“As an example of a lawful limitation Justice Scalia states that “prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment….””
vs
“South Dakota already has open carry without a license.”
So the nuance here is is open carry is unrestricted, but concealed carry is licensed.
In the early days of RKBA, concealing a weapon was socially considered prima face evidence of criminal intent. Licensing CCW would be a way of demonstrating lawful intentions by notifying the state ahead of time, and having paperwork presentable on demand should the concealed weapon be discovered and considered suspicious. Unfortunately, this is viably supported by the governor’s observation that 600 applications were denied for presumably good reason over a fairly small time & space; he of course then fails to note how many of those 600 proceeded to CCW anyway, leaving the harassed parties being the upstanding citizens who needed to CCW but knew they’d either be denied (so why bother; crushing the governor’s claim of nobody having been improperly denied) or not licensed in time.
The difficulty is that SD is a very cold state, making unwitting concealment common as one simply puts on a jacket. Then there’s the normal issue of unexpectedly needing discrete carry, faced with committing a harmless infraction vs scaring the natives.
Someone needs to get on the issue of those denied not caring and proceeding to CCW anyway - and also those being approved who should’t (I know of a case where a known coke-head applied for a NY CCW just for the he11 of it, and was shocked that he actually was approved; worse, the judge who approved my first CCW permit and stamped it “for recreational use only” was removed from the bench for cocaine trafficking).
There were no laws against concealed carry that withstood court review until 40 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified.
There were many concealable weapons available. Daggers and Dirks had always been available. “Muff pistols” became numerous during the reign of Queen Anne, from 1702 to 1714.
In 1833, the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. Then laws against the carrying of concealed weapons started to proliferate.