Ah, that's a very different discussion and one far less amenable to clear textual evidence. You, I believe, are a traditionalist Catholic and I am an atheist. While I do think we share some moral precepts, I'm not confident that we're going to find a clear moral text that provides answers to this question on which we can both agree.
I'm, uh, not sure what's going on here. Did we confuse between "a right to engage in non-government-sponsored armament and training" and "a right that is not governmental in origin"?
I believe in both to at least some degree.
If you're talking about the origin of rights in ethics, I believed in the past as an atheist that human rights spring from some sense of abstract justice that preceded human institutions. Now, as a Christian, I believe that this sense of abstract justice is of divine origin.
My intention was actually not to say that. What I was saying is that to the best of my knowledge the Second Amendment to the constitution defines the rights of individual American citizens concerning weapons/armor and militia service, and possibly the institution of the militia, but it doesn't define rules of engagement or a right of revolt.
Even in polities like Germany that have a constitutionally defined right of revolt, actually revolting would almost always be illegal-according-to-the-law-enforced-at-the-time.
As a traditionalist Catholic, I tend to be a lot more restrictive regarding when revolt is justified than many people would be.
I'm going to need some actual examples of the benefits here because mostly what I see is significantly higher homicide and suicide rates.
As usual I am extremely suspicious of the idea that homicide rates in the USA are driven by guns rather than people deciding to commit homicide by whatever means is available. This is supported by a lack of correlation between gun prevalence and homicide rates in different societies, and the intense clustering of homicides in the USA.
First, the mere existence of an option provides deterrence without it actually being used. Second, a lot of the value of a right to keep and bear arms that I focus on is the ability to defend yourself when the government deliberately decides not to.
Third, I think that "everyday" defensive use of weapons (incl. the general sense that self-defense with weapons is legitimate in the USA, in contrast to countries that consider it implicitly illegitimate except in extreme circumstances) is socially beneficial, esp. to a society that wishes not to have a "total state".
Fourth, it serves as an ideological-positional tripwire.
Phrases like "the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached" and "were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force" (both from the paragraph you cited above) which make clear that he sees this in the context of state governments rather than independent militias are often either glossed over or outright ignored in these arguments. The idea that individuals would possess arms was seen by the founders primarily as being in service to the state militias, large armories and military depots not being particularly common at the time or particularly practical for the relatively widespread population of the late colonial era.
Simply put, I think this is partially a somewhat subtle but significant confusion of concepts and partially completely made up.
Note that later in that paragraph, he says that European governments suppress their people by means of 1. standing armies, 2. disarming the people and 3. not having subordinate/local governments that would coordinate resistance. #2 and #3 aren't the same.
And, well, in that specific document it's specifically about state vs federal power, of course he's focused on the states. Currently we are significantly faced with states depriving their own citizens of their rights.
You have not actually advanced any argument for popular possession of arms being seen as broadly subordinate to the interests/needs of the state government in a way that the state government could renounce at its pleasure or convenience. And meanwhile, as we see above the Founders were perfectly capable of saying "state" when they mean state and "people" when they mean people.
>Note that a lot of what I'm saying isn't just the Founders but what people in living memory believed, as well as what people believed through the 19th century when the founding had passed into institutional memory but the historical-modern gun control complex hadn't emerged.
I'm going to need at least some evidence for this. Note that I don't disagree with the statement that this idea existed, I'm sure nearly every idea existed in someone's mind at some point in history, but I don't see any evidence that the current ideas of gun rights were widespread for held by any large group of people until very recent times.
To examine history is to see that your position is not tenable at all.
My impression of the correct history is that something like the current idea of gun rights (but less individualist / gung-ho insurrectionist and a bit less extreme in some matters, and sometimes just different) was seen as so-normal-it-wasn't-even-controversial until roughly the turn of the 20th century. At the turn of the 20th century you started seeing machine gun restrictions (state level) and carry restrictions crop up along with the High Industrial pattern of maximal state capacity, traditional rights be damned. However, this was a patchwork and heavily dependent on selective enforcement (concealable pistols were frequently advertised in the Sears Roebuck Catalog era). After WWI, we saw a relaxation of maximal state capacity and some of these selectively enforced laws got less selectively enforced, and there was a general recognition of what people had lost, spurring the emergence of political agitation for modern gun rights.
Simply put, the Heller and Bruen decisions were straightforwardly correct (except that they did not go far enough). They are the result of seeing history not filtered through reinterpretations aimed at legitimizing the loss of civil rights.
