[actsasbuffoon]

> What features do we want the firearms owned by law-abiding citizens to have?

Good question. I can’t imagine any legal use for a high capacity semiautomatic weapon with armor piercing bullets. A weapon like that is comically impractical for hunting or self defense.

Law abiding citizens should be able to get by with handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles. Clips with more than a dozen rounds should be banned, as should particularly deadly types af ammunition.

Either that or we could go back to doing it the way the framers of the constitution intended; make everything illegal except for muskets.

[AnimalMuppet]

That's not what the framers intended. They intended that the citizens have weapons sufficient for them to form a valid, militarily useful fighting force. And they knew what they were talking about; they had just found such fighting forces to be very useful in order to overthrow the government that existed at the time.

[actsasbuffoon]

What kind of firepower do you think would be necessary to win a fight the US government? I don't own any tanks, fighter jets, stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, and I don't have a military consisting of millions of highly trained, battle tested soldiers.

Me with an AR-15 versus the Marines is not going to end well for me.

[dragonwriter]

> I don't own any tanks, fighter jets, stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, and I don't have a military consisting of millions of highly trained, battle tested soldiers.

Note that the other side of the popular militia resting in the states protected by the 2nd Amendment is that that was supposed to be the foundation of national defense as well, not a large standing army. (Some standing army as a cadre and rapid reaction force was viewed as necessary, and the absence of one a failing of the pre-Constitutional system.)

[AnimalMuppet]

I said what the intent was. I was replying to your post that said

> I can’t imagine any legal use for a high capacity semiautomatic weapon with armor piercing bullets. A weapon like that is comically impractical for hunting or self defense.

I was pointing out that the point wasn't hunting, or even self defense. It was to form an effective fighting force, and semiautomatic (and even fully automatic) weapons and armor piercing bullets are very useful for that.

You replied, questioning whether such things could be effective today. That's a different question. It's a valid question, but it's a different question from the intent of the Second Amendment (and of what should therefore be legal).

And by the way, the militias, by themselves, were not enough to win the Revolutionary War...

[maxerickson]

Yes, we need to amend the Constitution if we expect restrictive gun laws to actually stick.

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, as actasabuffoon pointed out in a parallel post, there is an argument to be made that this wouldn't work very well in the modern setting. But yes, if we're going to change it, we need to amend the Constitution.

For example, the amendment could say that "militia" means the National Guard, and that is in fact supposed to be a significant fighting force, with military-grade weapons and people trained and ready to use them. And for personal use, people can have weapons sufficient for self-defense but not for mass murder.

But for that to happen, we've got to persuade 3/4 of the state that that's the correct answer. That's a pretty tall hill to climb...