"Militia", what that meant then.

[The Grand Nudger]

The objections used to propagandize and militarize the public.  There's no need to leave the gunpowder confiscation for an example.  The colonists had no legal right to the gunpowder stored in colonial magazines.  The colonial government was not confiscating weapons (or powder) from personal use at the time either...though, obviously, the rebels were capable of working up the public into a row as if they did and were.  

On a broader stage, the famous "taxation without representation" takes it's place in the history of war propaganda....not a sober assessment of truth.  It's always good to remember that our founding fathers were propagandists, first and foremost...and whatever else second to that.  It was a necessity of their position and their goals.

They wrote some of that propaganda into the constitution, but, as I mentioned earlier, not all of it (some would be inconvenient to them as an authority for the same reason it had been useful to them as an insurgency.  The hole licking of local militias was a necessity of position just as the propagandizing over gunpowder, guns, and taxes was.  We've since decided that militias are a fundamentally dumb idea.  Nothing about the regulation of supply of those militias expressed any level headed thinking on the part of the fathers in what they wrote -or- what they meant.  They were beholden to the militia, and to an ideological fraud of the militia as a concept.  They didn't like the militia, or the public having access to guns anymore than the previous colonial authority.  

I'm not looking to dispute or confirm the ideological truth or purity of any current political position, simply offering a reminder that the founding fathers were not and could not be authoritative into perpetuity, and that their comments on guns and militias and any right of arms was more an expression of the then current political and military realities than any level headed policy that we should be informed by today.

The founding fathers didn't know shit about assault rifles.  They could not see the future.  Their document creates our current problem with guns in ways entirely unrelated to the second amendment.  Whatever they meant by a militia is irrelevant to that.  These people, and whatever they meant by -anything- are moot point.  It's a living document.

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TLDR version....it's pointless for anyone on any side of this issue to point to what they think the founding fathers meant as though it were the gospel of guns according to the prophets of americana.  As a cynic, and as someone who wants to see better enforcement of gun regs (so I can keep popping off rounds at paper plates without becoming an enemy of the state by default, lol)..I'd love to see the sane amongst us stop letting the nutters control the narrative. Any time the nutters can get us to waste on this point, is time that we aren't spending working towards the common goal.