Gun Control & RKBA
In reply to the discussion: Who's right about the second amendment: Piers Morgan or the gun rights advocate? [View all]TPaine7
(4,286 posts)Last edited Tue Dec 4, 2012, 09:28 PM - Edit history (1)
Not so, unless you include the fact that they were including reasonable descendants of known technologies as well, and even of unknown technologies.
REPEATING weapons were known in the founding era; Lewis and Clark carried a REPEATING weapon on their expedition. Also, any reasonably intelligent writer of a constitution assumes that terms like "freedom of the press" or "arms" will encompass more than the technology that exists when they write. I would think that that would necessarily include, for instance, the internet and stun guns.
They may not have intended "arms" to include things like nukes (or planet destroying molecular disruptors to imagine the future). They may not have intended "freedom of the press" to include a future technology that can impose thoughts on an unwilling mind. But surely they envisioned a natural evolution of arms and communication technology.
Updated: "REPEATING" was "semi-automatic."