If you make a claim as audacious as that, you better bring the receipts, but unfortunately Fordham University professor, historian, and frequent expert witness for anti-gun politicians defending gun control laws Saul Cornell failed to provide a single piece of evidence for his assertion that, “[a]t the time of the Second Amendment, government sought to discourage Americans from purchasing the weapons they desired, and instead enacted laws forcing them to obtain the weapons the government believed essential to preserving a well-regulated militia.”
That’s not the only eyebrow-raising assertion in Cornell’s column at Slate that argues for the Supreme Court to, in essence, reject its own text, history, and tradition test laid out in the Bruen decision. In Cornell’s version of history, “traveling armed in public, apart from a list of recognized exceptions, violated the peace” and anyone doing so would have been stopped, questioned, disarmed, and subjected to a “peace bond” by a local justice of the peace.
What Cornell doesn’t say is that, under the common law in question, “going armed was no offense unless it was done in a manner and with the intent to…
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