[philipkglass]

I don't think that any American civilians own a working MANPADS, regardless of willingness to undergo background checks or pay for tax stamps. And that's explicitly designed for a single infantryman. I'm not well versed in the constitutional law but there seems to be a principle that extremely dangerous weapons will not be owned by civilians in the US, regardless of historical precedents, textualism, originalism, or any other contrary principles.

I'm also curious about the constitutional ramifications of the ban on civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after 1986. Could any class of small arms be gradually banned by specifying a date of manufacture cutoff for legality in a similar way? Seems contrary to a plain reading of the 2a to phase out weapons this way but I know that my layman's plain reading is worth very little here.