The most accessible collection of historical evidence, IMO, is that compiled by Moros Kostas, a pro-gun lawyer. (article version). This is from the 19th century. Note that there's some variation and a lot of past figures don't support the full form of modern gun rights absolutism, but it does seem like a lot of stodgy, not-mostly-about-guns writers on constitutional rights from the 19th century do see the Second Amendment as having protected an individual right to have contemporary weapons, and often specifically weapons of war.
Dr Seybert's book about economics and statistics of the early USA says that “our constitution guarantees to every citizen the right ‘to keep and bear arms,’ while in other countries this very important trust is controlled by the caprice and tyranny of an individual.”
Abolitionist Joel Tiffany says in 1850 that the right to bear arms is "accorded to every subject for the purpose of protecting and defending himself, if need be".
Lysander Spooner says that the 2A restricts both Congress and State governments from infringing the right of "the people, that is, of any of the people" to bear arms.
Abolitionist Horace Greeley shortly after the Civil War says, in a speech in a Black church, that the 2A protects the right to keep and bear arms against state governments.
William Rawle, former US district attorney for Pennsylvania in the founding generation, says “no clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.”
Lyman Trumbull, co-author of the 13th Amendment, said that incorporation of the 2A via the 14th Amendment was a matter of course and that as a result it would overturn racist bans on guns for black Americans.
Ohio congressman during the Civil War argued that the 2A restricted the federal government from totally monopolizing the production of ammunition.
Thomas M Cooley, in his book on "general principles of constitutional law", dismissed the idea, saying that "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".
Some of the people cited are less enthusiastic, but it's pretty widespread among legal and public notables of the 19th century to believe that the Second Amendment protects some individual rights. The biggest limitation that people are willing to accept is a ban on concealed weapons, in a social context where non-concealed weapons were much more tolerated.
Weapons for militia service were registered in most states and some states and localities enforced strict rules on the storage of such weapons [source]
Note: Weapons for militia service, not all weapons. So already I am not impressed with your first link.
That article links another piece which is itself as polemical and which is trying to do some weird equivocation with weapons types.
I don't think we lose our civil rights because people in the 18th century who didn't expect a war were underarmed or because there were sometimes public armories. And none of the people who write these things ever intend to actually let us have a mass levy militia.
The second link from that article is... the laws of Rhode Island? Which talk about required equipment for the miiltia? I can't even find the supposed vaunted restriction policy.
Restrictions on carrying arms in public were fairly widespread, particularly in the north [source]
My impression is that this was more common in the south, not the north.
Also, there's a lack of quantification or specificity in the source. It didn't convince SCOTUS in the Bruen case. A lot of laws that were "widespread" have massive exceptions, or only apply to one kind of carry, or only apply to people engaged in some kind of skullduggery, or were selectively enforced.
Certainly I have noticed how the Trace is specific when being specific supports them and vague when being specific does not support them.
A lot of the most apparently strict laws were exactly the ones that were not enforced on white men -- 19th c. Southern governor outright admitting that he knew his incredibly strict gun laws were unconstitutional and he never intended them to be enforced against white men is a trope.
And why haven't the blue state attorneys cited these laws that definitely exist when making their strongest efforts to defend modern gun restrictions (not licensing, carry, or sales or storage laws generally)?
They have actually. It turns out that, when confronted with such historical evidence, conservative judges who express a great deal of interest in historical usage suddenly lose that interest so they largely stopped trying.
This is... not what actually happens. I have followed these cases fairly closely.
What happens is that the blue state attorneys scrape together everything that they can find, which is either A. barely anything or B. a Gish Gallop of unrelated laws, laws, that has nothing like the same scope, private org regulations that never had force of law, blatantly racist Black Codes, laws that kinda touch the same matter but need to stretch like silly putty to equal the case actually before the court, etc.
Then the oral arguments happen, and the judge asks some fairly softball questions to the blue state attorneys and they totally struggle to answer, or piss the judge off, or make wild claims of how much unbounded power they should be allowed to have.
If the decision made is anti-gun, it's often based on some ridiculous BS like "the right to keep and bear arms doesn't apply to this because these specific guns we don't like aren't arms" or "we aren't banning guns, we're just banning (lists the parts of a gun)" or, frequently, they just blatantly ignore the rules.
...especially given that the government Madison saw in his lifetime didn't have that even in theory.
I'm not clear what you mean by this, can you clarify?
The government Madison saw in his lifetime didn't have racial or gender equal rights, and was biased enough on religion that it's hard to say it had religious equal rights as we would understand the concept.
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