Summations Only

No, it means "organized", orderly.Theodoric, your interpretation makes no sense. The US already has a military for domestic defense, because that power is granted to the Executive in Article 2, Clause 1. It makes no sense for the framers to have gone back and added a redundant Amendment stipulating something that would be obvious - that the nation's military should be armed. Of course it would be, that's inherent in the idea of military.So clearly the Second Amendment can't be referring to the government's armed forces. The Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to keep and bear arms - that there's an individual right not to have the government disarm the people - because of the people's interest in assembling to oppose, by force, the enemies of a free state if need be. That's not even historically accurate, and that's hardly the interpretation you expect to apply to the rest of the Bill of Rights. Or do you believe that the First Amendment doesn't apply to the TV news simply because there was no such thing as TV in 1776? The intent of the Second Amendment was that the populace shall not be disarmed by the government. It's not a protection of the right to hunt or the right to self-defense; it's a defense of the right to pose a credible resistance to armies.

It's true that when people lie right to my face, I've had to become fairly creative about how I call them on it. As always, however, people can avoid the accusation of being dishonest by being honest.

The National Guard evolved out of state armies, and the Federal armed forces were prohibited from internal action only by the Posse Comitatus Act signed after the Civil War. Sure, but that really doesn't contradict me because you're missing my point. Again the point of the Second Amendment is not to establish a militia, but to prevent the government from disarming the people. Like every Amendment of the Bill of Rights, it limits the power of the Federal government. It's fundamentally ahistorical to suggest that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to reserve arms only to the military. That's absurd - the military doesn't need a Constitutional amendment to be armed, that's implied in the notion of being the military. You're promoting an interpretation of the Second Amendment that makes no sense; if it meant what you say it meant, then there was no reason to write it.The Second Amendment preserves an individual right to keep and bear arms and enjoins the government from broadly disarming the general populace. That's been supported by 200 years of jurisprudence.

The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to limit the power of the Federal government. Specifically, the Second Amendment limits the power of the Federal government to disarm the people of the United States. That's abundant in the writings of the Framers and its supported by 200 years of jurisprudence. But there's no need to affirm that, because it's redundant. Militaries are armed, by definition. If you're in the Army, that implies the "right" to bear whatever arms they see fit to arm you with. There would be no need for the Second Amendment to have been written. Sure. Have you just not opened a newspaper in the past seven years? For 200 years - including last month, in Federal appeals court - the Second Amendment has been interpreted as implying an individual right to keep and bear arms as a private citizen. But you're the one making the wacky originalist argument that the original intent was to remind people that armies get to be armed. But that's stupid. Breech-loading rifles and cartridge ammunition were contemporary with the Revolutionary War and known to the Framers (since the British had been using both.) But as usual you're so certain in your correctness you've not bothered to do even basic research.

So was I. I was specifically referring to the countries we've invaded, the native populations of which have held us at bay with the exact weapons - automatic and semi-automatic rifles - currently under discussion. It's worth noting, it seems to me, that the rate of firearms ownership in Iraq is roughly the same as it is in the US. I'll make whatever arguments I feel support my point, Theodoric. You're not in a position to dictate the terms of discussion, whatever you may believe. Fun fact:

quote:

---

The main producer of self-cocking top-hammer pepperboxes (mostly referred to as "bar-hammer pepperbox") in the USA was Ethan Allen, but this type of weapon was also produced in very large quantities in England.

---

Oh, actually, not so fun:

quote:

---

Ethan Allen (September 2, 1808—1871) was a major American arms maker from Massachusetts. He is believed to be unrelated to the revolutionary Ethan Allen.

