Constitution Locks in Right to Bear Antiques

Good Sunday morning, Friends,

What would the founding fathers recognize if they were able to travel in time to the United States of 2016?

Let's talk about what they wouldn't recognize. First of all, they wouldn't recognize Washington, D.C. The original capital of the United States was New York City. But beyond that, they wouldn't recognize anything that was invented after 1830.

We'd probably have a hard time surviving in their world. There were no cars, trains, telephones, electricity, photographs, paved roads, or indoor plumbing. The only things flying above were birds. And high-powered assault weapons were beyond the scope of anyone's imagination.

I had an inkling to exercise my Second Amendment right to buy a musket the
other day, so I went to the local Wal-Mart. Here's what I wound up with!

Let's take a look at what "arms" were when our founders, in their not-so-infinite wisdom of what the future would look like, wrote the right to bear arms into our Bill of Rights.

In 1776, personal firearms consisted of inaccurate single-shot muzzle-loaded muskets. They took up to 30 seconds to reload and were only effective when used in conjunction with a lot of other people shooting single-shot muskets. Oh, there were also single-shot pistols, but they were equally clunky.

Although firearms had been around since the 13th century, they hadn't changed all that much in 500 years. There was no reason to assume they would.

Muskets were not that deadly, unless you were at close range and really knew what you were doing.

Firearms were what they were and would always be to our founding fathers. It's no wonder the Second Amendment didn't carry the ominous implications then that it does today. 

In the 1800's, the United States seriously considered closing its patent office because everything that could be invented already had been.

The point is, the Second Amendment was written before the simplest of things, like flush toilets, were well beyond the collective body of knowledge. The right to bear arms had a completely different meaning than it does today.

When the amendment was ratified in 1791, it would have been impossible to stage a massacre with any single firearm of the day.

I'm all for the right to bear reasonable arms. A pistol for personal protection or genuine hunting rifles have a place in our society.

Rapid-fire human assault weapons that rattle off magazines of 30 armor-piercing bullets in a matter of seconds and can be bought at the local Wal-Mart have no place,

A vote on several common-sense gun control issues comes up tomorrow in the U.S. Senate, spurred by the Orlando massacre and a subsequent Democratic filibuster.

They include creating a three-day waiting period for suspected terrorists on the FBI's no-fly list to legally buy guns,

I'm afraid that even this small step will go down to defeat at the hands of the NRA tools in the Republican party.

With Donald Trump demagoguing the Second Amendment to rile up his followers, we stand little chance of seeing any changes.

Perhaps when every single family in the United States has been touched by gun violence, we'll have the spine to bring the Second Amendment up to contemporary standards.