americans began to form independent militia, outside the traditional chain of command of the royal governors. In Virginia, George Washington and George Mason organized the Fairfax Independent Militia Company. The Fairfax militiamen pledged that "we will, each of us, constantly keep by us" a firelock, six pounds of gunpowder, and twenty pounds of lead. Other independent militia embodied in Virginia along the same model. Independent militia also formed in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maryland, and South Carolina, choosing their own officers.
John Adams praised the newly constituted Massachusetts militia, "commanded through the province, not by men who procured their commissions from a governor as a reward for making themselves pimps to his tools."
The American War of Independence began on April 19, 1775, when 700 Redcoats under the command of Major John Pitcairn left Boston to seize American arms at Lexington and Concord.
The militia that assembled at the Lexington Green and the Concord Bridge consisted of able-bodied men aged 16 to 60. They supplied their own firearms, although a few poor men had to borrow a gun. Warned by Paul Revere and Samuel Dawes of the British advance, the young women of Lexington assembled cartridges late into the evening of April 18.
At dawn, the British confronted about 200 militiamen at Lexington. "Disperse you Rebels--Damn you, throw down your Arms and disperse!" ordered Major Pitcairn. The Americans were quickly routed.
With a "huzzah" of victory, the Redcoats marched on to Concord, where one of Gage's spies had told him that the largest Patriot reserve of gunpowder was stored. At Concord's North Bridge, the town militia met with some of the British force, and after a battle of two or three minutes, drove off the British.
Notwithstanding the setback at the bridge, the Redcoats had sufficient force to search the town for arms and ammunition. But the main powder stores at Concord had been hauled to safety before the Redcoats arrived.
When the British began to withdraw back to Boston, things got much worse for them. Armed Americans were swarming in from nearby towns. They would soon outnumber the British 2:1. Although some of the Americans cohered in militia units, a great many fought on their own, taking sniper positions wherever opportunity presented itself. Only British reinforcements dispatched from Boston saved the British expedition from annihilation--and the fact that the Americans started running out of ammunition and gun powder.
One British officer reported: "These fellows were generally good marksmen, and many of them used long guns made for Duck-Shooting." On a per-shot basis, the Americans inflicted higher casualties than had the British regulars.

[NRATC53]

