The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791.
For most of the last century, courts read the individual right out of it.
In 2008, the Supreme Court read the words again.
By Jeff Bayard | Does the Constitution Really Say? — Part 9
This is the ninth part of Does the Constitution Really Say?, a Virginia Christian Alliance series on the Supreme Court cases where the original meaning of the Constitution was quietly swapped for something else. Earlier parts looked at a family’s home seized for a developer, a farmer punished for his own wheat, a butcher shut out of his trade, a soldier stripped of his citizenship, the “wall” between church and state, a coach forbidden to kneel and pray, speech banned for being “offensive”, and a government that watches without a warrant.
This week we turn to the amendment that puts arms in the citizen’s own hands — and ask, plainly: does the Constitution really say only the militia can keep and bear arms?
Your Rifle Didn’t Change. The Definition Did.
You bought the rifle years ago. You passed the background check. It stays locked, and you have never so much as pointed it at another person.
Then one morning you read that a bill in Richmond has given it a new name: “assault firearm.” You did not change. The rifle did not change. A definition changed — and overnight, a lawful thing became a suspect thing.
So you go looking for the words that are supposed to protect you. You find a single sentence, written in 1791, that people have argued about ever since. It has two halves, and the whole fight comes down to one question: does the first half cancel the second?
So this is the question worth asking, plainly. Does the Constitution really say only the militia can keep and bear arms?
What the Words Meant
Here is the whole sentence. Read it slowly:
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.
Two halves. The first names a reason — a well regulated militia. The second names a right — the people’s right to keep and bear arms. The entire debate is about how those halves fit together. Does the first one limit the second, so that only militia members are covered? Or does it simply explain the second, while the right itself belongs to the people?
Read the way the founders wrote it, the answer is plain, and two words settle it.
The first word is “the people.” That is the same phrase the Bill of Rights uses in the First Amendment and the Fourth — and everywhere else, it means individuals, not a government body. The people who may speak, and who are secure in their homes, are the same people who may keep and bear arms.
The second word is “militia.” To the founders, the militia was not a separate class of soldiers. It was the people — the whole body of armed citizens. One writer of the day, the “Federal Farmer,” put it simply: a militia, when properly formed, “are in fact the people themselves.” James Madison, in Federalist No. 46, pictured “half a million of citizens with arms in their hands.” That is not a select unit. That is the country.
And “well regulated” did not mean “heavily restricted.” It meant organized and trained. The Constitution itself uses the word that way, giving Congress the power to provide for “organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia.” A well regulated militia was one in good working order — not one hemmed in by gun laws.
Picture the man the founders had in mind. When the call came, he did not draw a weapon from a government armory. He took his own musket down from over his own door and walked to the muster. He was the militia because he was already armed. Take away his right to keep the musket, and there is no militia to regulate.
Virginia wrote this understanding down before the nation did. In 1776, George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 13, called “a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms,” the “safe defense of a free state.” Then, in 1788, Virginia’s convention refused to accept the new Constitution without a plainer guarantee. It demanded an amendment that put the right first, in so many words: “That the people have a right to keep and bear arms.” That demand sat on the very same list that carried Virginia’s demand for free speech (Part 7) and freedom from unreasonable searches (Part 8). Then Madison, a Virginian, carried it to Congress and wrote the Second Amendment.
One more thing the founders were clear about, and it matters. The armed citizen was never a private army. Mason’s own words finish the thought: the military must be “under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.” The people were armed — but under law, answerable to lawful authority, not free to muster their own force against it. Hold on to that. We will come back to it.
What the Words Now Mean
For most of the last century, the courts read the sentence backward.
Instead of treating the militia clause as the reason for the right, they treated it as a limit on the right. The theory went like this: the Second Amendment only protects a state’s organized militia, so an ordinary person has no individual right at all. The first half of the sentence was used to swallow the second half whole. “The people” quietly became “the state’s troops.”
Where did that reading come from? Mostly from a misused case. In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court considered a man charged with carrying a sawed-off shotgun. The Court’s actual holding was narrow: there was no evidence that that particular weapon had any reasonable relationship to a well regulated militia, so its possession was not protected. That is all the case decided. But over the following decades, lower courts stretched those few sentences into a sweeping rule — that the Amendment protected only militia service, and no individual at all.
So for most of living memory, half of the sentence sat silent. The right of “the people” was treated as if it were not there.
What Happened Next: The Words Won
Then, for once in this series, the Court came back to the words.
