In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains. READ MORE
So we learn that the 2nd was not, as claimed, a necessity for the defense of either nation or state, but merely a "quid pro quo" to get the slave states to ratify the bill.
What this means is that, quite contrary to what people today are saying about the 2nd, in reality it was only meant as a way to preserve and protect the rights of slave owners to keep and hold slaves. The fact that today's debates of the 2nd have focused on national and private security issues, does nothing to change the fact that this was a "right" created for the sole purpose of keeping slave ownership viable. In other words, had there been no slavery, the 2nd wouldn't exist. Since the gov't and the several states already had whatever powers they needed to preserve, either state or national, security using either police or military powers.
Thus the 2nd is really just an anachronism, meant and designed to preserve a social condition that is now completely illegal. Those facts cannot be either hidden, changed nor erased. The 2nd is simply a slave ownership artifact in the U.S. Constitution and has nothing to do with a "well ordered militia" being needed to do anything more than keep (the now illegal) slavery viable.
The Founding Fathers were very smart men, and they knew that to keep this slave ownership "right" in the bill, without raising protests from the other side of the slavery issue, it had to be couched in language that belied it's true cause, just like the "We hold that all men are created equal", was conveniently believed not to describe people being held in captivity. But, while they chose their words very carefully, the back stories they wrote in missives, letters, and displayed in debates, makes their true intentions abundantly clear, so the 2nd was simply a slave ownership protection, nothing less or more.
Could it be that the 2nd Amendment proponents are, merely seeking to keep their weapons, for a day when slavery might return? Well, that would be anyone's guess, but the fact remains that the 2nd Adm., has no state or national security issues at it's root. I'll leave it to future debate about whether it should be done away with or "modernized" and how that might be accomplished. But, suffice it to say that the 2nd, does not say, or represent, what people today seem to think that it does. This is due to the all but "forgotten" back story issues that gave birth to it.
