Do you think that guns weren’t capable of killing children when the Constitution was written? That the ability to kill children with a gun is a recent technological development unforeseen by our forefathers?
orly?
Maybe children back then had a 1938 Superman level of invulnerability so the whole thing just never came up when they were drafting the Constitution?
Well…intent of the framers…I don’t think the Second Amendment was intended to apply to large-scale weapons systems. Privateers, for instance, couldn’t operate without a letter of marque. It wasn’t unknown for people to own small sloops-of-war, but this wasn’t what the 2nd was written to cover. So, today, if I wanted to set up a small SAM battery on my back forty, it probably wouldn’t be permitted.
Doing a quick Google search, I found the following; I haven’t read it entirely, but it seems cogent, calm, and properly documented.
When the constitution was written, guns that could kill A CHILD existed–maybe two, if you were trained well enough to reload a musket in under 20 second before they all scattered.
Guns that could allow an untrained mentally disturbed man to kill a class full of children, however, certainly did not exist.
Considering schools were fairly rare and one room when they existed, I’m fairly certain a crazed farmer with a bayonet attached musket could easily kill a whole class of people. Not like schools back then were built with redundant emergency exits and places to hide.
That being said, this emphasis on “what technology was available back when” is irrelevant. The Founders did not want the Federal government to prohibit firearms ownership, but they cared fuck all if the States did. Mind the Founders did not intend the Bill of Rights to constrain State governments at all, and most of these issues we quibble over as constitutional issues the Founders would have considered State legislative issues outside the scope of what the Federal legislature should even be dealing with. Under the original Constitution + BOR the SCOTUS never would have ruled any local gun bans were unconstitutional, for example, because the Second Amendment didn’t even apply to the States until after the 14th Amendment (and then only in theory, it wasn’t until the 20th century any real rulings even touching on the Second Amendment were made and not until Heller the individual rights aspect was addressed.)
They did - cannister shot for cannon was (still is) pretty darn deadly. So were exploding shells for howitzers, proto-gatling guns, grenades…
I doubt a great many individual citizen possessed any of those back then, however.
ETA: that being said, I’d agree with **Bricker **& Martin Hyde on this: it doesn’t matter whether a given specific tech was or wasn’t available back then. The Constitution+BOR are looked upon for general ideas & concepts, not details. Speech is speech even if blogs are a new thing.
The Founder’s only even need to be talked about if we’re obsessed with the 2nd Amendment, I think I’ve made a clear cut case the scant SCOTUS rulings we have touching on 2nd Amendment issues more than empower the legislature to pass pretty much any gun regulations we’d realistically ever need.
If you want to ban all guns or even a class of guns, you may be out of luck, but I’ve seen little evidence that is a necessary step to have good gun control. A lot of countries with historically authoritarian governments and no historical private gun ownership have complete gun bans, then a bunch of countries have regulated gun ownership, then the U.S. has almost unregulated gun ownership. But almost no countries that allow some guns ban “all handguns” or “all semiautomatics.” Even in the UK I can buy a pistol, so the few areas the Second Amendment would constrain gun control are areas we don’t really need to get into to have effective gun control laws.
When it was written they didn’t intend for us to use muskets to fight tyranny in the future. Every time there’s talk of limiting the 2nd amendment it stimulates gun sales.
If the school system was prepared to deal with a deranged person then that would cover a variety of situations and not just those involving guns.
If you mean, doesn’t the Second Amendment technically forbid any federal firearms laws, I once asked that same question. The answer is that it’s been held to be authorized by the Interstate Commerce Clause. The federal government asserts a compelling interest in monitoring the movement of these weapons across state lines, their current location and possession, and passed a stamp tax on them (which at the time the government swore blue in the face was merely a revenue generating device, not in any way meant to be prohibitory :rolleyes:)
This is a bit tongue in cheek of course but y’all should know that my prototype death ray rifle is nearing completion.
It can vaporize entire buildings (including schools) on a pair of D cells without requiring a recharge and weighs only 10 lbs.
Can I manufacture and distribute these and sell them in gun stores?
It doesn’t spit out a rapid series of projectiles, does it? Instead it emanates some kind of beam or field? Like a floodlight? And that beam can, say, kill weeds or remove old, flaking paint? Along with the underlying walls, perhaps killing the termites too? So it isn’t a rifle at all.
It belongs in a home improvement store. On an end cap, right next to the battery display. 
I think this is where people get the slippery slope argument from.
To hear some tell it, we just need THIS legislation and we will promise not to go further, then you come along and propose further.
Frank Herbert wrote a short sci-fi story that resembles this. In the story, the protagonist explained, in fine technical detail, how to make such a device…on live broadcast tv. The secret is now out; pretty much anybody can make one. “It could cut the earth in half like a ripe tomato.” Will humanity survive, or will some cluck try it out?
I’m betting he (and you) have just destroyed advanced human civilization. See ya in the new bronze age…
Obviously at some level of deadliness we would have to reevaluate allowing such weapons (I wouldn’t trust army soldiers with your hypothetical). And your point presumably is that we have already reached that point. But if that’s the case I have to ask why we haven’t already banned semi-automatic guns, which have existed since the 1890s. Why weren’t people clamoring for their abolition back in the 1950s or '40 or '30s, or so forth? Why are they such an intolerable threat NOW more than at any time in the last century?
It’s beyond you?
All sorts of First Amendment issues have cropped up since the inventions of the printing press, telephone, film and internet.
The reason the argument rears its ugly head is because the founding fathers couldn’t conceive of individual weapons that could be used to single-handedly take out an entire Revolutionary War era company of soldiers.
What is beyond me is this right wing aversion to ANY sort of sensible control or restriction on who can own and carry any sort of weapon. You need a special license to drive a truck. Why not one to own a machinegun?
Speaking of which. How does that Russian guy from the Call of Duty commercial get his hands on a minigun?
If a machinegun license was any where close to as easy to get as a truck driver’s license I don’t think the right wing would have a problem with it.
I’ll second that. Where do I sign up?
Presumably the same way anyone else would, by buying it from a Class III dealer. A better question is how does he get the money? (Though I don’t think he personally owns everything he shoots in those videos.)
Is this a gotcha question? Such a weapon would be more comparable to an RPG then it would an “assault” rifle. You wouldn’t use it to go hunting. You wouldn’t use it to defend your home either, just like you wouldn’t use a nuke to fight off an intruder in the night. So my guess is that it wouldn’t be legal to sell them, just like you can’t sell RPGs in your local gun stores.