Mandatory Gun Ownership, the Militia Census of 1806, and Background Assumptions concerning the Early American Right to Arms: A Cautious Response to Robert Churchill

Abstract

In “Gun Ownership in Early America,” published in theWilliam and Mary Quarterlyin 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 ofLaw 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.