This isn’t meant to be a gun debate.
They did have some serious firepower back in the 1700s
Could a person legally own cannons? What about a ship with 100 cannons?
The Constitution gives congress the power to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal. That pretty much covers cannons and armed ships.
. . . which was abolished with the Declaration Respecting Maritime Law signed in Paris. This is in contrast to “contractors” who are employed by a government (I’m looking at you Blackwater/Academi) and operate under different charters and different legal status.
To the OP; I don’t think there were originally any restrictions, however once Prohibition came around and the Mob started slinging lead, there were a host of reforms to limit the firepower available to an individual (without an application process). There have been numerous SCOTUS decisions to uphold a “reasonable limit” to the right to bear arms today. But, back then technology hadn’t evolved to the point to require it. You were still in ball-and-powder times; nobody was hauling around a Chicago Typewriter.
Tripler
Heck, the first revolver patent wasn’t filed until 1936.
While ball and powder was the staple of the time, there was also the Girandoni air rifle. A 20 shot magazine fed rifle lethal to 125-150 yards.
Is there a typo there, or has every Western ever lied to us?
Citizens could not only own cannon, but those in strategic locations were encouraged to buy them.
And don’t forget - In the era of a wooden navy, a cannon could sink a warship. That would be like citizens owning Exocet missiles today.
On the other hand, because communications and travel were not so easy, a lot of locations got away with gun bans and such later on. If the Sheriff of a town says no guns allowed in town limits, the local cowpunchers weren’t about to appeal to the Supreme court. So I would say that de-facto gun laws were a patchwork of various local and state rules, along with pretty much laissez-faire federal rules.
Other early gun control laws were thinly veiled means to keep guns out of the hands of the black population. Tennessee tried to ban inexpensive handguns in 1873, a move that has been widely seen as a way to keep guns away from poor blacks and maintain a monopoly of firepower in the hands of wealthy landowners.
That patchwork situation continued into the prohibition era, when mobsters started outgunning the police and certain types of firearms were restricted nationally. Not banned, mind you. Tommy guns are still out there in civilian hands. Just more regulated.
But you can still own tanks and cannons with the right paperwork and a wheelbarrow full of cash.
The Second Amendment applies solely to the federal government. States are not barred by the Second Amendment from restricting gun ownership.
The application of the concept of the Second Amendment to state actions via the “liberty” concept of the Fourteenth Amendment did not occur until quite recently.
I am neither a lawyer or an American, but my undrstanding was that the 14th amendment made it explicit that the bill of rights applied to all the people in the U.S., and was not a matter of state vs federal power, and that this has been held up by numerous precedents starting in the 1890’s. And I am pretty sure that lots of state and local gun laws have been overturned because of the 2nd amendment. To be sure, the doctrine of incorporation has only been applied to the second amendment fairly recently, but the principle has held for other amendments for a century or more.
Are you of the opinion that the state of, say Tennessee can have an official religion, so long as the federal government doesn’t recognize it? Does the 4th amendment only apply to invasions of privacy by federal cops, and the state governments can search anyone at any time for any reason?
Among the weapons the British army set out to confiscate at Concord were cannon* so there has been debate about this for some time.
*Ten iron and two brass IIRC but a quick Google found no confirmation.
More precisely, it was a slow accrual of court cases that held that the 14th Amendment extended the bill of rights. It was not done as a whole, but piecemeal, one by one, over many decades.
I’m not sure when it was broadly accepted that the 14th Amendment had that effect, and I’m not sure that the entire legal community even now accepts that as a given, since not all the amendments have been the subject of Supreme Court decisions.
District of Columbia v. Heller disagrees with you. as later clarified:
District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), is a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held, in a 5–4 decision, that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, and that Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban and requirement that lawfully-owned rifles and shotguns be kept “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock” violated this guarantee. It was also clearly stated that the right to bear arms is not unlimited and that guns and gun ownership would continue to be regulated. Due to Washington, D.C.'s special status as a federal district, the decision did not address the question of whether the Second Amendment’s protections are incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against the states,[1] which was addressed two years later by McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) in which it was found that they are. It was the first Supreme Court case to decide whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.[2]
But yes, in the 18th Century, in America, individuals could own cannon (and in fact they still can own cannon of the period, in most states) and I remember reading of some rich guys that raised their own Militia artillery units.
I don’t see the US as having ratified this in the list of signatory countries (many have a 19xx date, so it includes countries not present at the initial signing.)
