The Second Amendment to the US Constitution says:
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.
It seems most people today understand the phrase "to keep and bear arms" to essentially mean for any person to own a gun and carry it in public. However, after doing a little historical research, I've found this definition to be unclear. Before the Second Amendment was finalized, James Madison's proposed version of the amendment said:
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.
This version of the amendment strongly suggests that the phrase "bear arms" means to render military service, specifically to render military service in the context of a militia. Also, the conscientious objector clause in the sentence further confirms this meaning of the phrase, as it would make no sense that a person would need to be "religiously scrupulous" about simply owning and carrying a gun.
However, an alternative interpretation can also be inferred from this excerpt from the Pennsylvania Minority Convention, which also preceded the writing of the Second Amendment:
That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military shall be kept under strict subordination to and be governed by the civil powers.
In this statement, it seems that the phrase "bear arms" can also be used in a private and non-military context, in this case for self-defense and hunting. There appears to be a contradiction here, as "bear arms" can exclusively mean "military service" in one sentence but then it can appear to just mean "carry a gun" in another.
Furthermore, I am unclear as to the exact meaning of the phrase "to keep arms"? It seems that to "keep" something can have at least two main definitions: it can mean to "keep" in the sense of to simply be in possession of something, or it can mean to "keep" in the sense of retaining something vis-a-vis someone who could potentially take it away. For example, if you went to a fast food restaurant and paid cash to the cashier, and when the cashier tried to give you back the remainder of what you owe, you might say "Keep the change." In this context, you are not telling the cashier to simply continue carrying the money on their person, but that the cashier is no longer compelled to return the money. So what I mean is that "keep" in the Second Amendment could mean that the people had the right to own and be in possession of arms or it could mean that the people possessed the right to not be coercively disarmed by the federal government.
Furthermore, another possibility is that the full phrase "to keep and bear arms" is not merely the conjunction of two separate phrases which each have two separate meanings, but rather that the complete phrase by itself has its own distinct meaning different from the sum of its constituent parts.
So what did the phrase "bear arms" actually mean to the framers of the Constitution? What did the phrase "keep arms" mean? What did the phrase "to keep and bear arms" mean?
To begin, I don’t think that those words even meant the same thing to the founding fathers themselves; each amendment came with discussion and debate over the exact language because of different interpretations of what rights the people had, or, rather, what rights they believed people naturally had and should be enshrined in political documents for protection.
To get a better idea of the general public perception, you have to examine the material and structural conditions of the litany people living in the early United States when the constitution was ratified in 1789. Those conditions were very different than those of today. They were people living in a frontier society and somewhat constantly at odds with the indigenous people they forcibly displaced as well as the people they enslaved.
The majority of people living there were sustenance farmers who lived in rural, agrarian economies. Their livelihoods and their own survival revolved around firearms, and firearm ownership was quite common, similar to today, but those firearms played a much more central role in those people’s lives. They needed them to hunt and bring in food, to put down animals, defend themselves against criminals/indigenous peoples, etc. This was also before the advent of modern policing as a response of capital to new organized labor forces, so the law was upheld mostly by local militias. While many were supplied by wealthier individuals living in the area, many were simply coalitions of farmers wielding their own guns. Any able bodied man would be expected to fight in these militias. For these people, “keeping and bearing arms” meant the ability to perform their livelihood and sustain themselves, as well as uphold their laws.
The framers recognized these actions as essential functions in burgeoning frontier society. They all had very vested interests in maintaining their upper class status, (after all, they’d just waged a war to create a country as a tax evasion scheme) and this particular political right was a guarantor that they, acting as leaders of militias, would be able to enforce the dialectical relationships they maintained with workers and enslaved people, as well as permit them to more easily expand into indigenous territory and murder them to increase their own wealth.