Jefferson on the Commercial Right to Make and Sell Arms

In a letter dated May 15, 1793, to British minister George Hammond, Thomas Jefferson addressed British complaints that French agents were purchasing arms in the United States for export.

Jefferson’s reply is one of the clearer early statements from a principal Framer on the scope of the right to keep and bear arms:

“Our citizens have been always free to make, vend, and export arms. It is the constant occupation and livelihood of some of them. To suppress their callings, the only means perhaps of their subsistence because a war exists in foreign and distant countries, in which we have no concern, would scarcely be expected. It would be hard in principle, and impossible in practice.”

The context matters. Britain was at war with France. French agents were buying arms from private American manufacturers and merchants. The British government wanted the Washington administration to stop it.

Jefferson rejected the request. He did not treat the manufacture and sale of arms as a privilege the government could suspend when geopolitically inconvenient. He treated it as a longstanding liberty of the citizen — “always free” — and one that the government had no rightful power to extinguish simply because a foreign war was underway.

This is not a marginal aside. It is a direct affirmation, from the principal author of the Declaration and a leading architect of the early Republic, that the right to keep and bear arms included the commercial right to make and sell them.

Modern regulatory regimes that treat the manufacture, sale, or transfer of arms as a privilege contingent on government permission sit in tension with this founding-era understanding. Jefferson’s position was the opposite: the calling was antecedent to the government’s convenience, and the government lacked authority to suppress it on the grounds offered.

The letter remains a useful primary source for any originalist analysis of the commercial dimensions of the Second Amendment.