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You are half correct. The other intent of our founding fathers in writing the bill of rights (that is part of the federal constitution) is to outline basic human rights that they stated did not come from the government, but come from your creator. The only role of the government in this case is to outline those rights and safeguard those rights for us. Rights such as free speech, unreasonable search and seizures, right against self incrimination, right to a speedy trial etc. Among those listed rights is also the right to keep and bear arms.

I'm afraid you'll have to dig a bit deeper than that. You are probably not aware that the Bill of Rights was a big controversy during ratification. You would probably think that there is no way freedom-loving colonials would ever object to having those rights enshrined like that, but they did. Here's why: a good number of men thought that outlining specific rights that the federal government could not violate would be mistakenly interpreted as meaning that those were the ONLY rights that the people had which were to be protected. However, others of the convention thought that those particular rights were so important to be protected from abuses by any central government, that they made the BOR anyway.

The most important concept to grasp is that the Founders were extremely fearful of a powerful centralized government. The Constitution was their effort to protect against this central government. The federal governments powers were to be "few and defined", so that they would not interfere with the sovereign States, nor exert any power over the people as individuals. Saying that the federal government has a bunch of rules that are supreme and that its own members would interpret that bunch of rules, is tantamount to saying that local governments have NO power, which is where we are finding ourselves today.

One more question for you: if the US Constitution, at the time of its ratification, was considered to overrule State law, then why would ANY state have bothered to create a state constitution, which usually mirrored the federal Constitution? There is only one reason, and that is that the States did not think the US federal government had authority over them, and therefore state constitutions were necessary to protect those very same rights for state citizens that were protected at the federal level.

“You are probably not aware that the Bill of Rights was a big controversy during ratification.”

I understand all of this. I did not think that my writing a novel on the whole subject of the constitution would prove anything. What you fail to understand is that most of the original 13 colonies state constitution were written before the federal constitution. That’s why they are similar.

James Madison is generally credited with writing the first 10 amendments or Bill of Rights. He patterned it after the Virginia constitution which he also had a major hand in writing.

The Bill of Rights was one of the first things that was passed in the first legislative session of Congress. Yes, it had a lot of different dissenters for many reasons. George Washington was against it because he felt that those things outlined in it were so self evident that they did not need to be codified.

All of these things miss the point I was trying to make to you. That is that there are two types of laws in the BOR. The first as you mentioned is to restrain the government. The second type of law is to codify civil liberties (or rights) that are guaranteed to every American citizen, not by the government but by their creator. The federal government’s only duty in these instances is to protect those rights (such as the second amendment). In other words, it would be illegal to completely ban the ownership of guns to law abiding American citizens by any state. That is essentially the ruling that came down in the recent Parker decision in Washington DC. The court in essence ruled that you can’t just ban guns. It was the correct lawful scholarly decision.

“One more question for you: if the US Constitution, at the time of its ratification, was considered to overrule State law, then why would ANY state have bothered to create a state constitution, which usually mirrored the federal Constitution? There is only one reason, and that is that the States did not think the US federal government had authority over them, and therefore state constitutions were necessary to protect those very same rights for state citizens that were protected at the federal level.”

Are you saying that the requirement in the US constitution that it guarantee that the states have a “Republican” form of government has *nothing* to do with it?