The text of the Second Amendment is short: “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.”
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds said the amendment’s few words speak for themselves.
“The Second Amendment places no limits on individual ownership of cannon, or any other arms,” Reynolds said.
There have been many court cases to resolve whether the amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it does. …
From the way Biden put it, the Second Amendment regulated weapons. The more immediate driver in 1787 was the desire to keep the federal government in check.
The framers of the Constitution agreed that a federal government might need a standing army. But coming out from under one despot, they wanted to avoid creating another. This was something that Federalists and Anti-Federalists could agree on, wrote Valparaiso law professor David Vandercoy.
“Both believed the greatest danger to the new republic was tyrannical government and that the ultimate check on tyranny was an armed population,” Vandercoy wrote in 1994.
— Jon Greenberg in Joe Biden gets history wrong on the Second Amendment limiting gun ownership