Actually, the Biblical idea was that potentially, every man of Israel was able to defend his family, and was part of the army. There were various exemptions (like the guy who just got married within the last year), but in general they were expected to know how to use and own their own spear (not as much skill), the sword (more skill and expense), the bow, or the sling (the highly feared and super-deadly weapon of the tribe of Benjamin).
Greece and Rome started out with very similar systems.
Most European Christian countries where there were freemen (as opposed to serfs) expected every free man to be able to serve in the army in time of war, and to do some sort of weapons training. Often people trained together as a militia.
England is a specialized case, because for most of its history, most of its people weren’t freemen; and most of the people weren’t allowed to legally hunt, even if they were freemen. Among the Saxons, pretty much all free men fought, and even thralls could hunt. Among the Normans, only nobles were allowed to bear weapons or hunt. (Although serfs got pretty good with “oh, yeah, this quarterstaff is just a walking stick,” and poaching and snaring was always a thing.)
When the English kings figured out that they needed huge numbers of longbowmen to counter the gigantic chivalric cavalry and foot troops found in the rest of Europe, suddenly every ablebodied man below the nobility had to practice longbow. And because they had all these well-armed peasants and serfs, suddenly peasants got a lot better deal.
There were a ton of revolts and civil wars in English history. The way Parliament and the new kings tried to stop it was disarming everybody and stopping hunting again. Except for the nobles or the rich, of course. Later on, there were exceptions made for veterans and wartime conditions in WWI and WWII. But after that, the clamps went back on with a vengeance. The big difference was that the Labor party et al. also wanted to disarm the nobles and the rich, and thus pretended that only la-di-dah people had weaponry to take away.
This is also representative of gun and sword control in historical Japan and China. Whenever the government wishes to ignore the rights and wishes of the governed, the first thing they do is disarm the common people and arm some trusted group. (And the common people generally react by inventing “invisible” weaponry that gives them plausible deniability, or by making unarmed martial arts more violent and effective, or just by plain old guerrilla warfare.) For extra fun, you give the trusted group no money but the right to kill the common people whenever they want, so the trusted group can never team up with the common people.
Meanwhile, because the whole point of the US was being freemen and not serfs, the US took the opposite take to prevent civil wars and revolts – everybody is part of the militia and everybody can have guns and hunt. Disarmament was something visited upon black slaves, in the past, or criminals and madmen in the present.
And finally, cars and trucks kill a lot more people than guns do. But nobody runs a homicidal looniness test on people going for drivers’ licenses, even in Europe.
