Since Bruen, lower court judges applying its test have been, to use a legal term of art, all over the place, a fact repeatedly highlighted during oral arguments by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sought some, any, guidance on how the court should understand its own ruling. Again, lower courts are equally confused. One court, for example, decided that Florida’s ban on the sale of guns to 18-to-20-year-olds passed constitutional muster; another concluded that a federal law disarming people convicted of certain crimes perhaps did not.
A few judges have publicly aired their frustrations with the sudden analytical primacy of law-office history. “We are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” wrote one in 2022. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” Another castigated the court for creating a game of “historical Where’s Waldo” that entails “mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.”
Just goes to show how shitty, stupid, and partisan this Trump Supreme Court is.
One thing the court refused to realize is that the founding fathers of 1791 didn't consider advancements in modern weaponry when writing the Constitution is because those advanced weapons didn't fucking exist. People generally don't write laws about things that don't exist. Go back in time and put an AR 15 in the hands of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and see if they still believe that that weapon should be in the hands of ordinary citizens.
It would be like trying to use the Constitution as a basis to see how we should handle the immigration rights of space aliens from Jupiter.
And I never did understand why we have to rely on the practices of the 18th century to make rulings about 21st century society. Even the founding fathers knew that the Constitution would have to change over time as society advanced. In fact, they themselves did it 10 times. It's what amendments are for.
I don't see a good reason for originalism. It seems stupid to me.
This is a false trope that always gets brought out in the gun control arguments.
There were actually magazine-fed repeating rifles in the era of the founding of the USA. In 1779 the Girandoni air rifle was produced, which was carried by Lewis & Clark on their expedition across the frontier. It was a repeating rifle that could fire at least 19 times and was as powerful as a 9mm handgun cartridge from modern times, but more accurate up to 300 yards.
There was also the Puckle gun (machine gun) and the Gatling gun is pretty old too.
So to claim that the authors of the Constitution had "no idea" about how advanced guns could get is obviously false.
You grab those, I'll grab an AR-15. Let's see who wins.
The idea that even the most advanced guns of the 1790s would even be in the same league as even the most basic semi-automatic rifle of today is preposterous. You know how many bullets an AR-15 is going to fire off before the Girandoni gets off anywhere close to 19 shots? And after that, let's compare bullet damage. A Girandoni kills people. An AR-15 leaves people as little more than a bloody splattermark where they once stood.
And how many people had access to these advanced weapons in an era before modern industrialization was a thing?
My point stands. There is no possible way the founding fathers had any idea about the weapons that exist today, nor could they possibly have planned for it. Just like the Constitution gives no guidance on how to handle things like flying, colonizing the moon, nuclear weapons, or a host of other things that simply did not exist at the time.
You obviously don't know very much about what you're talking about, so I'm not going to keep wasting my time on this discussion.
Regardless of your ignorant opinions, there is nothing you can do about the fact that those guns are legal and American citizens have the right to own them. There's zero chance the 2nd Amendment will be repealed, and our Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the right to bear arms is an individual right unconnected to military service.
Since homicides by firearm are not even in the top 10 most common causes of death in the USA, it would be more helpful to focus on the other issues that Americans have like access to affordable healthcare and housing. We're not giving up the guns, so you should move on.
As long as innocent schoolchildren are being murdered in cold blood by people who should not have access to guns we won’t stop.
Americans are the only ones with this problem, and we’re also the only ones with this lax of gun control. There’s a pretty strong correlation here.
I don’t care about your right to own firearms if it impedes the right to life for children.
I think it's pretty safe to ignore this troll at this point.
He almost, kinda-sorta started off with a semi-legitimate argument, then went off track, and is now just rubbing in a mix of GOP rhetoric and childish taunts.
Well you don't have to care about our rights but they will remain intact because there's still nothing you can do about it.
But you should care about our rights, because rights are not something that is easy to obtain. You know they're not just handing out new rights on the regular.
I simply do not give a shit. Your right to a gun is infinitely less important than the right to life. You’ll live without your guns. You don’t need them for your day to day life. You carry them because you’re scared of the world.
I support the removal of every gun in civilian hands and bans on manufacturing of new ones. There should not be any way for guns to be widely available to a populace that has consistently proved over the last 20 years that they are incapable of using and maintaining them safely.
Well tough shit, because that's just a useless fantasy. Won't happen in the lifetime of anyone who reads any of this.
Oh Lord I do not want to insert myself in this conversation but… I'm curious about the death stats.
Far and away the most common causes of death are disease based - and most are chronic conditions like heart disease or diabetes. You have to get well down the list before things like suicide appear. But suicide appears as a category, not disaggregated by cause (overdose, asphyxiation etc.). The same is true for homicide etc. To get the numbers you reference you'd have to disaggregate the categorical data and then re-aggregate by method.
Do you know of such a data source?
The Puckle gun had been invented but it was never in wide use or used in war. There is only good evidence for 2 of them to have ever been built. It was also basically nothing like what we would call a machine gun now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puckle_gun
The Gatling gun was invented in 1861 and first saw wide use during the American Civil War. (Approx 4 score and 7 years after the Revolutionary War.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun
The Girandoni air rifle was invented and used shortly after the revolution and the founders likely would have been aware of it but it is an air gun not an automatic or semi-automatic rifle. The air tank was good for about 30 rounds but filling the air tank required pumping the hand pump about 1,500 times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girardoni_air_rifle
In terms of the advancement of firearms technology here's something to consider. While both breach loading and rifling were crudely implemented much earlier it wasn't until America's westward expansion in the mid 19th century that they came into their modern forms and became standard features on batch produced weapons.
Gatling gun wasn't a good example, but to rectify that mistake here is an actual machine gun from earlier:
The Chambers Flintlock Pattern Gun is also not equivalent to a modern machine gun. Modern machine guns are recoil driven meaning they use the recoil from the last shot to fire the next. Pattern guns chain charges with a projectile between each charge. Once you start firing a pattern gun it doesn't stop until there is no more ammunition. This was a ship mounted gun that couldn't be reloaded quickly enough to be used more than once per battle. There were pistol and musket versions created but their capacity scaled down with their size. The ship mounted version is the only one that saw wide manufacturing and use because the single burst slow reloading gun was less effective than the faster reloading more accurate muzzleloader musket.
How long did it take to load? How portable was it? How easy was it to set it up and mow down a bunch of unsuspecting civilians before anyone had a chance to respond?
It could fire 19 times you say… Well then, let's pass out the heavy firearms!
While the detachable air reservoir could take around 30 shots, it took nearly 1,500 strokes of a hand pump to fill those reservoirs. So, no, your example is not correct, as it would take nearly 40 minutes to pump it up to be able to shoot like that.
Nope it's perfectly correct, as humans have access to preparation time before they choose to do things. A rifleman with the Girardoni rifle could simply carry extra reservoirs of pre-compressed air and be able to swap out as needed. The air reservoir was built with a check valve that allowed it to be removed while maintaining pressure.