""The need for community security had produced a traditional duty to be armed at English law, but it took the religious and political turmoil of seventeenth-century England to transform that duty into a political right. The attempts by Stuart Kings Charles II and James II to disarm large portions of the population, particularly Protestants and suspected political opponents, met with popular resistance and helped implant into English and later American constitutional sensibilities the belief that the right to possess arms was of fundamental political importance. These efforts led to the adoption of the seventh provision of the English Bill of Rights in 1689: 'That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.'""