If you're talking about 'a right to keep and bear arms,' the 'arms' aren't given any 'rights'

Same for all the things that full under speech...

It isn't limited to just words that come out of your mouth.

My mother actually got stopped by the police for carrying an unstrung bow to a sports outfitter to buy a string for the thing.

I've heard of people getting their asses in hot water for carrying a walking stick.

But pack around a loaded AR-15 and you've apparently got the constitution on your side.

arrows. Or muskets. Or rocket launchers.

the founders were suspicious of keeping a standing army, something they thought would inevitably become corrupt (they were right). By the turn of the century, they knew they'd been wrong, that citizen militias would be poorly trained, take too much time to round up and deploy, and risked high desertion rates during peak agricultural work times. So we got a standing army which remained small until WWII.

The second amendment should have been repealed when the whole citizen militia idea was discarded but I suppose Congress had its gunloons then as it has them now.

Common people were expected to keep arms for defense or to form war parties. This fed into English culture which had a long history of retinue companies of people who were hired as mercenaries for the many wars as well as just hunting/defense. Eventually this became the militia form of defense with commoners supplying their own arms to support a call out of the militia. We break from England, but codify the culture, liberties, and legal system (common law)s in a document that remains in effect until today.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Just sayin'.

you are not the first person to think that - there is case law that says otherwise.

Even Scalia says so. AWBs, registration, strict background checks, training requirements, etc are all perfectly constitutional.

The 2A is not the problem.

In colonial times "well regulated" meant well supplied. Regulation did not mean what it means now. Of course the anti-history crowd does not like that explanation.

make the militia not as well supplied.

None that I am aware of. How many day to day murders are done by older people? A few, but not many. So your solution would not affect this issue.

SCOTUS fucked this one up.

to what Warpy and others have mentioned, I suspect the Second Amendment may have had a lot to do with keeping slaves from revolting against their owners and/or escaping the plantation (armed slave patrols). It's hard to imagine controlling large numbers of slaves without the threat of bullets flying through the air. Some of the Founding Fathers were slave owners.

Another possibility may be self-defense out on the wild frontier where there were Natives and bandits and coyotes and maybe not any law enforcement close enough to provide protection.

Of course most that is no longer relevant. There are still some remote areas where law enforcement may be too far away to provide much timely protection. And coyotes preying on livestock.

thinks he needs to carry a pistol to the grocery store.

Both are stupid - but at least with the shotgun you're home far more often than anywhere else and you're in an enclosed area with much less chance of escape.

Of course, a person who actually cared about home defense would also have a home security system, body armor, and reinforced doors at minimum, and if they could afford it a bunker and booby traps. The reality is most of these people are just compensating for physical and/or mental/emotional inadequacies.

thanks to the NRA and their (mostly GOP) puppets in Congress.

Militias of the states. The people feared they would use this power to Disarm the militias, or otherwise make them ineffective.

Sort of obsolete once the PEOPLE decided the govt supplied National Guard, backing up a huge kickass military, were the best security of a free state, not UNregulated civilians with various arms and no discipline.

I mean, they were pre-industrial, so you can probably take the "I" out of that, but that's the main reason. The people who wrote the Constitution and participated in the first Congresses were pretty much unanimous in wanting to avoid a standing army because governments that have standing armies are tempted to use them. So they wanted the navy to be a bunch of contractors (privateers) and the land defense force to be an armed and drilled citizenry (this was the same year as the first French levée en masse, so it was at least a current idea globally).

We're in a violent hemisphere. There are three large (>100m) post-colonial countries in the Americas: the US, Mexico, and Brazil. The US and Mexican constitutions both explicitly protect a right to bear arms, though Mexico restricts guns more heavily than the US. Brazil has very, very strict regulations, no constitutional right to have arms, and carrying a gun outside of the home is essentially illegal. Our gun deaths per 100k are 10 in the US, 11 in Mexico, and 19 in Brazil. I think a lot of the frustration from those of us on the left comes from imaging that as a country we are like Canada; realistically when you look at demographics we're much more like Mexico or Brazil.

But that aside, that product was singled out in the bill of rights because the people who supported the amendment disagreed with Hobbes's "monopoly of violence" theory. They also lived in a significantly more violent time than we do today (the murder rate in New York City in 1790 was about as high as it was in 1990 -- the post-Revolutionary era was one of those violent crime spikes that seems to occasionally hit western hemisphere countries), which may have led people to want to be armed.