...may be inconvenient for you, but I think he knew exactly what he was saying. You're putting words in his mouth because you don't like what he said. Most of our early national documents are masterpieces of ambiguity, because they represent compromises between conflicting interests. A lot of issues where just, shall we say...postponed. A lot of confusion also arises because the language has changed in the last few hundred years.

Trying to figure out what the founders MEANT unfairly idealizes them. This is dangerous thinking. They were men, not gods, and we should interpret these papers for what they are, legal documents which serve as flywheels to keep government from changing haphazardly and erratically, not pronouncements from Mt Sinai which must be interpreted by what the gods MIGHT have been thinking when they carved them in stone.

I am convinced that in this case, the 2nd amendment means exactly what it says, that every local government has the right to maintain an armed force, for self-defense and to discourage Federal tyranny. In his time, private ownership of firearms was not the issue it is today, for many reasons, many of them the technological capabilities of the weapons themselves. He could not possibly have anticipated the social conditions today relevant to gun ownership. He might have totally different views on gun control if he were around today, but of course, we have no way of knowing that, one way or the other.

I am sure, but cannot prove, that if Jefferson and his colleagues were alive today they would have agreed that legislation to control drugs and narcotics would be essential, although no effort was made during the early days of the republic to draft any, even though marijuana, opiates and alcohol were widely abused back then. Does this mean we should make all narcotics legal today, just because the founders made them legal?

That's right, they got high! Washington's diaries record him separating the male and female hemp plants, which tells us he wasn't just using them to make rope. Opium was a common medical cure-all and very popular and readily available, and the entire 18th century was notorious for it's drunkeness. Marijuana wasn't even illegal until 1937. It just wasn't considered a problem.