[noonespecial]

America was made from violent revolution against tyranny, so as part of its 'DNA' (constitution) it includes a simple inoculation against that sort of tyranny in the future in the form of the right of private citizens to be armed.

It was technology that threw the founding fathers the unforeseen curve ball. What seemed like a simple question of allowing or disallowing private weapons was really an un-enumerated, technology restricted question of the form "should a private citizen have the means to deploy deadly force against 1 to 3 others".

Today we ask a different question. "How many other citizens should a private individual be allowed the power deploy deadly force against." Now the answer can be 0, 1, 5, a classroom, a neighborhood, even a small town. But the top end is getting higher every year.

The 2nd amendment is useless to us in answering this question. All that's left is haphazard whack-a-mole bans on emerging technologies.

The founding fathers didn't mean to give us a binary choice between total forced disarmament and allowing red-necks to have their own black-hawk helicopters.

Its time for an amendment.

[angersock]

Your history is wrong, and the killing power of your average citizen hasn't gone up significantly since the end of the 1920s. Look up the Bath school bombing in 1927-near double the casualties of the current tragedy.

Your interpretation is interesting, though.

Edit--Okay, say, the roaring 20s with the Thompson.

[noonespecial]

The 2nd amendment: 1791. The first practical automatic repeat firing weapons didn't show up until almost 100 years later and they still required a crew to operate. There was a touch of progress in that first 100 years.

I'm going to go ahead and make the weak point that bombings, poisonings, and sabotage are a slightly different animal than purpose build firearms and would likely be treated differently in the law. There is a huge element of luck to those attacks.

The crux of it is, that rampages last 5 to 10 minutes. This is probably going to be true whether the first responders are armed citizens or police. We're going to have to decide how many people we're going to allow a private citizen the capability of killing in that time. We're going to have to very explicitly choose or technology will choose "a whole damn lot" for us by default.

I'm thinking your point just indicates that we should have started addressing this long about the time Swing was King.