How Fake 2nd Amendment History Kills

[The Magistrate]

6. A Solid Piece, Sir

I would advance only one caveat. The amendment was, at least in part, intended as a selling point to political elements in various states who still placed a high value on state sovereignty versus the new central authority. Taken together with a common understanding that the new Federal government would not maintain much in the way of a standing army, the amendment can be seen, and certainly was sold, as offering a means for state governors ( or to put it more bluntly, the wealthy and powerful gentlemen of a state, whose creature any state governor would be ) to resist encroachment by the Federal government on their State's prerogatives, by establishing that state militias would be the predominant form of military force, and by setting control of militia at the state level. Certainly by the time of President Jackson, this view had become practically obsolescent, as the Nullification crisis showed, but it was present at the start, and is a genuine enough root from which the modern idiocy of 'its so people can over-throw the government' grows.