Except that is only an idea that is less than 20 years old...for the prior 250+ years, that wasn't the case.
That's.... absurdly false.
The position that the Second Amendment guarantees a right of individual Americans to own and carry (private ownership), was embraced by every known legal scholar in the 19th century who wrote about the Second Amendment (although several wrote about its limitations, all considered it an individual right), and is the consensus of most modern legal scholarship. Any claim to the contrary is pure historical revisionism.
To start, St. George Tucker, a judge and law professor from Virginia, published an edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, in 1803, to which he added explanations of how it related to American law, including the new Constitution. Soon after Tucker's Blackstone became nearly universally regarded as being the leading American authority on both Blackstone and American law.
Tucker addressed the Second Amendment at several points, clearly stating that it protected the individual, natural right of self-defense. After quoting the amendment he wrote:
"This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty... The right of self defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."
Moreover, in his notes concerning Blackstone's description of the individual's right to have and use arms for self-defense, Tucker applauded the Second Amendment's "right of the people" for being "without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government." In everything that Tucker wrote he explained that the right belonged to the individuals and not to some collective state right.
William Rawle of Pennsylvania, who had turned down an offer by George Washington to be the nation's first Attorney General, published his View of the Constitution of the United States of America in 1825 with a second edition printed in 1829. In it, especially in the second edition, he made it clear that the right to keep and bear arms belonged to the ordinary citizen, writing that
"No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people."
This same view can again be seen in the highly influential 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States by Supreme Court Justice and law professor Joseph Story, as well as in his later Familiar Exposition of the Constitution. By paraphrasing the "right of the people" as the "right of the citizens" -- not of States or members of a militia -- Story left no doubt that he meant the right to belong to individuals. He unequivocally stated that
"the right of the citizens to keep, and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic."
Story was even more direct in his Familiar Exposition when he wrote:
"One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is by disarming the people and making it an offense to keep arms."
Though less prominent than his father Henry Tucker (son of St. George) shared the view of the Second Amendment as securing an individual right. In an 1831 commentary he exclaimed:
"The right of bearing arms ... is practically enjoyed by every citizen, and is among his most valuable privileges."
And this view was the one expressed after the Civil War as well (Woods 1886, Black 1895) as well as in how the Freeman Bureau Act of 1866, referred to the rights of the people included
"the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens of such State or district without respect to race or color, or previous conditions of slavery."
They emphasized how such rights should be preserved from attempts at government encroachment, indicating that they didn't see the Second Amendment as the state's right to maintain their own armed military.
To contradict all of this the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence (CPHV) is forced to claim that "Colonial legislatures from New Hampshire to South Carolina imposed communal storage of firearms and permitted them to be removed only in times of crisis or for muster day." But in reality the only indication of community or compulsory storage in Colonial times was for arms and ammunition that was purchased by state or local legislatures, or supplied by the King. Throughout the colonial period it was the private ownership of guns that was compulsory or encouraged. When the British tried to take the local stock of powder, shot and arms at Concord the local "Minute Men" already had their own firearms and ammo in their homes.
So, as an examination of the writings of the Founding Fathers[1], any pre-1900 case or commentary shows that none of them thought of the Second Amendment was established to preserve a collective right or right of the states. IOW, while the Second Amendment was meant to preserve and guarantee an individual right for a collective purpose that does not in any way suddenly somehow transform that right into a collective right. There is no contrary evidence from the writings of the Founding Fathers, early American legal commentators, or pre-20th century Supreme Court decisions, indicating that the Second Amendment was intended to apply solely to members of well-regulated militias. The "collective right only" theory is exclusively an invention of the 20th century "gun control" debate.
Now, in our time, in his 400-page The Bill of Rights: Creation & Reconstruction, Akhil Reed Amar (a leading Constitutional scholar and Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University) discusses the idea that the 2nd Amendment establishes state militias and doesn't support the individual's right to bear arms. Amar, a self-described liberal, states unequivocally that
"this reading does not work ... The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to 'the people,' not the states. As the language of the tenth Amendment shows, these two are of course not identical: when the Constitution means 'state' it says so. Thus, as noted above, 'the people' at the core of the Second Amendment are the same people at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment."
Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, often mentioned as being on a short list of possible Supreme Court picks by a Democratic President, stated back in 1999 that individual Americans did indeed have a right to keep and bear arms noting that he studied the issue thoroughly and found that the Constitution did indeed ensure to each American the right to "possess and use firearms in defense of themselves and their homes." Some believe it was this stance that kept him from ever being nominated.
The fact is that the nation's leading constitutional scholars such as Tribe and Amar as well as folks like William Van Alstyne (Duke), Sanford Levinson (University of Texas) and Glenn Harlan Reynolds (University of Tennessee), all ascribe to the concept of the individual Second Amendment right as the "Standard Model." As the afore-mentioned Glenn Reynolds notes, scholars that adhere to the individual rights interpretation, "dominate the academic literature on the Second Amendment almost completely," and that this view is "the mainstream scholarly interpretation."
Liberal Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz agrees with his colleagues but for different reasons:
"Those who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right are courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."
And when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 32 year long ban on handguns in Washington D.C., in June 2008 (District of Columbia v. Heller) in a 5-4 decision. It was "an inevitable ruling," explained George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley
"Even though I'm an advocate of gun control, it's very hard to read the Second Amendment and not see an individual right."
Finally, the fact is that the Founding Fathers loathed the concept of a standing army in the control of the federal government. They considered it a threat to freedom.
For instant during the Constitutional Convention back in 1787 James Madison, long considered the "Father of the Constitution," warned against the dangers of a permanent army stating that, "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." He added that, "Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people."
Madison's Vice President, Elbridge Gerry (one of only three attendees to the Constitutional convention who refused to sign the U. S. Constitution because it did not then include a Bill of Rights) described standing armies as "the bane of liberty" and that the purpose of state militias was to make them unnecessary.
Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Paper no. 8 described a standing army as being an institution that was "unfriendly to liberty."
Samuel Adams wrote in 1776 that a standing army was, "always dangerous to the Liberties of the People." He argued that professional soldiers were likely to consider themselves separate from the populace, to become more attached to their officers than their government, and to be conditioned to obey commands unthinkingly[2].
The fact of the matter is that standing armies terrified them. Thomas Jefferson called them "engines of tyranny" and considered them to be "dangerous to our liberties."
These men were influenced not only by their experiences with the British army who many of them saw as being comprised of ruffians and drunken thugs and thus predisposed toward a citizen army, but also by the writings of folks like the Scottish writer Thomas Gordon who wrote under the pseudonym "Cato" in the 1720s and was an adamant opponent of standing armies, viewing them as a key method of undermining ancient English liberties as can be seen his Discourse of 1722:
"There are but two Ways in Nature to enslave a People, and continue that Slavery over them; the first is Superstition, and the last is Force: By the one, we are perswaded that it is our Duty to be undone; and the other undoes us whether we will or no. I take it, that we are pretty much out of Danger of the first, at present; and, I think, we cannot be too much upon our guard against the other; for, tho' we have nothing to fear from the best Prince in the World, yet we have every thing to fear from those who would give him a Power inconsistent with Liberty, and with a Constitution which has lasted almost a Thousand Years without such a Power..."
1. In the Federalist No. 29 Alexander Hamilton clearly and unambiguously states that membership in a well-regulated militia is not required for the right to keep arms.
2. Adams also said during the debates of the Massachusetts Convention on February 6, 1788
"and that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms"
And that's barely even going into the many quotes by other Founding Fathers.
