The “whole point of the Revolution” was so George Washington and Ben Franklin could make money as land speculators in Arkadelphia.
Well, almost the whole point. There was a practical issue with the money supply which argued for local sovereignty–and which doesn’t really apply to today’s fiat-money, welfare-state economy, in case you’re wondering–but it was largely a land grab for profit, literally those two guys’ profit.
Sorry, but all this stuff about how awesome the Founders were is just the bamboozled confusion of suckers inside the cult.
In future, when thinking about how awesome the leaders of the USA tell you the USA is, consider that the country most like us in disturbing ways is the Union of South Africa (Apartheid era). Imagine someone saying that the founders of the USA–Union of South Africa–were the greatest legal philosophers ever!
No, sorry. The Founders’ reputations benefit from the ignorance of what they actually were: Godless, treacherous, corrupt, neighbor-killing, treaty-breaking pirates, reavers, and scofflaws–as opposed to the sainted figures of myth. And the Constitution is misinterpreted by people who lack the historical education to understand what the Founders were about and the context in which they lived.
That said, once they had power, they had to use it responsibly enough not to be absorbed back into a European empire. Shockingly, they managed to pull this off.
For the record, the Second Amendment is about the ability of the nation to police itself. Private gun ownership was not its purpose, and indeed the words “private,” “gun,” (nor “firearm”) and “own” are not in it. A distribution of arms to a militia (like the Swiss militia today, an organized citizen defense force) was a means to secure the actual purpose: the security of the community. The Bill of Rights was written during a weird period in history where there were no professional police forces in the English-speaking world; citizens had to bear arms on behalf of their communities.
It’s arguable that the whole militia paradigm was rendered obsolete by the introduction of French-style professional police forces. It’s alternatively arguable that we should go back to citizen militia. But “Second Amendment advocates” usually don’t know enough about history to even make that kind of argument.
But since the point was never just “keep and bear arms” (which is not “own and sell guns” btw) but rather “keep and bear arms in order to maintain security,” if our present gun laws don’t maintain security as well as a tight gun control régime would, then we best serve the actual purpose of the Second by instituting a tighter gun control régime.
However scummy the Revolutionaries were, the Framers (many of the same guys) managed to avoid social disintegration by writing a functional set of basic civil laws (the 1787 Constitution) and letting the judiciary maintain English Common Law. But it was a functional set of laws for the time, and still deeply, deeply flawed. There were still the Nullification Crisis, the War Between the States, Jim Crow, and the malignancy of the more recent Conservative Movement to come.
We emulate the best of our avaricious, rebellious, genocidal, infidel, slaver forebears not by copying the bad stuff, but by trying to do the right thing with power, like one shockingly halfway decent thing they did with power once they robbed it at swordpoint: Write laws that work for the good of our people.