Can a government prohibit all new firearms commerce within its jurisdiction? The issue in this case is the same issue that precipitated the American Revolution.

To regain dominance over the increasingly defiant American people, the British prohibited arms commerce. In the summer of 1774, American merchants were prevented from withdrawing their supplies of gunpowder that were stored in powder houses (secure brick buildings). Soon after, British Redcoats marched out to confiscate the Americans’ firearms and gunpowder from the Charlestown powder house.

The prohibition escalated in October 1774, when King George and his ministers embargoed all import of firearms or gunpowder into the thirteen colonies. Edmund Burke, a leading member of Parliament, suggested that the embargo was illegal, and Americans heartily agreed. The Virginia Charter in 1606 and the New England Charter in 1620 had expressly guaranteed the rights of firearms commerce.

Americans defied the British ban on arms commerce by importing firearms and gunpowder from other nations, and by domestic manufacturing. When the British army attempted to confiscate arms at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the Revolutionary War began. The British embargo on commerce — and American defiance of that embargo — continued throughout the war.

When the London government thought that victory was near in 1777, it wrote a plan to keep defeated America in perpetual submission. The plan included permanent prohibition of all American arms commerce.

The United States Constitution comprehensively protects the American people from the types of abuses that necessitated the Revolution. Necessarily, the Second Amendment still prohibits the particular abuse that triggered war with Britain hundreds of years ago: prohibition of firearms commerce.