---

Still, though. Sure, I'm not going to be able to show you a box-magazine short-recoil semi-auto handgun from the Revolutionary War, since those weapons weren't invented until 1909 or so. But firearms technology was growing even during the Revolutionary War, and there's absolutely no notion in any writing of the Founders that they envisioned a Second Amendment that applied only to the specific firearms technology that existed at the time. That would have been completely at odds with their conception of the Constitution as a document for the future of the country, a document meant to grow and expand along with a growing and expanding nation.And yes, I do believe that repeal of the Second Amendment is permissible as part of that flexibility. But deprecating a major American right isn't something that should be done glibly. It's not even clear that it would help - even if you repealed the Second Amendment, 44 of 50 state constitutions preserve an explicit right to bear arms; even if all such constitutions were amended, the Fourth Amendment prohibits the widespread confiscation of anything from those not convicted of crime.

It doesn't say "cannons" because cannons are not arms, they're artillery; you can't bear a cannon."Keep and bear arms" is about individual arms (cannons require a group to fire.) "Well-regulated" implies orderly arms, specifically (per United States v. Miller) those that have "some reasonable relationship to any preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia", that could be used as part of "the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense." In other words it is specifically accurate, precise military-style firearms the Second Amendment protects - not explosives, inaccurate bullet-hoses, or weapons of mass (and indiscriminate) destruction. Obviously not, but the Second Amendment doesn't protect bazookas. But it does protect semi-automatic rifles and handguns specifically because they're appropriate for individual military use. Yes, that's exactly right - not for hunting, not for self-defense, but so that there's a broad base of armed adults - with their own guns - you can muster for the civil defense.

No, examples exist from the beginning of the 18th century and even earlier. As well, there are dozens of examples of multi-barreled rifles from the same time period - combining several barrels into a single stock was an almost immediate innovation in firearms. I've seen a number of such weapons in museums.So it's hardly the case that the concept of a multi-shot weapon was foreign to the framers of the Second Amendment. I don't know how you prove what someone now dead wasn't able to conceive of, but I'm pretty sure you can't do it by falsely asserting the non-existence of things that did, actually, exist at the time.And it's easy to grab handfuls of tech that the Founding fathers might not have thought of, like the xerox machine or desktop publishing - but then again, Thomas Jefferson invented a device that made four copies of a letter as you wrote it. So many things we now have that seem inconceivable to the 18th-century mind are really just refinements of technologies and modalities that they already had. Jefferson might not have understood how the xerox machine works but he would have had no trouble understanding what it did; but is that much different than how you understand the xerox machine? No one is stopping it. You simply have to pass an amendment to repeal the Second Amendment, and then amend 44 individual state constitutions, and then you can pass whatever laws you like (that are consistent with the rest of the Constitution.)Believe it or not, though, the things you want to do are not so obvious that they have universal consensus. You're going to have to be far more convincing than you have been if you expect to pass 45 individual amendments.

Self-defense. When seconds count, you need the gun to fire as soon as you pull the trigger, not after several seconds or minutes of tedious loading. "Freeze, buster! Oh, wait, hang on a second, now where did I put that powder horn..." The Bushmaster .223 is a hunting rifle.

There's no such thing as "ammo for assault-type weapons" because there's no such thing as an "assault-type weapon" - any firearm can be used to assault someone - and they don't use special ammo..223 caliber, for instance, is a hunting round. 9mm Parabellum is a target-shooting round. Hollow-point bullets are meant for the range since they don't penetrate - but it's precisely because they don't penetrate, but deliver all of their kinetic energy to the target, that they can be so lethal. There's no such thing as a "safe" bullet to be shot with; there was nothing particularly lethal about the firearms used in any of these mass shootings beyond their high capacity magazines (the restriction of which I support, perhaps along with a California-style "bullet button" requirement than magazines be detatchable from semiautomatic weapons only by use of a special tool.)

