Maybe they did.
One of the arguments against an individual's right to bear arms is that the second amendment needs to be interpreted in the context of the time in which it was written. Anti-gunners claim that the Bill of Rights was written with the idea of maintaining a militia against foreign forces (i.e. the British during the American Revolution) and not with giving individuals the right to own firearms for personal defense.
Anti-gunners also argue that we (people who favor gun rights) cannot claim that the second amendment could be about individual rights or personal protection since we could never really know what the people who wrote the Bill of Rights were thinking at the time.
Perhaps Thomas Jefferson disagreed when he borrowed a quote from the 1700's criminologist Cesare Beccaria: "The laws that forbid the carrying of arms .... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
So people were thinking of personal defense against criminals well before modern times. Fascinating......
