Justice  /  Explainer

Automatic for the People

Armed militias were essential to the creation of America. But times have changed, and so has the firepower.

Today, anyone over the age of 18 possessing around $800 can purchase a semiautomatic rifle like the AR-15, capable of shooting 30, 60, or even 100 rounds at a time and able to be reloaded in just three seconds. As radiologist Heather Sher memorably explained in The Atlantic in February 2018 after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, high-velocity bullets shot by AR-15s make organs look “like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer.” In other words, when it comes to the wounds they make, not all weapons are created equal.

But it’s not just the guns that have changed since the days of the early republic. It’s our relationship to the them. Most Americans nowadays aren’t living subsistence lives under constant physical threat. The frontier has been “closed,” according to the US Census, since 1890. In 1933, the National Guard of the United States was officially consolidated as a reserve component of the US Army; the last freestanding state militias are gone. Hunting has largely transitioned from a widespread subsistence activity to a hobby serviced by a huge consumer-facing industry. The average American doesn’t need a gun leaning by the cabin door in the same way the average colonist did.

And American citizens are no longer only white men, understood to be heads of households and responsible for the defense of their settlements from “insurrection” and attack. The Supreme Court eventually affirmed the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment, which had long been unfashionable in the legal establishment, in the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008. As historian Caroline Light points out in her 2017 book Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense, the Supreme Court’s ruling that individuals had the constitutional right to bear arms stripped all social context from our American history of 18th-century gun ownership, “divesting the early emblem of ‘law-abiding citizenship’ of its historic exclusionary connotations.” The white property-owning man looking to defend what Justice Antonin Scalia called “hearth and home” in early America was doing so against Natives, enslaved people, and possible incursions from foreign invaders, but this reading of the Second Amendment didn’t mention that part of the history.