Indeed they won't get any shot off faster than a revolver; revolvers have the highest rate of fire of any firearm. All of the records for fastest rate of fire of conventional firearms (as distinguished from high-tech "caseless" autofire weapons) are set with revolvers.You seemingly know nothing about guns. "Semi-auto" doesn't refer to the number of rounds held in the firearm; it refers to the action of the firearm, and whether the weapon uses the recoil energy of the shot to cycle the action and load the next round. It's not a reference to how fast the weapon can be fired or how many rounds it can hold. You seemingly know nothing about guns. That's exactly wrong. The Bushmaster .223 is, of course, a variant of the AR-15 modular receiver concept; that design grew out of the AR-10, which was originally designed as a lightweight "survival rifle" - a modular weapon in a lightweight caliber that could be disassembled and stored as part of a survival kit. In other words it was a hunting weapon. The AR-15 variant adapted the technology to meet the requirements of the Army program to replace the M1 Garand, itself originally a hunting rifle chambered for .30-06.You seemingly know nothing about guns. The Bushmaster .223 is accurate to within 2" at 300 yards, using the right ammo, accessories, and barrel. Semiauto rifles are more accurate than bolt-action ones because the recoil energy is absorbed and used. And it's worth pointing out that almost all of the accessories that increase accuracy - optical scopes, energy-absorbing stocks, balancing counterweights - are precisely the accessories that make these weapons look "military." One is left with the impression that gun foes think that weapons would be safer if they were made more inaccurate.

As CS has noted in the past, the legal definition of "assault weapons" in the assault weapons ban was so legally incoherent that it succeeded in functionally banning approximately zero weapons. Most weapons interdicted under the assault weapons ban were simply re-released with alternate cosmetics. Also, as my pro-gun friend constantly reminds me, the Federal assault weapons ban was associated with an increase in gun deaths.

There's no ammunition that won't kill and wound humans. Any ammunition designed for hunting - to cleanly kill animals up to and including moose, bears, and other large mammals - is necessarily going to have features that improve lethality towards humans. We're talking about pieces of metal flying out of guns at high speed, here. There's not going to be a way to have them do so in a way that is lethal to deer but safe for humans. No, you have it backwards. The 5.56mm is the militarized version of the Remington .223. All bullets are designed to inflict wounds. So they'd kill just as many people with different types of arms, chambered for different rounds. I don't understand your obsession with the caliber of round fired; is it your misapprehension that the Sandy Hook shooter would have killed less children if he had been forced to fire .30-06, instead?

I don't believe the Bushmaster .223 has a bayonet lug, but if it did, it wasn't essential to the function of the weapon as a semi-automatic rifle in .223 caliber. The Sandy Hook shooter didn't kill even a single child with a bayonet or it's lug. So how would it have helped if he had been required to use weapons without bayonet lugs? I don't understand why you think shooting a person is such a unique engineering challenge that a gun meant to kill a person must be somehow functionally distinct from a gun meant to kill something else. Generally the engineering focus of the design of a firearm is about safety, accuracy, shooter comfort, and reliability in various environments and usage scenarios. Militaries test a wide variety of firearms when they decide to equip their soldiers, but they don't test them by how many people they can kill with them. They assess firearms based on their safety, accuracy, versatility, and reliability under stress conditions. That's what makes a gun a "military" gun - being safe, being accurate, being versatile, and being reliable. I don't understand the perspective that says that we'd all be safer if civilians were allowed only to own guns that were inaccurate and unreliable. That seems a lot worse.

A clip can also hold less rounds than a revolver. "Clips", or magazines, aren't limited to semi-automatic weapons and they don't define that category of weapons. Many bolt-action rifles are magazine-fed, for instance. A trained individual can cycle the bolt of such a rifle quite quickly. Yes. They were testing a lightweight caliber aluminum survival rifle based on modular components attached to a central receiver, based on a rotating-bolt gas-actuated design. In other words, the exact design of the AR-15. Every M-16-type rifle is based on that design. That's the "DNA" of the rifle, in other words, and it inherits directly from the original survival rifle. No, it's the truth. Because you don't understand how guns work, you don't understand how they're designed. As a result, you don't know how to recognize how those designs developed. For instance, your completely inaccurate presentation of the history of the M-16/AR-15. Maybe you're just a bad shot. Why should I believe you about these figures?

You're free to do so, but again - lawmaking is about building consensus, so you'll have to present a more compelling argument than just your assertion that the same law that failed in the past will succeed in the future. Mexico needs to solve its own problems, they have no representation in the US Congress.