Lawyer ≠ English

While I'm ranting about lawyers, like Mark Smith, I need to sit back a bit and admit he's just a symptom.

The line that he and others like him are pushing is similar to the idea that only flintlock firearms are covered by the 2nd amendment because that's all they had in 1789.

How so?

I keep hearing them repeat the idea that it's just small arms, or man portable arms which are covered.  This falls from the "dangerous and unusual" idea that's falling from Bruen.

But if they weren't dangerous, they wouldn't be arms, would they?

Even if there was no gun control at all, there would be many arms that would be unusual simply from their price-tags.

If I could buy an M1A2 from the local Chrysler dealership, I couldn't afford the payments.

Even more so for an F-16.

So that makes it OK to ban expensive weapons?  Because hardly anyone can afford them?

Somehow I don't think that's really true.

Especially since arming merchant ships against pirates was a thing.

Arms is everything.

That's why that merchant ship with cannon is called an armed merchant.

The 2nd Amendment doesn't say "...the right of the people to keep and bear small-arms shall not be infringed."

That "small arms" includes the modifier "small" means it's a subcategory of the greater term "arms!"

All of the definitions for "arms" the lawyers are using have been made externally to the 2nd amendment and more than a century later.

It's an inversion to the idea of liberty that's saturated into the founder's writings.  The historical analog we should be looking at is the government has to prove why it gets to restrict something, not that the citizen has to prove that it shouldn't be.

The government has to prove that something I have decided is an arm is not, I don't have to prove that it is!  My rationale is supported by how free speech applies to the medium I am using this very moment to make this little diatribe.  It's not controversial that using a blog is free speech, despite there not being digital computers in 1789. 

That there are now arms, like nerve gas, that we really don't want ANYONE owning, means that we need to look to passing an amendment that says something like, "except NBC weapons."

Then there's the weapons that are only unusual because they have been banned.

An anti-gun judge even said something to the effect of needing to get regulation out ahead of advancements so they would be banned before they became commonly used.

Such is the case of machine guns, really.  A select fire AR doesn't contain thousands of dollars in extra parts compared to its more prosaic semi-auto counterpart. 

Aside:  Why aren't all pre-86 transferable MG's considered Curio & Relics?  One of the definitions is a firearm that's expensive because of its scarcity.

Can we now ban moveable type presses because they are no longer commonly used?  Can they be banned because they were never commonly used?

For that matter can the gigantic presses that a major newspaper uses be banned because of their unusually fast rate of printing and very small number?

It's all the same.

But none of these lawyers would entertain the 1st amendment analogs because they are absurd; yet it's OK for entire circuits to ban an NFA item out of fear that we'd get a bad ruling from SCOTUS.

SCOTUS can be wrong.  Roe v Wade was bad law for decades, but it did eventually get rectified.  We're ever so slowly undoing the Slaughterhouse decision.

Knowing you will lose a battle is no reason to stop fighting!

But never say that losing the battle is a good outcome.

Losing battles is how you lose wars and you shouldn't be happy about it.