2026-08-01 · originalism
There Is No Founding-Era Tradition of Asking Permission
Free Americans in the founding era did not ask the government for permission to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment was written to forbid the government from requiring it.
There is no founding-era tradition of free Americans asking permission to keep and bear arms.
None.
The historical record does not show a people who understood the right to arms as a privilege dispensed by the state. It shows a people who regarded the right as antecedent to the state — a natural right that governments were bound to respect, not a license governments were free to withhold.
“Shall not be infringed” was never a suggestion. It was a prohibition. The Amendment does not say the right may be regulated in the ordinary course of legislation. It does not say the right exists subject to government approval. It says the right shall not be infringed.
Modern permitting regimes invert this understanding. They treat the carrying or even the possession of arms as something that requires prior government authorization. That structure would have been unrecognizable to the generation that wrote and ratified the Second Amendment. They did not ask permission. They forbade the government from requiring it.
The absence of a founding-era tradition of permission is not a minor historical detail. It is central evidence of original meaning. When the people declared that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, they were not carving out a regulated privilege. They were protecting a pre-existing liberty from the very form of control that modern licensing schemes impose.