"The intention was to establish the United States military as one in which every adult male meeting that description would be a citizen soldier"
The most annoying aspect of discussing the Second Amendment is the ease with which opponents of gun control are argued into a corner and refuse to give ground. Fundamentally, there are only two cases to be made: either “A well ordered Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, will not be infringed” is completely unbounded, or it has boundaries that we as a theoretically civil society have an obligation to identify and evolve.
The first argument is wholly indefensible, and one of the better examples amongst a litany that common sense has already brought to the forefront of your mind can be found in the majority opinion of Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller. Heller struck down the DC handgun ban, and the low quality of Scalia’s argument gives the strong impression that the majority sorely regretted taking the case in the first place. The entire thing is a long-winded attempt to assert that one can know the intention of the Framers’ words by flipping through Dr. Samuel Johnson’s contemporary dictionary and then piecing it together as if a monkey wrote it, and the first thirteen words don’t really need to be there. The bulk of its extensive annotations are dedicated to the task of grumbling aboutJustice Stevens’ insistence that the Founding Fathers weren’t just wearing out an old quill.
The reason the word “militia” is in there is because the Framers believed that investing the majority of the military power in the hands of the people was both a safeguard of liberty, and philosophically consistent with democracy. In the Virginia Bill of Rights George Mason’s articulation is as good an explanation as can be found, and is echoed throughout the various other states and drafts of the Second Amendment as we know it today:
17. That the People have a Right to keep and to bear Arms; that a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defence of a free State; that Standing Armies in Time of Peace are dangerous to Liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided as far as the Circumstances and Protection of the Community will admit; and that in all Cases, the military should be under strict Subordination to, and governed by the Civil Power.
There are several salient pieces of evidence embedded in there.
First, you’ll notice that the clauses are reversed, and the prefatory clause (A well regulated militia...) that Scalia attempts to blow off is about five times as long and five times more explanatory. This “why” that he articulates is reduced in the federal constitution because it is broken up and described in the first article, and the key terms were well understood and immediately articulated in law as soon as the Constitution was ratified.
The phrase “Body of the People” is understood in every contemporary constitution to mean some variation of “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.” This particular variant comes from The Militia Act of 1792, which provided federal standards for meeting the constitutionally-based congressional mandate “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia” per Article 1 sec. 8.
The intention was to establish the United States military as one in which every adult male meeting that description would be a citizen soldier, and it was further required that they be disciplined and trained by officers who would be appointed by the states. So clear is the federal imperative to fulfill the duties of Art 1, sec. 8 that it articulates exactly what kind of weapon each citizen was required to have and what accompanying equipment they must maintain.
They must “provide [themselves] with with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack...” etc. These weapons were considered military grade, and should the militia be mustered in full or in part by the president they would all be trained up and ready to go.
George Washington was well known to bemoan the loathsome state of the militia during the Revolutionary War, and when this act was passed he brightened up quite a bit about the possibility of making a real fighting force out of them.
In fact, this state of affairs persisted until a federalized system of an “organized militia” (Army Reserves, National Guard and the like) was established and the 1792 act abolished by the Dick Act...in 1903. The government finally conceded that the people simply didn’t care to be involved, and even as early as the 1830’s the state militias were a laughingstock of civic indifference. Hardly anybody even showed up to train, and most of the time it was because nobody bothered to organize it in the first place.
This is the problem we face today. Americans want to claim their cake as if the Second Amendment floated out of the sky, and eat it at home without following up on the civic obligation that ownership of arms entails. Furthermore, the Federal Government has had, since day one, the imperative to decide what weapons that militia should have. Nothing about the Second Amendment suggests that the right to bear arms implies contextual-less possession, and it is the height of citizen apathy to suggest otherwise.