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms — unconnected to militia service — for lawful purposes such as defending your own home. Writing for the Court, Justice Scalia went straight at the two-halves question and answered it in one line: the opening militia clause “does not limit or expand the scope of the operative clause.” It announces a purpose. It does not shrink the right.
That is the whole ballgame, stated plainly by the highest court in the land: the reason for a right is not a limit on it. You do not lose the freedom because one stated purpose for it does not apply to you.
Two more decisions followed. In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the Court held that this right applies against the states, not just the federal government. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen (2022), the Court held that the right extends outside the home, and that gun laws must square with the nation’s text, history, and tradition — the same original-meaning test this whole series is built on.
And here is the part that answers the fear on the other side. Restoring the individual right did not turn every man into an army. In the same breath, Heller pointed back to an older case, Presser v. Illinois (1886), which upheld a state’s power to forbid private groups from organizing, drilling, and parading as military units without the government’s authority. That rule still stands. So the law today lands exactly where the founders did: an individual right to keep and bear arms for lawful defense — and no right to raise a private army.
The Strongest Argument the Other Way
The other reading is not foolish, and it deserves a fair hearing.
The sentence really does open with the militia. And much of the founders’ own debate about arms was about the militia as an institution — who would organize it, who would arm it, and how power over it would be split between the states and the new federal government. A careful reader can look at that history and honestly conclude the Amendment was mostly about military structure, not personal defense. That is a serious argument, not a silly one.
There is also a real public-safety concern underneath it. An individual right makes some gun regulation harder, and reasonable people worry about the cost of that in a nation with more guns than people.
But notice what the honest version of that argument requires. If Americans want the right to mean less than it says, the Constitution gives them a lawful way to say so: Article V, the amendment process — debated and ratified by the people. That is the legitimate path. The illegitimate path is to leave the words on the page and quietly read the individual out of them, which is exactly what happened for most of the last century.
And the individual right was never a blank check. Heller itself said so. The right does not cover every weapon or every place; longstanding limits — keeping guns from felons, barring them from sensitive places, forbidding private armies — remain intact. You can regulate arms within the right. What you may not do is redefine “the people” until the right disappears.
Did God Really Say?
The oldest trick in Scripture was never a flat denial. In the garden, the serpent did not begin by calling God a liar. He asked a question, then twisted the answer. “Has God indeed said…?” — and a plain word became something to argue away.
The collective-right theory did the same thing to four plain words. Did the people really have a right? — and “the people” slowly came to mean the state.
Scripture does not treat self-defense as sin. On the night before He died, in a world full of real danger, Jesus told His disciples in Luke 22:36 (NKJV): “He who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” The commentator Albert Barnes, reading that verse carefully, drew two lessons from it. First, that self-defense is lawful — a person surrounded by danger may lawfully defend his own life. Second, that this “does not prove that it is lawful to make offensive war” on anyone. Defense, yes. Aggression, no.
Look at where that line falls. It is the same line the founders drew, and the same line the law draws today: an individual may arm himself to protect his life and his household, but no one may take up arms to attack or to raise a private force. Scripture and the Constitution meet at the same fence. The right to defend what God has given you — your life, your family, your home — is honored. The appetite to make war on others is not.
What the Citizen Does
Start by knowing the words for yourself. Hillsdale College offers its Constitution 101 course free and online. Hillsdale takes no state or federal money — not even student aid — which keeps its teaching free of political pressure. Dozens of courses, no cost, go at your own pace. Start there.
Virginians have a second place to look, and it is close to home. Article I, Section 13 of the Virginia Constitution still carries Mason’s 1776 words about a militia “composed of the body of the people.” The right the Second Amendment secured was thought through and written down on Virginia soil.
Then watch how the right gets narrowed today — not by open repeal, but by redefinition. When a lawmaker cannot ban a rifle you already own, he can try to rename it — “assault firearm” — until the label does the work the ban could not. Virginia has criminal statutes that already govern the genuine danger of private paramilitary activity. The question worth asking about any new gun law is not whether it feels safe, but whether it changes the meaning of a right the people were promised. Ask the question this series is named for. Does the Constitution really say that?
Next time, we take up the promise that the law will treat every person the same. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees “the equal protection of the laws” — but in our day, “equal” is being quietly redefined, from treating people alike to sorting them by group. Part 10 asks what equal protection was written to mean, and who decided it could mean the opposite.
