Cornell may well deliver the most devastating blow yet to the Standard Modelers’ view of the Founding era because he successfully challenges them concerning Pennsylvania, the state where one finds the most evidence of claims for gun ownership as an individual right, which was often linked with opposition to ever accepting the Cons ution without a bill of rights. Here the Standard Modelers have often gone to the fullest available sources, especially the Do entary History of the Ratification of the Cons ution. But have they interpreted the evidence correctly? Cornell demonstrates that they have not. Although the Pennsylvania state cons ution of 1776 declares that "the people have a right to bear arms" both "for the defense of themselves and the State," the Revolutionary government’s Test Acts, hardly limited to the Loyalists, gave authorities wide la ude to curtail liberties, including the confiscation of arms. These Acts, which may have affected close to forty percent of the population, remained on the books until 1789, stoutly defended by political elements that would lead the Anti-Federalist forces. Indeed, at the time of the Carlisle Riots and the Whiskey Rebellion substantial voices from the elite ranks of Anti-Federalism supported disarming their former Anti-Federalist allies. 5 The whiskey rebels themselves did not justify taking up their muskets on the basis of the Second Amendment "but instead framed their actions in terms of a natural, not a cons utional, right of revolution." 6 On gun ownership, Anti-Federalists were not cut from the same cloth, a truism for other issues as well. Cornell, the preeminent authority on Pennsylvania Anti-Federalism, will not be easily dismissed.
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