DAVID HARSANYI: The New York Times Botches America’s History With The Gun. “Over the past 50 years, a wide-ranging, well-funded political, cultural, and legal revisionism effort has been undertaken to erase much of the United States’ history and culture of the gun and the Second Amendment. The New York Times’s Nick Kristof’s recent column, ‘It’s Time To Talk About The NRA’ (because no one’s been talking about them!) is a good example of this trend.”

The right to defend your property, life and liberty girds the entire American project. Not a single Founder ever challenged the notion of individual firearm ownership. Most celebrated it. Individual ownership of firearms was so omnipresent in colonial days—and beyond—that Americans saw no more need to debate its existence. Debates over the Second Amendment involved a disagreement over who should control the militia: state or federal government.

Second, the idea that “Gun control laws were ubiquitous” in the 19th century is the work of politically motivated historians who cobble together every minor local restriction they can find in an attempt to create the impression that gun control was the norm. If this were true, Kristof wouldn’t need to jump to 1879 to offer his first specific case.

Read the whole thing.