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Notes -
Why, though?
The Second Amendment was written by people who were accustomed to raising local militia to fight off, essentially, bandits running raids on otherwise-peaceful settlements. They had just fought a war for independence in which not only were freeholders with firearms instrumental, but also in which privately-owned merchant fleets (equipped with naval artillery and no strangers to fighting pirates) were donated to the cause. The difference between armaments used to fight wars, and armaments used to fend off everyday barbarism, was in those days essentially zero. The very idea of nation-states was relatively fledgling, and not understood in most of the world. If the Second Amendment is understood, as the entire Bill of Rights was intended to be understood, as a check on government power, then limiting people from possession of arms sufficient to fight, if necessary, a successful revolutionary war is clearly in violation of the Second Amendment.
Of course that's crazy, nobody (or close enough) wants a world where every billionaire fields a private army and the "family atomics" (a la Dune) become an important part of maintaining one's feudal inheritance. Weapons, war, and politics are so different now that enforcing the fairly clear original meaning of the Second Amendment would very likely be disastrous for all involved. Well, the Constitution is not inflexible, but the mechanism it has provided for change is the Amendment process. As a nation we've apparently decided that's simply not good enough, it's much easier to just persuade five of the nine oligarchs who rule the country in truth to patch things up by pretending there's some legitimate question as to what the Second Amendment could possibly really mean.
And like... maybe that's even for the best? But there's nothing democratic about it, and certainly nothing I would call "constitutional." It's pure ad hoccery, even though it is in many cases (like nukes) pretty obviously a good idea. But implementing what seem like good ideas because they are good ideas, rather than because they have met the previously-agreed-upon process for establishing new laws, is a departure from Rule of Law as an ideal ("and I'm tired of pretending it's not").
Right, I'm good with banning privately held nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. These are legitimate categories of new technologies that I think would be bad for individuals to hold. The way to do that is proposing an Amendment that bans privately held nuclear weapons, which one would think passes without all that much trouble. But no, we don't feel the need to do law in any coherent or legible fashion, we just trust that a group of ethically compromised lawyers know what's best and can rule accordingly.
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