I pride myself on providing purely original material, but the insight in this post comes from a book called “The Quartet” by Joseph Ellis. Here is what he tells us:
- Madison was responsible for collecting and editing the proposed amendments that became the Bill of Rights.
- There was great concern in the process of ratifying the Constitution about the need to promote state militias in lieu of a large federal standing army. This was particularly true among those who felt that the Constitution was an unwarranted step towards the centralization of power in the U.S.
- While Madison and the other supporters of ratification rejected any notion that ratification could occur with the adoption of amendments as a condition precedent, he promised that such amendments would be considered and approved expeditiously after ratification. The adoption of the Second Amendment, and the rest of the Bill of Rights, was a good faith effort to keep that promise to the Anti-Federalists.
If this is true, and I see no reason to doubt it, the notion that the Second Amendment was intended to protect individual, not collective, rights is historically inaccurate. Nevertheless, the current Supreme Court has decided that the right belongs to individuals, which is an obstacle to the creation of national gun control legislation.