This is the first of two closely related tricks which together make up a significant bulk of the content for “collective right” literature. Countless examples of 18th- and 19th-century state and local arms regulations are presented as proof that such laws existed so early, but nobody ever denied this. It is only federal gun control that was never even remotely constitutional, as discussed in Lie #1, which is why it didn’t appear until 1927—after years of Prohibition fueled the homicide rate to 8.4 and the passage of 140 years had significantly weakened respect for our Founding principles. The government nevertheless still felt obligated to operate somewhat plausibly within its constitutionally granted powers, as the Mailing of Firearms Act only affected use of the US Postal Service.

 

The government thus implicitly acknowledged its inability to interfere with even the interstate use of private carriers, much less with what objects or substances private individuals have inside their homes, but it later magically discovered that it could take vastly more power under the same Constitution that previously limited it. Certain types of state-level gun control may be annoying and even harmful to individuals, but none can directly empower a tyrannical centralized authority to disarm its opposition nationwide. It must be noted here, however, that federal gun control isn’t going anywhere soon. Not a single “pro-gun extremist” on the Supreme Court has ever come close to even musing about getting rid of it, but its existence is not a justification to dial the unconstitutionality up to eleven.

 

As for those early state and local laws, they (with the notable exception of overtly racist ones) almost never interfered with the peaceful private possession of any weapon. Nearly all of them addressed subjects like hunting, public carry, powder storage, and the actual firing of guns, so even a complete list of such regulations isn’t helpful for making the case that there’s literally no limit to the disarmament that can be imposed on civilians. Now that the states are bound by the Second Amendment, as they were not in the 18th and 19th centuries, this line of argument is less relevant still.