The History of the Right to Bear Arms - The American Militia And The Right To Bear Arms

Much of American law is rooted in the system of laws developed in England (called common law) because most American colonists came from England, bringing with them English values, traditions, and legal concepts. Many of the English were familiar with the famous judge, Sir William Blackstone, who listed in his Commentaries the "right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense." This right, brought to America by the English, was exercised by the colonists against the English during the Revolutionary War and was later incorporated into the U.S. Constitution.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, an increasing British military presence in the colonies alerted colonists to the danger of a standing army. When British soldiers shot and killed five men on the streets of Boston in 1770, an event known as the Boston Massacre, colonists grew further concerned. The Boston Massacre became a milestone on the road to the Revolutionary War. In 1775 the British army encountered the Massachusetts militia at Lexington—"the shot heard round the world"—and the ensuing seizure of colonial arms and munitions convinced other colonies that a militia was necessary to achieve the "security of a free state."

Because the individual colonies did not have enough money to purchase weapons, each man was required to maintain a firearm so he could report immediately for duty and form a militia. It was taken for granted by the colonists that the right to individually possess and bear arms was inseparable from the right to form a militia—without these privileges, the right to organize a militia would have little meaning. Thomas Jefferson stated, "No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms (within his own lands or tenements)," and Richard Henry Lee observed that "to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms."

In The Federalist, No. 24, one of a series of papers written after the Revolutionary War to convince the colonists to ratify the Constitution, founding father Alexander Hamilton spoke of the right to bear arms in the sense of an "unorganized militia," which consisted of the "people-at-large." He suggested that this militia could mobilize against a standing army if the army usurped the government's authority or if it supported a tyrannical government. Such a standing army, declared Hamilton, could "never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and those of their fellow-citizens" (The Federalist, No. 29).

Founding father James Madison attributed the colonial victory to armed citizens. In The Federalist, No. 46, he wrote, "Americans [have] the right and advantage of being armed—unlike citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."