Point Click, Fire: An Undercover Investigation of Illegal Online Gun Sales

[ellisonz]

170. I think that could be taken to mean a couple clear things...

The foremost being that you only really need a few weapons to be equipped otherwise you could be out to cause trouble and that would be directly counter to a Militia's task of protecting the community from external threats such as bandits, Indians, and other threats where there was no need for a Militia, there was no need to equip.

Arms and the man
America’s love affair with the gun is the eternal stuff of fiction. It has not always been the stuff of fact*

Jul 1st 1999 | washington, dc | from the print edition

RICHARD HENRY LEE, one of the signers of America’s Declaration of Independence, wrote that “to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.” This association between guns and liberty seems hard-wired into the American consciousness. It has produced a country with more guns than people. It has made national heroes of the armed frontiersman, the cowboy and Teddy Roosevelt, the president who carried a big stick and a hunting rifle. Above all it has engendered such a powerful cult of the gun that whether you glorify it, fear it or accept it as a necessary evil, hardly anyone questions its basis in fact. Have guns really been an essential part of American life for 400 years?

At first glance it seems absurd to doubt it. From the time of the earliest settlement on the James river, the English colonies required every freeman to own a gun for self-defence. More than a century and a half later, the notion of the citizen-soldier was enshrined in the constitution. “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,” holds the second amendment of the Bill of Rights, which establishes additional safeguards for Americans’ freedom.

Yet in ordinary life people were not armed to the teeth a couple of centuries ago. Wills from revolutionary times present a different picture. Probate records that list the belongings passed on to heirs often give valuable insights into everyday activities and possessions. Michael Bellesiles, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has trawled through more than 1,000 probate records dating from between 1765 and 1850**. Here is a typical finding: “He takes note of his favourite chocolate pot [says Mr Bellesiles]. The record notes broken bottles, bent spoons. It notes every scrap of land and every debt and credit he holds. There’s not a single gun listed. And this is the commander of the Virginia militia.” Between 1765 and 1790, fewer than 15% of probate inventories list guns of any kind (see chart 1), and more than half of those listed were broken***. The larger-than-average proportion in the South was probably due to difficulties in persuading people to be slaves by peaceful means.
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Official surveys of private-gun ownership show much the same thing. (Amazingly, to modern sensibilities, state and federal governments were able to undertake surveys of this sort without any debate in state legislatures about their right to do so.) The state of Massachusetts counted all privately owned guns on several occasions. Until 1840, at any rate, no more than 11% of the population owned guns—and Massachusetts was one of the two centres of gun production in the country****. At the start of the war of 1812, the state had more spears than firearms in its arsenal. What was true at the state level was true nationwide. “It would appear,” says Mr Bellesiles, “that at no time prior to 1850 did more than a tenth of the people own guns.”

http://www.economist.com/node/218080