{"id":69388,"date":"2021-06-30T12:16:27","date_gmt":"2021-06-30T17:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69388"},"modified":"2021-06-30T12:16:27","modified_gmt":"2021-06-30T17:16:27","slug":"69388","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69388","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Second Amendment will be Nullified if \u2018Common Use\u2019 is Restricted to \u2018Popularity\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Second Amendment protects modern weapons,\u201d Judge Roger T. Benitez observed in his landmark\u00a0Miller v. Bonta ruling<\/a><\/em>\u00a0striking down California\u2019s so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d ban. He was citing\u00a0Caetano v. Massachusetts<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>a 2016 United States Supreme Court decision vacating a woman\u2019s conviction for carrying a stun gun for self-defense.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Court has held that \u2018the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding,\u2019\u201d the High Court, citing the\u00a0Heller<\/em>\u00a0case, unanimously held. \u201cIn this case, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld a Massachusetts law prohibiting the possession of stun guns after examining \u2018whether a stun gun is the type of weapon contemplated by Congress in 1789 as being protected by the Second Amendment.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Aside from the obvious, no-nonsense assertions of Founding-era voices such as\u00a0Tench Coxe<\/a>\u00a0(\u201cevery terrible implement of the soldier\u201d) and\u00a0James Madison<\/a> (see \u201cmilitia\u201d observations in Federalist No. 46), it helps to understand another gun-grabber lie, that the Founders only had single-shot muskets and couldn\u2019t have imagined technological advancements leading to more lethal weaponry.<\/p>\n

Firearms technology from long before their time included Fourteenth Century multiple-barreled volley guns and a design by Leonardo DaVinci for a rotating triple-barrel breech-loading cannon. The Founding Era had already seen pepperbox revolvers, Kentucky\/Pennsylvania rifles, cartridges to combine shot and powder, the British breech-loading Ferguson rifle, the 11-cylinder crank-operated Puckle gun, and the Girandoni air rifle, capable of firing 22 .46 caliber balls and that had actually been used by the Austrian army 11 years before the Bill of Rights was ratified. And the above is by no means an exhaustive list.<\/p>\n

The Founders were enlightened men, schooled in classical, political, and legal history, aware of current developments (and in cases like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, innovators and inventors themselves), and visionaries with eyes toward the future, and to \u201csecur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to \u2026 Posterity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oblivious to that,\u00a0Constitutional and historical illiterates<\/a>, like the head of the oxymoronically named \u201cTexas Gun Sense,\u201d are getting ink spreading astonishingly ignorant assertions like \u201cThere weren\u2019t automatic weapons or 100-round magazine capacities in the guns 100 years ago.\u201d And, like useful idiots, they\u2019re making such moronic pronouncements for Chinese communist propagandists (who want Americans disarmed and live Chairman Mao\u2019s maxim that \u201cPolitical power grows from the barrel of a gun\u201d).<\/p>\n

That\u2019s bad enough, but the grabbers then bring those arguments into court cases and equally corrupt judges then create \u201csettled law.\u201d\u00a0 As\u00a0the Brady Center argued<\/a>\u00a0in a brief supporting the State of Maryland\u2019s semiauto and magazine ban:<\/p>\n

\u201cSuppose, for example, that a new, unregulated and highly lethal weapon were developed before a statute was enacted. When first offered for sale, the weapon would not be protected because it would not be in common use. However, under Plaintiffs\u2019 theory, if sales of the weapon grew explosively over the next year, prior to any legislation, then the weapon would, within that short time frame, become constitutionally protected, even though a ban would have been permissible had the legislature acted just a few months earlier. Such an approach makes little sense.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s the crux\u2014if new developments in weaponry can be denied to We the People, then it\u2019s just a matter of time before the disparity between what the government has and what the people have will be as wide as if we were relegated to Brown Bess muskets and flintlocks against modern infantry. Unless \u201cin common use at the time\u201d is held to mean by soldiers in the field, with real \u201cweapons of war,\u201d as opposed to a sporting arms popularity contest, \u00a0the Second Amendment will be nullified as a last-resort defense against foreign and domestic tyranny.<\/p>\n

To argue otherwise is to argue the Founders thought sending an outmatched yeomanry to their slaughter was \u201cnecessary to the security of a free State.\u201d That\u2019s insane.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We\u2019re well on our way along with that, though, notably with the National Firearms Act restricting the transfer of militia-suitable arms to tribute-paying supplicants meeting overlord approval, and the illegitimate (whether a real vote was taken or not) Hughes Amendment denying post-1986 select firearms to all but government troops and enforcers. I\u2019d argue that one of the most in-your-face tyrannical phrases ever constructed is:<\/p>\n

\u201cRESTRICTED FOR GOVERNMENT OR LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThings to Come\u201d was my Second Amendment column in the January 2002 issue of\u00a0Guns & Ammo<\/em>\u00a0magazine. I wrote a bit about the bans but focused on developing technology, definitely stuff the Founders would have never imagined \u2014 as if that\u2019s supposed to make a difference. I always began those articles with a quote to set the tone, and for this one, I borrowed from H.G. Wells in\u00a0The Shape of Things to Come<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have declared the Declaration of Independence is inoperative\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How that could happen isn\u2019t hard to see.<\/h3>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the difference between a bow and arrow and a modern rifle,\u201d I quoted an executive describing his company\u2019s Objective Individual Combat Weapon System, a weapon that could \u201chit targets completely behind barriers.\u201d<\/p>\n

I cited articles on supposedly \u201cless than lethal\u201d microwave weapons that could burn the skin or temporarily blind, or \u201ctetanize\u201d (paralyze skeletal muscles). If stun guns are \u201cprotected,\u201d why wouldn\u2019t they be?<\/p>\n

But who needs phasers set on \u201cstun\u201d when the real thing is being developed to vaporize targets\u00a0Star Trek<\/em>-style, along with assurances that \u201cadvances will be made and power plants will be shrunk and one day it will dominate the battlefield\u201d?<\/p>\n

Since when have rayguns not been seen as the great future equalizer, and who thinks keeping them away from the bad guys will work any better tomorrow than what we see happening today?<\/p>\n

\u201cJust remember, not so long ago your pocket calculator would have filled a room, requiring programmers, technicians and keypunch operators, and cell phones, laptops, and GPS units would have been considered no more plausible than \u2026 paralyzer beams and death rays,\u201d I wrote. Unarguably, those advances are now all \u201cin common use.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been said a battle isn\u2019t won until a man with a rifle occupies and controls the field,\u201d that article concluded. \u201cSomeone probably once said the same thing about spears.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Second Amendment will be Nullified if \u2018Common Use\u2019 is Restricted to \u2018Popularity\u2019 \u201cThe Second Amendment protects modern weapons,\u201d Judge Roger T. Benitez observed in his landmark\u00a0Miller v. Bonta ruling\u00a0striking down California\u2019s so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d ban. He was citing\u00a0Caetano v. Massachusetts,\u00a0a 2016 United States Supreme Court decision vacating a woman\u2019s conviction for carrying a stun gun … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rkba","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69389,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69388\/revisions\/69389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}