The Quotes
The fundamental issue in gun rights and measures to address gun violence is accountability to public authority. Accountability means specifically registration of ownership. Registration is the only mechanism by which gun ownership can be effectively regulated and gun use regulations can be enforced. Accountability to public authority it turns out is the one point of policy the gun lobby's armed populace fantasy cannot accommodate. The gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, cannot win the right to be armed outside accountability to public authority in court but not for the want of trying, .../nraperp.html, .../pzpet.html, .../nrareno3.html. It has to cultivate a constituency that is already eager to believe and rally the constituency to defeat legislation. Part of the strategy is the fraudulent and/or severely adulturated quotes. The quotes are usually fragments lifted out of the context of the immediate sentences and paragraphs in which they were written and completely out of the context of time in which they were written.
If the NRA wants to have its very contemporary armed populace fantasy, it can have it, formulate it, believe in it, and lobby for it, but it has no roots in the Second Amendment and the historical consciousness and practices of the militia. The NRA, the rest of the gun lobby and the host of libertarian "scholars" who fabricated the armed populace fantasy cannot therefore canot wrap itself in the respectability of the Constitution and the Second Amendment. The context of the eighteenth century was completely different. The Second Amendment was about the arrangement of military force in the society. The choices then were between a much distrusted regular army associated with monarchy and usually composed of mercenaries, foreigners and/or social misfits and a republican militia composed of citizen soldiers rooted in their local communities. Just as the Framers of the Constitution distrusted political power and divided power between state and federal government and among three branches within each, they divided military power between the regular army and the militia. One big difference was that militia duty was conscript duty. The regular army was not. The militia clauses in the Constitution created a national militia, under limited authority of the Congress and the president, out of the pre-existing state militias. The Militia Act of 1792 (.../emerappc.html), enacted by the same people who ratified the Second Amendment, required the states to "enroll"— that is, register— militiamen for militia duty. It also required the state militia officers to compile and report to the President, the commander-in-chief of the militia, inventories of the militia resources of the states including privately owned arms. The inventories were called "Return of Militia." The conscript citizen militia, despite the ideological fervor that inspired it, was never a very popular or effective institution. It was completely moribund by the Civil War, replaced by volunteer militias which were under state authority. The two opposing military concepts of the militia and regular army were combined in the twentieth century in the Selective Service Acts starting in 1917. The United States became a national republic with armed forces composed of conscripted citizen soldiers. These issues are raised with the US Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, in the Potomac Institute (Md.) amicus brief in US v. Emerson.
Strong Federalists like Presidents Washington and Adams had little use for the militia and ignored the inventory requirement, but President Jefferson for ideological reasons wanted to emphasize the militia over the regular army and required the inventories be reported. They were reported from 1802 through the 1820s by which time the conscript militia institution was in an advanced state of decline. The listings under "Arms, Ammunition, and Accoutrements" included: "artillery side arms", "pairs of pistols", "muskets," "sabres," "bayonets," "pounds of power," etc. There was in those days no mention of or discussion about or concern for an individual civil right to be armed outside of accountability to public authority, outside of the knowledge and reach of government, state or federal. That is the right that is advance today.
The lists of quotes from the period of the American Revolution and the Framing of the Constitution promote enormous respectability for the armed populace fantasy for the eager to believe. It is not clear if the people who promote this stuff haven't really been deluded by their own eagerness to believe. See What does the NRA want? and Appendix I. What is as remarkable as the sophistication and persistence of the fabrication of a political ideology out of the false reading of the quotes quotes is the failure of any opposition. No political leader these day who is grandstanding to introduce gun control laws, usually derived from public health models of gun safety, has taken on the political ideology of anarchy and insurrection and made an issue of its fraudulent fabrication. The news media, whose first responsibility is to get the facts straight, has been silent. The New York Times did give small, very, very late treatment to a few quotes on September 24, "Week in Review" section.
The real issue gets down to whether or not gun owners are citizens under law and government or individual sovereigns, laws unto themselves, in the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy: Or, phrased another way: Is the Constitution a frame of government with "just powers" that derive from the "consent of the governed" or a treaty among sovereign individuals who give no more than word of honor and promise of good faith? The Million Mom crusade has surrended to public health models and has no apparent interest in expanding public consciousness and educating a constituency for law and government.