And now "- thanks to last month's Supreme Court ruling "- there are and will be more guns everywhere in America. No place is safe any more.
How did we get here?
Republican politicians keep repeating the lie that the Framers of the Constitution wrote the 2nd Amendment so future generations could shoot at corrupt politicians. Of course, there was never even any such discussion; the idea is absurd now and was equally absurd then.
The Second Amendment came out of two concerns the Founders had.
The first concern was that they had seen, repeatedly over the centuries, standing armies during time of peace rise up and overthrow European nations' governments, drenching them in "a sea of blood."
To solve that problem, they intended what Switzerland had done: every state (canton) had its own militia, and if the nation as a whole is attacked the militias come under federal control. In addition to the Second Amendment, this is actually specified twice in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution:
"The Congress shall have Power To " provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions" and
"The Congress shall have Power To " raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years--
The reason Congress can only appropriate money for two years to fund the Army "- when it can, for example, appropriate 50 years worth of monies to support the railroads or roadways "- was because the Framers wanted to force Congress, every two years, to reconsider if the Army was even needed at all.
If it was peacetime, they hoped, future administrations would just let it go and rely on the state militias.
That idea evaporated with the War of 1812. Prior to that, President Jefferson inherited around 300,000 men from the Washington/Adams administrations' post-Revolutionary War Army, and he shrunk it to under 10,000 during his 8 years in office.
But when the British invaded from Canada, the state militias weren't up to the task: Redcoats made it all the way to Washington, DC and burned the White House.
Ever since then, military appropriations have been routine and the state militias "- the National Guard "- have turned to disaster relief and being a reserve backup for the federal Army.
But when the Constitution was being written, this was a really hot idea.
James Madison's first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said:
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
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