Looks like I am a little late to the party, however, I just answered a very similar question a few days ago, so I will copy and paste it here:

Specific question I answered: "Why would Thomas Jefferson write in, and founding fathers put their signatures on, the 2nd amendment after Shays rebellion?"

This is an incredible question and I'm very glad you asked. Before I answer it, I'd like to briefly describe what Shay's Rebellion actually was:

Context:

Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising led by former Massachusetts Militiamen and Veterans of the American Revolution which took place between 1786 - 1787. Daniel Shays led several thousand "rebels" to fight against the economic injustices that were facing farmers and agrarian peasants all across America. These farmers were experiencing extreme poverty following the end of the Revolutionary War. All across Massachusetts (and the rest of America) farmers saw their lands foreclosed on in unfair property seizers, and they wanted to fight back, which they did here. They were also trying to fight taxes which were beginning to be levied against them. They fought this in many ways, but among them was closing and obscuring roads so that government agents couldn't reach rural parts of the state. Shays' Rebellion would ultimately be put down, but it startled the gentry who feared further uprisings throughout the United States.

I also like to point out that the naming of this event is really interesting. The people who did this, called themselves Regulators ( modeling off of the North Carolina Regulators who also fought against economic injustices before the start of the American Revolution.). The idea of Civilian Regulation was a popular idea that sought to end government corruption and stamp out the overwhelming power of the gentry. They believed that if the government wasn't regulating itself on behalf of "We the People", then "the People" had the right to regulate, or take back the government -- to take it back and do what they believed was right. They didn't see themselves as a rebellion, but rather the gentry labeled them as such in order to de-legitimize their cause. The gentry didn't want to call these men "militiamen" or "regulators" for this reason (which they clearly were), but instead, branded them as "rebels" who needed to be stopped.

Veterans like Benjamin Lincoln would raise militias on their own and mounted their own assaults against the "rebels." They call themselves the "the Massachusetts Militia" even though it was the former militias who they were fighting! So as they begin to debate this on the national stage, especially in 1787 at the Constitutional convention, the gentry singled out Daniel Shay (even though there were actually many other leaders), and they said he was crazy and people were only following a demagogue. They hailed The Massachusetts Militia as the victors and saviors and asserted that militias are what will save America in the future against such madness.

Answer:

Although the Constitution was drawn up in 1787 and ratified in 1788, the Bill of Rights was not ratified until December of 1791 when the Bill of Rights was finally agreed upon. Whether or not to include the Bill of Rights (and what to include inside it) was a matter of extreme contestation between the Founders and everything within it was deeply fought over.

When we look at the Second Amendment specifically, we should look at a few things before hand. First, by the 1790s, other small rebellions had popped up all over the country. Terry Bouton's article "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania" (The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), pp. 855-887) masterfully explains the fighting and rebellion that took place in the rural countrysides of Pennsylvania that mirrored what had happened in Massachusetts with Shays' Rebellion. Simply put, the gentry were terrified that they were losing control of rural America, and as a result they would not be able to seize foreclosed land and collect taxes, which they deeply wanted. Empowering militias to be trained and carry firearms allowed the gentry to call up these men in times of need and suppress these rebellions that were taking place.

Now there was already precedent in existence for protecting militias and their rights to bear arms in many states. Multiple other bills of rights from other states had already protected a militia's right to bear arms (such as Section 13 of Virginia's Declaration of Rights) and many of these states were fighting to have the federal government protect this as well.

Now, look at the very wording of the Second Amendment.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

"A well regulated Militia" is the key phrase. They are referring to the militias led by people like Benjamin Lincoln and his Massachusetts Militia not Shays and his "rebellion". The initial goal was to protect a state's right to call up arms against rebels, not to arm the masses. The Founders feared that in some states (like Rhode Island) that were already being drastically controlled by the poor (rather than the gentry), that local governments would start being able to choose who could keep and bear arms, and that by creating the Second Amendment, the gentry would always have the ability to call up and arm militias in times of need.

Clarification: I also need to stress that this question mentioned Jefferson by name, however he was not a signer of the Constitution, but did certify the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1792.

Tl;Dr: The second ammendement wasn't passed in spite of Shays' Rebellion, rather it was passed because of Shays' Rebellion.

EDIT: 1

Wow, what a response from everyone! I started posting responses to people below, but alas it is Father's day and I am heading out with my family to do some fun stuff for the day. I will do my best to answer questions I wasn't able to answer when I return tonight and will also answer any news ones that I can. I would like to say thank you to /u/DBHT14 , /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov , and /u/FatherAzerun who have helped me answer many of these follow ups (and given some pretty fantastic answers themselves)

EDIT: 2 Thank you to everyone for your patience. Sorry for the delay. Father's day and then NBA Finals and then Game of Thrones -- busy day!

Here are some great secondary sources that many of you have requested from me. I will post some more by tomorrow evening. Please let me know if you have any follow up questions.

Shalhope, Robert."The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment" The Journal of American History, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Dec., 1982), pp. 599-614.

