Yes! Someone else who knows the Puckle gun! That should seal the deal.
The Founding Fathers loved new gun technology, including the repeating air rifle which Lewis and Clarke took on their historic expedition through the Louisiana Purchase. They were obviously aware that new arms tech would constantly be developed; yet they did not forbid the people from acquiring them at all. Instead, they expected the people to be updated with the latest and the greatest.
I have a condition that leads people astray. Whenever a legal argument comes up, I tend to explore how the other side would argue against my opinion, and then then talk about that. A lot of the time, it’s because I want to show the weakness in their argument, bring awareness, or because I’m hoping someone will offer a rebuttal I haven’t thought of yet.
With that in mind, I believe private citizens should have access to everything the government has access to. Nukes included, subject to regulation similar to fire prevention laws about powder storage from the colonial era. The opposition opposes machineguns, I believe, because of movies and false elevation of government as somehow more trustworthy and responsible than citizens.
Mark Smith also believes that machineguns should be unregulated, but that with the current makeup of the courts, SCOTUS included, that goal is unrealistic. If a machinegun case made it to SCOTUS today, that would likely set terrible precedent which would harm other arms freedoms we still enjoy today. So he thinks it is in our interest to not let any machinegun case make it to the appellate division as of now; it is currently best for us to lose early at the district court level, where no binding negative precedent can be set.
Here is where I differ with Mark Smith. He thinks that machineguns are not “in common use” and therefore can legally be banned, because there were just under 190k of them in private hands as of 1986. By the Caetano SCOTUS precedent, stun guns were considered unbannable due to “common use” with about 200k of them in private hands around 2005 when Caetano was decided in our favor. Since under 190k is less than 200k, machineguns are less popular than stun guns and can be banned, according to him.
I say, we had a smaller national population in 1986 than 2005, and if we work out how common machineguns were per capita, we can actually find that machineguns then were more common than stun guns at Caetano. Therefore machineguns were at least as common as stun guns, and the ban on them is unconstitutional.
I also question why we have to say the limit equals the commonality of stun guns at Caetano. Setting the limit higher is obviously logically inconsistent, but the limit of commonality could easily be less than 200k. It is an arbitrary number.
Besides which, SCOTUS itself in Caetano has told us that 2A protects modern arms, like stun guns, which did not exist at the founding. There exist prototype, unique arms in development that are not common at all, yet are protected as well. Otherwise, no new arms could ever be lawfully invented. That’s a ridiculous idea to ascribe to the authors of the 2A, which plainly wanted an effective militia of the people, with arms comparable to and able to defeat any threat they might face, indefinitely into the future. Artificially limiting the arms of the citizen’s militia directly threatens the security of our free state. No practical arms technology should be off the table.
