The comprehensive nature of [digital] archives can give scholars a high degree of certainty that keyword searches accurately reflect common usage since they contain most of the surviving printed material from the colonies and early Republic. The Early American Imprints series contains over 15,500 documents from 1763 to 1791 alone, 273 of which use the phrase “bear arms.”" If we discard the many reprints of the Bill of Rights, all quotations of the text of the Second Amendment in congressional debate, irrele- vant foreign news, reprints of the Declaration of Independence, and all repeated or similar articles, 111 hits remain, of which only two do not use the phrase to connote a military meaning.’ Using the same method of sorting results from the 132 papers published from 1763 to 1791, the Early American Newspapers database returns 115 relevant hits, with all but five using a military construction of “bear arms.” A search of the exact phrase “bear arms” in the Library of Congress da- tabase (which includes Letters of Delegates to Congress,Journals of the Continental Congress, Elliot’s Debates, and the House and Senate Journals of the First Congress) between 1775 and 1791 returns forty-one relevant hits, of which only four do not use the phrase “bear arms” in an ex-plicitly collective or military context. The sources prove that Americans consistently employed “bear arms” in a military sense, both in times of peace and in times of war, showing that the overwhelming use of “bear arms” had a military meaning. [W]hile not every sin- gle source uncovered from these digital archives uses “bear arms” in an explicitly military sense, the handful that do not are merely ambiguous; at most, they tend to show that “bear arms,” on rare occasion, was paired with additional language to mean, idiosyncratically, “carry guns.”
The historical record of usage clearly shows that, before 1791, “bear arms” was used in its idiomatic sense to denote military service and the like, and that usage to denote non-military conduct was rare and idiosyncratic.
Bud the reason I didn’t reply with sources at first is honestly because you are a joke to me. Linking a law review article to me, you don’t know shit about law review. The scholarship on this is clear and overwhelming.