Costas, Whitlock and gun control

No, you didn't. But, you'd like to ban 'em, right?

 

Again: Argument is fine as it goes.

But it is not an originalist stance.

It is a Living Constitution stance.

An activist one, in other words.

 

Show your work.

 

" . . . then William Boeing and his descendants perfected the AH-64 helicopter gunship and rendered my old-timey epigram moot."

 

That is just incomplete, at best. The founders were equally concerned with homegrown tyranny, and an armed population is a good check against it. The fact that so many mock the idea that this government could be tyrannical shows what a good job guns have done, frankly.

 

People would freak out at losing their guns. Freak out.

 

Irrelevant.

Again: The citizen militias of the Second Amendment existed because transportation and communication technology of the time period, along with uncertain centralized federal government power, made them necessary to defend the homeland because we didn't have a centralized armed forces like now.

The Second Amendment - the origanal Second Amendment - is an anachronism. The world it was created for does not exist now.

 

Not the purpose of the Second Amendment.

 

For what it's worth, President Obama, who used to teach Constitutional Law, disagrees with you. So does Alan Dershowitz and (of course) 5 current members of the Supreme Court. The first sentence of the 2nd Amendment is a reason, not a limitation.

 

The Bahrain Air Force flies F-16s. If Bahrain wants to put down an insurrection of people toting AK-47s, it will do so in an afternoon. It will also do it with our help since it's our Persian Gulf naval outpost.

Unless every family in China in 1989 had a T-69 or T-85 tank of their own - of which the government had many tens of thousands even back then - I'm not optimistic about their chances to resist the crackdown.

 

Great Britain was the Central Government.

And, yes, the writers of the Constitution did not envision large, well equipped, standing armies -- especially in "Peace Time".

But, militias were intended to preserve liberties.

The Constitution is about preserving rights from our government. Hell, if we trusted our own government so much, why is the Third Amendment necessary? And, who would it fall upon to preserve our Third Amendment rights if they were violated, and the Courts were unable to do so?

 

Disagree.

Then they are all wrong.