Analysis: How Revolutionary-Era Privateers Play Into the Supreme Court AR-15 Case

On December 2, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Viramontes v. Cook County and decide a question that sounds simple but carries enormous weight: does the Second Amendment protect the AR-15?

The Seventh and Second Circuits have both let those bans stand, but the Seventh Circuit’s reasoning is the one that matters most in Viramontes. That court held that the challengers were unlikely to win, because America’s most popular rifle is too much like a soldier’s weapon to belong to an ordinary citizen. It ruled there is “a long tradition, unchanged from the time when the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution, supporting a distinction between weapons and accessories designed for military or law-enforcement use, and weapons designed for personal use.”

That theory has a problem: It is not history. It is the opposite of history.

I have spent much of the past year writing a law review article, The Militia of the Sea, about a category of privately owned weapon the Founders never doubted belonged to ordinary citizens: the cannon. Not a musket. Not a pistol. A ship’s cannon, and often a whole battery of them, owned outright by private merchants and sea captains, with no government permission required to buy one.