<nitpick> 1836 (1835 in Britain) on the patent, by the legendary Samuel Colt. US Patent #138.
Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833) held that the Bill of Rights amendments applied only to the federal government, not the states. The opinion was issued by the Chief Justice, John Marshall himself. So, at the time the OP is discussing, the Second Amendment did not apply to any state, nor was the right conferred BY the amendment held to exist in individuals v. states through any mechanism of the federal constitution. Individual state constitutions might have had similar restrictions, of course.
After adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, this situation did not immediately change. After all, there is no language in the Amendment that says, “Hey, everyone, all that stuff in Amendments I to VIII applies to states, too, just sayin’!” It was not until the end of the Nineteenth Century that the Supreme Court started “incorporating” rights from the first eight amendments into the meaning of the language of the Fourteenth. The first such case, Chicago, B. & Q. R. Co. v. Chicago, 166 U.S. 226 (1897) did not explicitly state it was incorporating a right from the Fifth Amendment. Rather, Justice Harlan simply asserted that “due process” in the case of a taking of property required fair compensation. The first time the Court expressly incorporated a federal right into the Fourteenth Amendment was in [Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925), wherein Justice Sanford said,
It’s important to understand what is going on when rights are “incorporated”. The Court is NOT saying that the “First Amendment” applies to states. It expressly does not (see the text of the First Amendment if you are unsure about this assertion). But the Fourteenth Amendment by its text precludes a state from “deprive[ing] any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”. As justice Sanford noted, “liberty” as stated here can be held to include the liberty to speak freely. “Liberty” over the years since Gitlow has assumed expressly or impliedly almost all the rights included in the first eight amendments. Some of those NOT so far included in the concept of “liberty” are the right to indictment by a grand jury (see: [url=Hurtado v. California :: 110 U.S. 516 (1884) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center]Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516 (1884)](Gitlow v. New York :: 268 U.S. 652 (1925) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center) and the rights included in the Seventh Amendment.
It is important to note that the Supreme Court has, to date, expressly refused to totally incorporate all the individual rights of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Hugo Black argued passionately in a few dissenting opinions that it was imperative that the Court use “total incorporation” of the first eight amendments, primarily to avoid letting future decisions utilize “selective incorporation” to incorporate unarticulated rights reserved to individuals by the Ninth Amendment. He was, of course, prescient, because that is the battleground for the Court in cases of the last 45 years; see for example Roe v. Wade. But Justice William Henry Moody articulated as far back as 1908 in Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78 (1908):
Justice Felix Frankfurter, among others, took up the argument that “selective incorporation” was preferable. And, thus, while almost all the rights secured on behalf of individuals by the Bill of Rights have been so incorporated, the remainder remain uncertain, or expressly excluded.
As noted, the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” has been expressly incorporated into the doctrine of “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment. The case in question, as noted above, was McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010). Until that decision issued, there was no certainty that the Second Amendment right applied to the states.
As for the question Sam Stone asks about Tennessee having an “official religion”, the answer most certainly is “yes”, and the most glaring example was the state of Massachusetts, which practiced open religious discrimination against Catholics for decades. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find out the specifics, as well as the case that stops that from happening today.
As originally conceived and argued, the 14th amendment was intended to incorporate the BoR against the states through the PorI clause. It was only until Slaughterhouse a few years after the 14th was ratified that the PorI clause was read as narrowly as possible.
In the arguments in favor of the 14th, the right of freed slaves to bear arms in defense of themselves was to be a significant impact. This was in part to push back against the Black Codes passed in many jurisdictions after the Civil war intended among other things to disarm freed slaves.
Given the incorporation discussion above, it’s probably worth mentioning that most states have their own “right to keep and bear arms” (or similar) provisions in their state constitutions.
No. If you wanted to do significant damage to a wooden warship you had to fire broadsides of very heavy cannonballs from a range of a few yards. Even then wooden ships with foot-thick timbers were very hard to sink.
If you just had one field cannon you could fire away all day without doing more than irritating the ship’s crew as the light cannonballs bounced off the woodwork.
And yet, warships were in fact sunk by cannon fire from more than a few yards away.
But, I submit, very rarely:
https://www.quora.com/How-much-damage-could-wooden-ships-take-before-sinking
and not by using one small cannon.
Citizens didn’t just own ‘small field cannons’. Citizens even owned private heavily armed warships. and there was nothing stopping them from owning cannon large enough for shore-based naval bombardment.
And sure, it’s hard to sink a ship on the open sea. Now see what kind of damage you could do with a few cannon to a ship docked in port.