Bouton, Terry. "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania" The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), pp. 855-887 I always recommend starting with this one. It's an excellently written article that is extremely well-respected in the field. It helps set up a much broader perspective for what was going on in the rural countryside with agrarian peasants who were rebelling during this time period.

Parker, Rachel. "Shays' Rebellion: An Episode in American State-Making" Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 95-113

Konig. David. "The Second Amendment: A Missing Transatlantic Context for the Historical Meaning of 'The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms'". Law and History Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 119-159

Edit 3

Once again, thank you to everyone for your patience. I am still getting PM requests for books, so I am adding two plus a few more articles. If would you like the articles emailed to you, please PM and I will send them to you. Please be aware that I am posting books that are on both sides of the gun control debate because both sides pretty much universally agree that regardless of what the founders' original intent was, a major (if not the major reason) for including the Second Amendment for the Bill of Rights were the incidents of rebellions, insurgencies, and regulators.

If anyone has more questions on this, I am perfectly willing to discuss them. Just ask the question in /r/AskHistorians and feel free to tag me.

Cress, Lawerence. Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 The University of North Carolina Press; First Edition edition. 1982

Malcolm, Joyce. "To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right* Harvard University Press. 1996

Cress, Lawerence, *An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right to Bear Arms" The Journal of American History, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jun., 1984), pp. 22-42

Higginbotham, Don. "The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second Amendment Scholarship" The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 39-58

Shalhope, Robert. "The Second Amendment and the Right to Bear Arms: An Exchange" The Journal of American History, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Dec., 1984), pp. 587-593

This is both an important question, and, as many other respondents have noted, also a thorny one. While I appreciate the citation of Heller as a strong indication of modern interpretations of the history of the phrase “well-regulated militia” as seen through legal eyes, both the controlling and dissenting opinions have found dissent. Since much of the origin of that dissent falls outside of the historical realm (and long discussion of it would violate our 20 year rule), I’d rather leave that for now and look to some historian’s interpretations, and see if that helps illuminate your question.

(Apparently I was had typed this up this morning that comment may have been removed for that reason, so sorry if I am responding to a phantom post now)

Just as a caveat, though: Clearly this is a question that has sharp divides, and the context of the way the question is framed today might itself be seen as ahistorical.

As noted above, there is a well-established concern that a militia stood in contrast to a Standing Army, which was seen as the “tool of a tyrant.” But one of the ways to answer this question about the militia specifically is to examine the historical context of what constituted a militia (and here I am focusing on the period before the Revolution) versus what did not at the time, since colonials did react to armed citizens taking up “defense” differently in different contexts.

In general, for a militia to be “well-regulated” it would have to have been mustered out by colonial authority, specifically the colonial Governor. Other groups that owned individual weapons and “mustered out” on their own – even if was regional and massively popular – were seen not as proper militias but as illegal actors or vigilantes. On the eve of the American Revolution in South Carolina, there was a set of vigilante groups in the western backcountry that eschewed the courts and decided to muster themselves out and attack outlaw gangs. This “Regulator Conflict” of 1767 was not seen as a proper use of militia but instead as a criminal activity, although people in the Western backcountry saw it as simply a necessity due to lack of governmental protection afforded to people by the governments along the coast. (I should note that western backcountry uprisings and “taking law into their own hands” is a subject worthy of an entirely other thread, one can go back to Bacon’s Rebellion as an example.) The eerie parallel is that the regulator conflicts presaged some of the complaints American Revolutionaries would have after the implementation of smuggling offenses being tried in the military Vice-Admiralty Courts – there were too few courts, too far away, although in some ways the complaints were polar opposites – the backcountry decried the lack of convictions of criminals, whereas the Vice Admiralty Courts were seen as tools of oppression, placing colonials who (in the colonials minds) were doing minor civilian infractions being sent to military Tribunals.

So not every group of citizens arming themselves and engaging in “defense” was seen as well-organized. Also, some historians have argued there is evidence in the early Republic that the second amendment was not seen as an individual right. I am specifically thinking of an essay in the collection edited by Saul Cornell, Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect? – and I apologize as I do not have the book on hand and a quick google search didn’t help me find the list of essays, but I’ll come back later and append if there is interest – but one of the early essays in the book cited the example of George Washington’s experience with the Whiskey Rebellion – not only, as mentioned in a previous response, drummed out the militia to deal with the uprising, but he also ordered disarmament of the Rebels. Therefore, the author concluded, the second amendment was not was not intended to reach beyond the militia mustered by the government. However, the point of that text was also to show other historians who had differing interpretations as well. It’s a good resource to examine some of the historiography of the debate. One of the co-editors, Cornell, is famous for making an argument that the two legal methods of viewing the second amendment (individual or collective) are both not quite right, and there is a third view entirely. Since I have not read his book on the matter – only an abstract and reviews – I cannot comment on its veracity, but as he is a rather esteemed scholar on this debate you may find it of interest as to how the framing of the debate today may be in and of itself flawed when we ask these questions.

