Thank you for your question, -- I appreciate respectful insight like that -- to many people are just name-calling and crap-hurling on this website. I'm a historian and I'm actually writing a book about the Founding Fathers right now, and after working on it for about three years I've learned a lot about their beliefs. Let's go, like you said, into some brief historical context. The Constitution was ratified by each individual state, each state acting like a party agreeing to a contract. They gave up specified and enumerated powers to the federal government for the protecti… Read moreon of their liberties from anarchy. The powers they gave up were very, very limited -- the power of signing treaties and alliances with foreign nations, the power of paying congressional salaries, establishing a post office and post roads, adding new territories to the United States, copyright and patent protections, moderate tariffs and excise taxes, and finally to keep a professional military -- but. beyond this the states didn't give up any power. Which means that whenever the federal government does something the states didn't give it permission in the Constitution to do, the states are released from the terms of the contract and can nullify the unconstitutional law -- meaning, completely ignore it. Look through all the history books on the period you can, the ratification debates, the Federalist papers -- and it's doubtless that this is how the states understood the constitution when they ratified it. TO say the states no longer have such authority, one must pinpoint in history the precise moment they surrendered such power -- which they never, ever did. So any federal gun control breaks the "contract" and is thus "null and void" under the Constitution. This would doubtlessly include federal gun control regulations -- those are the states responsibilities.
As far as the States go for regulating gun control, they never did. It wasn't understood to be necessary, because with 99 percent of people owning firearms, if you misbehaved as a criminal you'd probably be blown to bits. They understood that as a good thing, and didn't see any reason to regulate it. And some state constitutions also include pro-gun measures as powerful as the federal constitution.
The first gun control measure enacted was at the State level -- in 1865. The Democratic South, which had just been forced to join the Union after the Civil War, passed a law banning African Americans from purchasing guns as a racist measure meant to control their populations and force them to submit to the paramilitary Ku Klux Klan. And it was disaster for the former slaves -- the Klan rampaged throughout the South, burning their farms and killing black women and children in the middle of the night in cold blood. Of course, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant put down the Ku Klux rebellion, but the KKK instituted the first gun control regulations in America -- and with disastrous consequences.
So to answer your question, as understood by the Founders, the Federal Government doesn't have any authority to regulate guns, no matter how powerful they are. A handful of states would potentially and arguably be within their bounds to institute moderate regulations, but I personally wouldn't recommend it, giving the repeated history of disaster in the face of virtually every gun control law that has ever been instituted. Not to mention how gun control is systemically racist, lol. Hope that answered your question.
