| The 2nd amendment says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." [0] My understanding is that it is up to the courts (ultimately the US Supreme Court) to interpret the Constitution, and define things like "Arms", "security", etc.. > I can’t own a nuclear weapon Careful what you wish for. If personal nuclear weapons ever become a thing, they too may be "Arms" "necessary to the security of a free State". It is hard to understand some rulings of the Supreme Court. At the time of writing the 2nd Amendment (December 15, 1791), the accepted "Arm" was a musket, with a muzzle velocity between 1425 fps (434 m/s) and 1700 fps (518 m/s) with a ¾” (19.05 mm) diameter ball (. 640 caliber), and an approximate weight of .9 oz (25.5 g) [1]. Today the court accepts that an ArmaLite AR-15 is an "Arm", with a muzzle velocity of 3,300 ft/s (1,006 m/s) using a .223 Remington cartridge with a 55 g FMJ bullet [2]. The momentum of the AR-15 round is therefore approx 55,330 gm/s compared to 13,209 gm/s for the musket ball (ie more than 4 times greater). Too many American shooters make the mistake of thinking these modern "lightweight" weapons translate into less lethality, but it is the increased momentum from higher muzzle velocities that does the devastating damage to soft tissue and bone. Take a look at the X-ray of a leg showing a bullet wound delivered by an assault rifle used in combat compared to an X-ray of a leg that sustained a bullet wound from a low-energy bullet, inflicted by a weapon like a handgun in Philadelphia. [3]. The trauma surgeons of the 19 children killed in the Robb Elementary massacre reported "They were so pulverized, he said, that they could be identified only by their clothing." [4] [0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/ [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2019.16... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Remington [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/health/parkland-shooting-... [4] https://khn.org/news/article/trauma-surgeons-uvalde-mass-sho... |
Why is it that political philosophy that hates constitutional originalism in every other case wants to try and selectively apply some weird quasi-originalist argument not to the amendment itself but to two individual words within it?
If the amendment was written before muskets were common would you argue in only applied to swords, bows, slings, and catapults? The amendment is about providing the populace with a mechanism to keep tyranny in check, its not about caliber and projectile ft/s.