“Musket vs. AR-15: Judges Are Throwing Out Gun Restrictions Because of Antiquated Laws from America’s Founding,” a Wednesday hit piece on the right to keep and bear arms presented as a news report by The Trace, “published in partnership with Slate,” laments. “A 2022 Supreme Court decision that gun laws should align with the nation’s ‘history and tradition’ has sown confusion in courtrooms and weakened longstanding limits on firearms.”

Assurances of donor transparency and editorial independence notwithstanding, The Trace depends on its financial existence from a host of left-wing foundations and organizations, including Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety.  Based on past performance, the results of that are predictable, with advocacy appeals paraded as “investigative journalism that much, like junk science, are calculated to promulgate preordained conclusions. And Slate, for its part, never saw a gun it didn’t want the government to grab.

The “Founders could have never conceived of modern arms” is an old lie. Enlightened men, schooled in classical, political, legal, and military history, understood that firearms technology was evolving. From long before their time, there were Fourteenth Century multiple-barreled volley guns and a design by Leonardo DaVinci for a rotating triple-barrel breech-loading cannon. The Founding Era had already seen pepperbox revolvers, Kentucky/Pennsylvania rifles, cartridges to combine shot and powder, the British breech-loading Ferguson rifle, the 11-cylinder crank-operated Puckle gun, and the Girandoni air rifle, capable of firing 22 .46 caliber balls and that had actually been used by the Austrian army 11 years before the Bill of Rights was ratified. And the above is by no means an exhaustive list.

Unable to refute reality, what’s a gun prohibitionist to do but try and confuse the issue?

“Which History? Which Sources?” the agitprop “report” asks. “Gun rights groups frequently call on courts to exclude other time periods. That’s because there were fewer regulations — at least regulations written down as statute — compared to the latter half of the 1800s, leaving fewer historical analogues to pick from. Focusing on the Founding Era also ignores crucial legal developments in the intervening decades.”

Yeah, that’s because later infringements weren’t what was agreed to and ratified. Can you imagine what the anti-Federalists would  have said if instead of “shall not be infringed” Hamilton, Jay, and Madison would have been calling for “universal background checks,” waiting periods, purchase and carry permits, “red flag laws,” “prohibited persons,” “gun-free zones,” prohibitions on 18 to 20-year-olds, and bans on “weapons of war”?

It figures “living Constitution” crowd would also demand “living text, history, and tradition” to justify whatever infringements and outright bans the corrupt can swindle the ignorant with today that their ancestors would have taken up arms to resist.

It’s our history, and you don’t need to look very hard to find irrefutable sources for what they did when the government came to seize weapons and powder, despite what curated “experts” like Saul Cornell (a.k.a. the Slippin’ Jimmy of the revisionist history movement) would have us believe.

But they want an expanded timeframe, let’s give them an expanded timeframe.

I had occasion recently to visit Old Fort Western in Augusta, Maine, a colonial outpost built “built in 1754 by Kennebec Proprietors, a land company based out of Boston,” during the French and Indian War, and “garrisoned by … men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony …” They were joined in “annual resupply [by] up to 300 men from militia companies [and their] lives were in great danger from the enemy for the river is not a musket shot wide.”

They had, by necessity, “weapons of war” available to them. And to refute The Trace’s historian who declared “The founders did not inhabit a world where a disgruntled 18-year-old could go and kill a couple dozen people in six or seven minutes,” among the arms we were permitted to hold were hand grenades, not banned by any laws, that would have certainly done the trick.

Let’s take it the other way and go to the Civil War era, since The Trace is the one who brought up “latter half of the 1800s.”

We could start with the infamous Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court held that recognizing the former slave as a citizen “[W]ould give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right … to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

Now let’s revisit an AmmoLand exclusive and go to the Civil War itself, with a form of “confiscation” never challenged on Second Amendment grounds, that nonetheless offers a revelation the antis can’t work around:

“You are deputized by me to demand and collect from whose hands the same may be found, all military arms both good and bad in the county of [Beaver]… and give receipts.”

This in particular stood out: it refers to collecting MILITARY arms from “patriots” and “good citizens” to outfit Civil War soldiers.

Plenty of legal arguments reference ARMS owned by citizens, and for militia purposes. This document specifically categorized them as military arms. Disregard the constitutionality of such a demand– the point is, it establishes the government knew citizens were so equipped with “weapons of war” and not only had no problem with it, it wanted to rely on that reality to fight a war. Presumably this had been the way things were since the country was founded, and they would have assumed it would be the way things would continue into the future.

Years ago, in one of my first articles, I challenged the ACLU to support its contention, based on writings from America’s Revolutionary era, to substantiate its claim that the Second Amendment does not guarantee an individual right to keep and bear arms, but rather, was only intended to provide for the right of states to maintain a militia. It failed miserably to make its case.

I’ll offer a modified challenge to The Trace and all of its curated “historians” unencumbered by budget constraints “thanks” to all those wealthy donors who don’t want you and me to have a gun: Provide evidence-based writing from the time the citizenry accepted the Constitution to support your contention that the Founders didn’t want the people to have “weapons of war” equivalent to those fielded by the military.

I think everybody can see why they’re trying to move the date scale marker up to ignore that, and include the 1934 National Firearms Act,  the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Hughes Amendment to the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act, the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 Clinton “assault weapon” ban, and all the state prohibitions that have been enacted in the meantime, to try and invalidate Bruen.

They won’t take the challenge because they know they can’t. And that should tell us all we need to know about these people.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.