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 protection 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 perce…  Read morent 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.