On a per-shot basis, the Americans inflicted higher casualties than had the British regulars.
That night, the American militiamen began laying siege to Boston, where General Gage's standing army was located. At dawn, Boston had been the base from which the King's army could project force into New England. Now, it was trapped in the city, surrounded by people in arms.
Two days later in Virginia, royal authorities confiscated 20 barrels of gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg and destroyed the public firearms there by removing their firing mechanisms. In response to complaints, manifested most visibly by the mustering of a large independent militia led by Patrick Henry, Governor Dunmore delivered a legal note promising to pay restitution.
At Lexington and Concord, forcible disarmament had not worked out for the British. So back in Boston, Gage set out to disarm the Bostonians a different way.
On April 23, 1775, Gage offered the Bostonians the opportunity to leave town if they surrendered their arms. The Boston Selectmen voted to accept the offer, and within days, 2,674 guns were deposited, one gun for every two adult male Bostonians.
Gage thought that many Bostonians still had guns, and he refused to allow the Bostonians to leave. Indeed, a large proportion of the surrendered guns were "training arms"--large muskets with bayonets, that would be difficult to hide. After several months, food shortages in Boston convinced Gage to allow easier emigration from the city.
Gage's disarmament program incited other Americans to take up arms. Benjamin Franklin, returning to Philadelphia after an unsuccessful diplomatic trip to London, "was highly pleased to find the Americans arming and preparing for the worst events."
The government in London dispatched more troops and three more generals to America: William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne. The generals arrived on May 25, 1775, with orders from Lord Dartmouth to seize all arms in public armories, or which had been "secretly collected together for the purpose of aiding Rebellions."
The war underway, the Americans captured Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. At the June 17 Battle of Bunker Hill, the militia held its ground against the British regulars and inflicted heavy casualties, until they ran out of gunpowder and were finally driven back. (Had Gage not confiscated the gunpowder from the Charleston Powder House the previous September, the Battle of Bunker Hill probably would have resulted in an outright defeat of the British.)
On June 19, Gage renewed his demand that the Bostonians surrender their arms, and he declared that anyone found in possession of arms would be deemed guilty of treason.
Meanwhile, the Continental Congress had voted to send ten companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to aid the Massachusetts militia.
On July 6, 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, written by Thomas Jefferson and the great Pennsylvania lawyer John Dickinson. Among the grievances were General Gage's efforts to disarm the people of Lexington, Concord, and Boston.
Two days later, the Continental Congress sent an open letter to the people of Great Britain warning that "men trained to arms from their Infancy, and animated by the Love of Liberty, will afford neither a cheap or easy conquest."
The Swiss immigrant John Zubly, who was serving as a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote a pamphlet entitled Great Britain's Right to Tax . . . By a Swiss, which was published in London and Philadelphia. He warned that "in a strong sense of liberty, and the use of fire-arms almost from the cradle, the Americans have vastly the advantage over men of their rank almost every where else." Indeed, children were "shouldering the resemblance of a gun before they are well able to walk." "The Americans will fight like men, who have everything at stake," and their motto was "DEATH OR FREEDOM." The town of Gorham, Massachusetts (now part of the State of Maine), sent the British government a warning that even "many of our Women have been used to handle the Cartridge and load the Musquet."
It was feared that the Massachusetts gun confiscation was the prototype for the rest of America. For example, a newspaper article published in three colonies reported that when the new British generals arrived, they would order everyone in America "to deliver up their arms by a certain stipulated day."
The events of April 19 convinced many more Americans to arm themselves and to embody independent militia. A report from New York City observed that "the inhabitants there are arming themselves . . . forming companies, and taking every method to defend our rights. The like spirit prevails in the province of New Jersey, where a large and well disciplined militia are now fit for action."
In Virginia, Lord Dunmore observed: "Every County is now Arming a Company of men whom they call an independent Company for the avowed purpose of protecting their Committee, and to be employed against Government if occasion require." North Carolina's Royal Governor Josiah Martin issued a proclamation outlawing independent militia, but it had little effect.
A Virginia gentleman wrote a letter to a Scottish friend explaining in America:
We are all in arms, exercising and training old and young to the use of the gun. No person goes abroad without his sword, or gun, or pistols. . . . Every plain is full of armed men, who all wear a hunting shirt, on the left breast of which are sewed, in very legible letters, "Liberty or Death."
The British escalated the war. Royal Admiral Samuel Graves ordered that all seaports north of Boston be burned.
When the British navy showed up at what was then known as Falmouth, Massachusetts (today's Portland, Maine), the town attempted to negotiate. The townspeople gave up eight muskets, which was hardly sufficient, and so Falmouth was destroyed by naval bombardment.
The next year, the 13 Colonies would adopt the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration listed the tyrannical acts of King George III, including his methods for carrying out gun control: "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our people."
As the war went on, the British always remembered that without gun control, they could never control America. In 1777, with British victory seeming likely, Colonial Undersecretary William Knox drafted a plan entitled "What Is Fit to Be Done with America?" To ensure that there would be no future rebellions, "[t]he Militia Laws should be repealed and none suffered to be re-enacted, & the Arms of all the People should be taken away, . . . nor should any Foundery or manufactuary of Arms, Gunpowder, or Warlike Stores, be ever suffered in America, nor should any Gunpowder, Lead, Arms or Ordnance be imported into it without Licence . . . ."

[NRATC53]

To the Americans of the Revolution and the Founding Era, the theory of some late-20th Century courts that the Second Amendment is a "collective right" and not an "individual right" might have seemed incomprehensible. The Americans owned guns individually, in their homes. They owned guns collectively, in their town armories and powder houses. They would not allow the British to confiscate their individual arms, nor their collective arms; and when the British tried to do both, the Revolution began. The Americans used their individual arms and their collective arms to fight against the confiscation of any arms. Americans fought to provide themselves a government that would never perpetrate the abuses that had provoked the Revolution.
What are modern versions of such abuses? The reaction against the 1774 import ban for firearms and gunpowder (via a discretionary licensing law) indicates that import restrictions are unconstitutional if their purpose is to make it more difficult for Americans to possess guns. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibits the import of any firearm that is not deemed "sporting" by federal regulators. That import ban seems difficult to justify based on the historical record of 1774-76.
Laws disarming people who have proven themselves to be a particular threat to public safety are not implicated by the 1774-76 experience. In contrast, laws that aim to disarm the public at large are precisely what turned a political argument into the American Revolution.
The most important lesson for today from the Revolution is about militaristic or violent search and seizure in the name of disarmament. As Hurricane Katrina bore down on Louisiana, police officers in St. Charles Parish confiscated firearms from people who were attempting to flee. After the hurricane passed, officers went house to house in New Orleans, breaking into homes and confiscating firearms at gunpoint. The firearms seizures were flagrantly illegal under existing state law. A federal district judge soon issued an order against the confiscation, ordering the return of the seized guns.
When there is genuine evidence of potential danger--such as evidence that guns are in the possession of a violent gang--then the Fourth Amendment properly allows no-knock raids, flash-bang grenades, and similar violent tactics to carry out a search. Conversely, if there is no real evidence of danger--for example, if it is believed that a person who has no record of violence owns guns but has not registered them properly--then militaristically violent enforcement of a search warrant should never be allowed. Gun ownership simpliciter ought never to be a pretext for government violence. The Americans in 1775 fought a war because the king did not agree.