Contrary to the popular imagination, bearing arms on the frontier was a heavily regulated business
By Matt Jancer
smithsonian.com
February 5, 2018

... The “Old West” conjures up all sorts of imagery, but broadly, the term is used to evoke life among the crusty prospectors, threadbare gold panners, madams of brothels, and six-shooter-packing cowboys in small frontier towns – such as Tombstone, Deadwood, Dodge City, or Abilene, to name a few. One other thing these cities had in common: strict gun control laws.

“Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,” says Adam Winkler, a professor and specialist in American constitutional law at UCLA School of Law. “Today, you’re allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren’t.” Same goes for most of the New West, to varying degrees, in the once-rowdy frontier towns of Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota.

Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families. Cultivating a reputation of peace and stability was necessary, even in boisterous towns, if it were to become anything more transient than a one-industry boom town.

Laws regulating ownership and carry of firearms, apart from the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, were passed at a local level rather than by Congress. “Gun control laws were adopted pretty quickly in these places,” says Winkler. “Most were adopted by municipal governments exercising self-control and self-determination.” Carrying any kind of weapon, guns or knives, was not allowed other than outside town borders and inside the home. When visitors left their weapons with a law officer upon entering town, they’d receive a token, like a coat check, which they’d exchange for their guns when leaving town ...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-180968013/

What part of "well-regulated" does he find open to interpretation?

By Francis Wilkinson
September 4, 2018, 1:00 PM EDT

... as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh staked a bold claim as a champion of the gun movement. His gun manifesto is a lengthy 2011 dissent in a case in which he was overruled by two other Republican-appointed judges.

The court’s majority opinion in that case upheld Washington D.C.’s ban on semi-automatic firearms and its gun registration law. Kavanaugh dissented on both items, claiming the court could rely only on “text, history and tradition.” Those are dodgy standards for a famously ambiguous Second Amendment text, a vigorously disputed history of guns in America and a widely varied tradition of regulation ...

Kavanaugh said there is “no meaningful or persuasive” distinction between a semi-automatic pistol and a semi-automatic rifle. He went on to compare a ban on a class of arms, such as assault weapons, to “a ban on a category of speech.”

It takes a peculiarly willful blindness, in a land uniquely beset by gun massacres, to claim semi-automatic rifles and semi-automatic pistols are indistinguishable. There is perhaps no more eloquent refutation than the 58 dead and more than 800 injured at a Las Vegas concert last October. The killer chose rifles over pistols for a reason: superior lethality ...

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-04/brett-kavanaugh-wants-you-to-bear-his-assault-weapon

By Emma Ockerman
Sep 5, 2018

... “I never thought this would happen in our country, that someone would bring a semi-automatic assault weapon into a school and just mow down children and staff,” Feinstein said, while also mentioning her 1993 legislation on assault weapons.

Then she asked Kavanaugh — who once wrote that the District of Columbia’s assault weapon ban was unconstitutional — for his opinion on assault weapons. (He had previously argued that such weapons are in “common use,” and therefore protected by the Second Amendment.)

Kavanaugh, dodging Feinstein’s actual question, said semi-automatic rifles cannot be distinguished from semi-automatic handguns, as both are “widely possessed in the United States” and are not considered unusually dangerous ...

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nydd/kavanaugh-defends-his-decision-about-semiautomatics-not-being-a-dangerous-and-unusual-weapon

BY ERIC TIRSCHWELL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 08/31/18 02:00 PM EDT

... we do not have to guess how Judge Kavanaugh would approach challenges to gun regulations, because he laid out his views in a dissenting opinion in a 2011 case known as Heller II. Those views are outside the mainstream of judicial thought about the Second Amendment. If they prevail on the Supreme Court, they threaten to invalidate a wide range of some of the most important and effective gun safety regulations at the federal, state, and local levels.

To determine whether a gun law is constitutional, Judge Kavanaugh asks only one question: Is the law “sufficiently rooted in text, history, and tradition”? In other words, if a gun regulation is “longstanding” or “analogous” to a longstanding regulation, Judge Kavanaugh would likely uphold it. If not, he would likely strike it down ...

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/404574-if-we-want-gun-safety-in-america-brett-kavanaugh-will-not-help-us

Fixed your subject line.