Jon Roland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Clayton Cramer has done research along these lines as well, and may want to > weigh in on this.
I must confess that while I see some merit in what Jon is saying on this, much of it confuses me, too. Without question, militia men were obligated to be available for duty. There seems to have been nothing in the way of gun registration, probably because guns didn't have serial numbers. There were efforts made by Virginia and Rhode Island to try and figure out if people were unlawfully transferring firearms to the Indians, but the lack of serial numbers seems to have been a major obstacle--leading to fairly absurd methods of trying to ascertain criminal intent. A March 1675/6 Virginia statute made it a capital offense to sell guns or ammunition to the Indians, and also declared that any colonist found "within any Indiane towne or three miles without the English plantations" with more than one gun and "tenn charges of powder and shott for his necessary use" would be considered guilty of selling to the Indians, and punished accordingly. Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, 1:226, describes the 1650 Rhode Island law. I'm hard pressed so how anything from the period precludes registration, except by some implication from the fear expressed in Federalist 46. There was a widespread belief that the population needed to be armed to prevent federal tyranny, but there was also a pretty widespread trust of local governments to do the right thing. On the other hand, state governments had given some reason to be skeptical of too much trust in that area as well. Registration of firearms is a bit too modern of an idea, I suspect, to show up in original intent. Disarming people--that was something that wasn't new to the colonists, and many the Framers were rightfully skeptical of THAT. Clayton E. Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.claytoncramer.com Being a citizen of the Republic is not a spectator sport.