However, one needs caution. I want to point out that some historical books need to be avoided. I myself was influenced at one time by a book that was highly lauded but ended up being upended. One of our great modern scandals involving the Bancroft Prize happened when in Emory professor Michael Bellesiles published Arming America, which tried to argue that the American value of gun ownership was more a locus of Pre-Civil War America and not a phenomena rooted in colonial, Revolutionary, or Early National America. As a new Assistant Professor, I personally tailored some of my lectures around what was seen then as groundbreaking new scholarship. As you might guess, it ended up that the book was an embarrassment – indeed, a lot of the evidence was simply fabricated – and it led to the Bancroft Prize being rescinded. (I think this is the only time that has happened.)

One other area worthy of investigation is to recognize that the idea of what constitutes a militia evolves as well over time in America. Since this goes beyond my period of expertise, and I am not specifically a military historian, I will let my colleagues tackle this if they wish, but I would point to the fact that Congress has defined the militia differently over time, and as pointed out in another response, the rise of the National Guard codified the militia in a way that was clearly different from colonial understandings. You might wish to look at the The Efficiency in Militia Act of 1903 passed by congress to get one such example.

One last note: Because of the politicization of the gun issue, the diminishing role of the militia in United States defense and the rise of the Professional (standing) Army has often been treated in a bubble. But I would argue that you can see parallels in other American institutions as well, where previously services that were volunteer or privatized and sometimes scattershot begin to be seen as disorganized, unresponsive, or ill-equipped to handle the challenges of an expanding population and urbanization over time (and particularly by the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and that expanded roles for government organization and professionalization are called for: The evolution of city watch and Sheriffs to the Robert Peel model of policing that is the foundation for much of our structure of modern police forces; there is a similar evolution from volunteer firefighters into modern professional Firefighters. Since Police, Military, and Fire response all entail safety and all have had somewhat similar evolutions into professionalization and government institutionalization, looking at the way who is tasked to do these behaviors – and who is prohibited – may provide insight into how control over these institutions have evolved without stepping on the second amendment political landmine.

The Bill of Rights did not just happen over night. There was an exhaustive debate that took place in the public forum over many months in newspapers, journals, letters, and essays. The purpose for the 2nd Amendment was laid out for us in writings by the very men who wrote and ratified our nation's founding document. One such argument was laid out by James Madison on January 29, 1788.

You might remember Madison as the 4th President of the United States. What you may not remember is that Madison also penned the Bill of Rights. One of his arguments for ratification of the 2nd Amendment was published in the form of Federalist Paper #46 (an excerpt of which is provided below). Madison argued that the standing army of our newly formed nation should not exceed 1/100th of it's overall population, or 1/25th the size of the armed civilian population. In no uncertain terms, he states the reason for this as:

"It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops."

Madison was not concerned with hunting nor the self defense of ones home. He was concerned with the people not having the ability to form militias in a manner capable of fending off a standing army following the orders of a future tyrant. It is interesting how James Madison's math has held up over time:

1788 Figures USA Military Personnel: 25,000 (1/100 of 2.5M) Armed Militia Potential: 625,000 (25x Military)

2016 Figures USA Military Personnel: 2.1 Million (1/150 of 315M) Armed Militia Potential: 100 Million (50x Military)

Many who are opposed to guns describe as "ultra-right fringe" those who believe the 2nd Amendment is intended to ensure the public can defend itself against a future tyrannical government. Laid before you is evidence to the contrary.

People on both sides of the debate are entitled to their opinions. However, during the course of the debate we must ensure that we do not engage in intellectual dishonesty. If you believe the 2nd Amendment is an outdated right, then make the case that it should be repealed. However, please do not attempt to rewrite history in order to circumvent original intent in an effort to impose laws that violate our Constitution in its current form.

***** Excerpt from Federalist Paper #46 *****

"Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms.

This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it.

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."

***** End of Excerpt *****

Hi there people!

As this thread seems to garner and pick up a lot of attention, here are some reminders about the rules for posting in this sub:

Answers in this subreddit are expected to be of a level that historians would provide: comprehensive, in-depth and informative. As such, all answers will be assessed against the standards of Historiography and Historical Method. You should cite or quote sources where possible. A good answer will go further than a simple short sentence. As we always say, "good answers aren't good just because they are right – they are good because they explain. In your answers, you should seek not just to be right, but to explain."

Please take these key question into account before posting:

• Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?

• Have I done research on this question?

• Can I cite my sources?

• Can I answer follow-up questions?

As pretty much all our other rules derive from this prime directive of getting people informative, in-depth, and comprehensive answers, please neither post just a link or a quote nor a wikipedia link as we consider wikipedia to not be a proper source here.

Furthermore, our rules are very strict when it comes to the discussion of modern day politics. I am aware that the 2nd amendment is the subject of heated political and legal discussion but this sub aims to provide a space for education about history, not for the discussion of current US politics.

Thank you!