“In deciding that the Second Amendment means what it says, the Supreme Court relied on Connecticut’s post-Revolutionary libertarian gun history. Bet you didn’t know we were one of three states (the others being Mississippi and Alabama) that adopted what the Supreme Court called ‘even more individualistic phrasing’ of Second Amendment analogues as state law. That’s right: While the wording of the constitutional right to bear arms took more than 200 years to resolve, Connecticut removed all doubt in the first years of America’s existence by enshrining into our state constitution in 1818 the following words of common-sense wisdom: ‘Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defence of himself and the state.’ With only a modernized spelling change from ‘defence’ to ‘defense,’ those exact words are still incorporated as Section 15 of Article 1 in our current constitution, adopted in 1965.” (for publication 07/03/08)