That makes it pretty clear this is all about a militia/Army that can defend the nation, not personal self-protection or shooting at errant politicians or wannabee tyrants.
But why did the word "nation" get changed to "state" giving us today's Second Amendment?
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
That's a most fascinating story, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.
The second, adopted version of that Amendment was changed to its current form to accommodate the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders and Virginians Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that " and we all should be too.
This was the second big reason why the Second Amendment was placed in its current form into the Constitution.
In the beginning, there were the militias, as mentioned, left over from the Revolutionary War. But in the South they predated that War by two centuries and were also called "slave patrols." And rebellions by enslaved people were keeping the slave patrollers busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings.
Slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the slave patrol militias.
If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband "- or even move out of the state "- those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse.
And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the enslaved people of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.
These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical who famously proclaimed "Give me liberty or give me death," Patrick Henry (the largest slaveholder in Virginia).
Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free those enslaved people.
This was not an imagined threat.
Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.
Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that the people they'd enslaved could be emancipated by the federal government through military service.
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