The notion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right is hardly a modern invention cooked up by 20th-century activists; it is the same understanding that guided the Founding generation and every generation that followed. Early state constitutions, the writings of St. George Tucker, and the post-ratification commentary of luminaries such as William Rawle all treated the right to keep and bear arms as belonging to the citizen, not to a select corps of militiamen. When Congress debated the Fourteenth Amendment, members repeatedly invoked the need to protect freedmen’s personal right to arms against Southern disarmament codes—proof that even Reconstruction-era lawmakers viewed the right as individual. Far from being a novelty, the individual-rights reading is the original public meaning, reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Heller and rooted in centuries of Anglo-American practice.

For today’s gun-owning community, this historical continuity is both shield and sword. It undercuts the claim that an “individual right” theory is a recent contrivance, and it supplies originalist ammunition against any future litigation that tries to confine the Amendment to collective or militia-only service. More importantly, it reminds activists that the cultural and legal battle is not about inventing new rights but about restoring a liberty the Founders took for granted. When lower courts uphold magazine bans or “sensitive-place” rules that would have been unthinkable to the generation that wrote the Bill of Rights, they are not upholding tradition—they are ignoring it.