In “Gun Ownership in Early America,” published in the William and Mary Quarterly in 2003, Robert Churchill drew on probate inventories and militia records to make the case that arms ownership was pervasive in late colonial, revolutionary, and early national America. Churchill concluded with the observation that “[i]t is time to ponder what these guns meant to their owners and how that meaning changed over time.” In his substantial contribution to this volume of Law and History Review, Churchill takes up that challenge himself and advances the claim that widespread arms ownership engendered a sense of possessory entitlement, and that this notion of right informed constitutional sensibilities respecting guns and the Second Amendment. He acknowledges that a civic republican understanding focused on the militia was central to the framers' conception of the right to arms, but urges that another stream of discourse—individualistic, personal, and divorced from militia linked obligations—was present from the beginning. By the early nineteenth century, Churchill argues, this purely private view of the right to arms had become ascendant.

The scholarly debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment and the scope of gun regulation has been marred by ideological distortions. Michael Bellesiles, an ardent supporter of collective rights theory, argued that state control over weapons was virtually unlimited. Now Robert Churchill, a champion of individual rights theory, stakes out an equally bold position. In his view, a distinct and separate right to keep arms evolved under American law. According to this new variant of individual rights theory, the state might regulate bearing arms, but it was prohibited from regulating the right to keep arms.

In the 1990s the issue of gun control raised political passions to a fevered pitch. It is perhaps to be expected that some of that passion has spilled over into the scholarly debate about the meaning of the Second Amendment. I see that passion in the visceral responses my work has generated, in Saul Cornell's reflexive impulse to dismiss my work with crude labels, and in David Konig's unwillingness to engage fully the nuances of my thesis, which is neither strong nor weak, but certainly complex. In this context I appreciate William Merkel's courteous engagement of the full complexity of my argument.