ALL men that are fittinge to beare arms, shall bringe their peices to the church.
— Virginia General Assembly, 1631-2

That's a mandatory carry law from nearly 400 years ago, and it wasn't philosophical — it was a direct response to a massacre that wiped out a third of the English population in Virginia. The next time someone tells you that carry laws are a modern invention, that's your answer.

An act of 1639-40 specified: "All persons except negroes to be provided with arms and amunition or be fined at pleasure of the Governor and Council."

This is the part of early firearms history that doesn't show up on the posters at gun shows. The same legislative tradition that built the foundation for the Second Amendment was simultaneously writing race-based disarmament into law. Under Bruen, federal courts now have to look at the full historical record — including statutes like this one — when evaluating modern regulations. That's not a comfortable thing to sit with, but it's the honest history.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights... stated in Section 13 that "a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state."

Mason wrote that in June 1776, three weeks before the Declaration of Independence. Madison used it as scaffolding for the Second Amendment thirteen years later. When you're cleaning your carry gun tonight, that's the direct line from 1776 to your holster. George Mason gets less credit than he deserves for putting that language on paper first.

Harper's Ferry Armory... became one of the two primary federal arsenals alongside Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. By the 1840s and 1850s, Harper's Ferry was producing... roughly ten thousand weapons per year.

Then John Brown tried to seize it, Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart stopped him, Virginia's legislature panicked, and eighteen months later the Confederates grabbed the machinery anyway. That one installation — and what happened to it — connects the antebellum arms debate directly to the Civil War's logistics. The Richmond Rifle Muskets that Confederate soldiers carried were made on Harper's Ferry tooling.

Virginia's legislative whiplash from 2019 to 2021 — going from relatively permissive to one of the more regulated states in the South and then back to constitutional carry — is just the latest chapter in a 400-year pattern of this state swinging hard on firearms law every time the political ground shifts.

What's the oldest firearms law, historical event, or piece of gun history tied to your state that most shooters around here probably don't know about?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team