On Historic Gunsmithing and ‘Ghost Guns’ – Bearing Arms

I’ve probably mentioned a time or two that I’m a history buff. I have a weird love of the subject, one that gets kind of odd. I’m not content to just sit there and read about history, though I do plenty of that. I also insist on trying to experience as much of  history as I can. I’ve been a reenactor off and on for the last 40 years, for example, and I study and teach things like medieval martial arts or hand-tool woodworking (because of the history of it), all because of my love of the subject. I haven’t tried historic gunsmithing, though.

And I probably should at some point, because as a recent piece at Ammoland points out, it’s a key part of our national identity. Without domestic gunsmiths during the Revolution, we likely wouldn’t be a free nation.

But then we get to this little tidbit.

The historical significance of these gunsmiths extends directly into modern Second Amendment litigation.

In his 2023 research paper, The American Tradition of Self-Made Arms, attorney and Second Amendment historian Joseph G.S. Greenlee documented the longstanding American practice of manufacturing firearms for personal use.

Greenlee traces private firearms manufacturing from colonial America through the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, and the development of modern firearms technology.

His research establishes that Americans regularly manufactured, assembled, and repaired their own firearms throughout the nation’s history. He also concludes that restrictions specifically targeting firearms manufactured for personal use are relatively recent developments rather than longstanding American regulatory traditions.

That distinction matters under the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which requires the government to demonstrate that firearm restrictions are consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct at issue.

The historical record of American gunsmithing provides powerful support for the constitutional argument that the right to keep and bear arms necessarily encompasses the ability to manufacture and maintain those arms.

In other words, laws against so-called ghost guns are unconstitutional simply because making guns for your own use predates the United States, continued after the Second Amendment was ratified, and has continued right up until the modern day. 

Yes, technology makes it a lot easier than it used to be, but technology makes a lot of other things easier than it used to be, too, including exercising freedom of the press. No one is going to try to reasonably claim that because blogging became a thing, we should revisit that particular right.

The Bruen decision made history matter when it came to determining the constitutionality of gun laws, and the reality is that there’s absolutely no way on this planet that the history, text, and tradition standard will uphold a ban on so-called ghost guns. Not when, as noted above, home gunsmithing is older than the United States of America.

Home gunsmithing is part of why we have a United States of America, for crying out loud.

To say it’s past time for some of these people to knock it off with their stupidity is putting it mildly. I’d gladly be out of work because people finally woke up and stopped attacking our right to keep and bear arms. It’s a sacrifice well worth it should that day come.

Instead, I suspect I’ll retire or die first.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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