It isn’t news to the patriotic members of the National Rifle Association that July 4, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States of America. As we approach this auspicious milestone, Americans across this great nation should embrace a renewed interest in U.S. history and tradition and an even greater appreciation for the fundamental rights that have helped make this country a beacon of freedom for the world.
American history and tradition are of particular importance to gun owners and not just because we value curios and relics and our cultural heritage.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion was a conclusive vindication of gun-rights supporters’ longstanding interpretation of the Bill of Rights.
The decision was also the culmination of decades of historical scholarship elucidating the true meaning of the Second Amendment. Moreover, it was perhaps the pinnacle of Justice Scalia’s originalist method of constitutional interpretation—which focused on the public meaning of a provision at the time of adoption.
In ruling that the Second Amendment protects a right to bear arms outside the home in the NRA-supported case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the High Court explained the importance of American history and tradition. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion made clear that, for a firearm regulation to pass constitutional muster, the government must “justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
While the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights wasn’t ratified until 1791, the American colonists’ respect for the right to keep and bear arms predated 1776.
Hosting King Charles III for a state dinner in April, President Donald Trump used the occasion of America’s upcoming 250th birthday to remark upon our shared history. Invoking the Magna Carta, the president explained, “Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British code that ‘no man should be denied either justice or right.’”
American gun owners are correct to view the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as protecting a natural right—the logical extension of the right to self-defense inherent to all peoples. As such, this right is not dependent on any government for its existence.
Still, it is undeniable that the English tradition of individual rights influenced the American right to keep and bear arms. As George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm examined in her 1983 law review article “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms: The Common Law Tradition,” the historical record shows that the American colonists were informed by the rights of their forebears.
Malcom explained that given English tradition and law, “The Second Amendment should be properly read to extend to every citizen the right to have arms for personal defense,” adding, “This right was a legacy of the English, whose right to have arms was, at base, as much a personal right as a collective duty.”
Constitutional attorney and scholar Stephen Halbrook noted in his book That Every Man Be Armed: Evolution of a Constitutional Right, how the 1689 English Bill of Rights “included only two individual rights—those of bearing arms and petition.” Halbrook went on to explain “These rights… reappeared exactly a hundred years later in more absolute form as Articles I and II of the American Bill of Rights.”
This “more absolute form,” in a stable written constitution to be interpreted by an independent judiciary, has proved critical.
Today, the United Kingdom subjects suffer under a government that treats the right to arms as a disfavored privilege or with outright hostility. In recent decades, the UK and the rest of the anglosphere (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) have all confiscated, or are currently in the process of confiscating, various firearms from their law-abiding subjects.
America’s formative experience with disarmament came a little earlier and had a far different outcome.
It was on April 19, 1775, when a British officer ordered the militiamen on Lexington Common to “throw down your arms and disperse.” The ensuing Battles of Lexington and Concord marked the start of the Revolutionary War. In the subsequent days, British General Thomas Gage strove to disarm the people of Boston. Founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson cited this confiscation effort in the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” passed by the Second Continental Congress on July 6, 1775.
American gun owners have every reason to celebrate, cherish and herald our vibrant history and what it means for our right to keep and bear arms as our country reaches a quarter millennium. With the continued support of NRA members dedicated to preserving freedom, we can protect this foundational American right for the remainder of America’s third century and beyond.
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