One of the biggest myths about firearms and United States law is the idea the Second Amendment originally only protected a state's right to form a military, not an individual's right to be armed.
The thing is, this is an easy myth to examine! If that used to be the standard interpretation of the Second Amendment we ought to be able to find law school textbooks from prior eras saying this.
The most commonly used Constitutional law textbook from the 1880s up to WW1 was written by Justice Cooley. In it, he writes of the Second Amendment,
"It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. … The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose."
Myth. Busted.
(Read Cooley's Con Law textbook for yourself if you want! It's available online at https://constitution.org/1-Constitution/cmt/tmc/pcl.htm )
@rob Hm. This is an excellent source but I have some concerns with that date.
The Civil War saw many things that were understood to be state rights and responsibilities stripped away at, not ironically, the barrel of a gun (followed of course by constitutional amendments clarifying the result of that use of force). Our author may have been undertaking the work of stabilizing a new legal ground out of quicksand that had just been formed by a massive upheaval of the original understanding of state and private liberty. Not to say their interpretation was wrong, only that their interpretation may have been working under a new framework that did not apply (or was meaningless given the old power balance) prior to 1865.
On its own I accept your analysis of its meaning, but I feel I should go hunting for a pre-1860s source that would confirm that, say, in a case where a state tried to bar ownership of arms, any authority beyond an explicit call out for freedom of arms ownership in the state's Constitution was used to deny the state that authority to infringe.
(The right place to start that hunt, is, of course, the citations of the source you provided! Darn it Rob, I already have *so much* reading to do!) ;)
