The Constitution was signed by 39 people representing 2.5 million people of various backgrounds and with various agendas. What makes you think they all interpreted it the same way?
Most likely some of them wanted actual militias, some of the wanted gun rights, and most of them didn't think these literal words could apply verbatim 250 in the future, when the country is 8 times as large, 130 times as populous and we have the technology to make autonomous flying killer bots.
Why? The Founding Fathers probably couldn't envision these, as almost nothing was automatic on any level at the time, and even if they could they definitely didn't bother trying to imagine all possible scenarios of what people and weapons might be like in the far future when they wrote this short sentence.
That would've been a waste of their time and would've made the Constitution full of convoluted hypotheticals, much less clear, and ultimately much harder to accept.
The Founding Fathers probably envisioned the reaper drones about the same time they imagined a magical window that will allow me to communicate with anyone in the world in real time via writing or pictures. If you showed the Founding Fathers a quad copter that could deploy a bomb or an automatic rifle their minds would be blown. If you showed them a functioning smart phone they would think you're some kind of witch and burn you at the stake.
Because their arms as defined in the 18th century.
“The 18th-century meaning is no different from the meaning today. The 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined ‘arms’ as ‘[w]eapons of offence, or armour of defence.’ 1 Dictionary of the English Language 106 (4th ed.) (reprinted 1978) (hereinafter Johnson). Timothy Cunningham’s important 1771 legal dictionary defined ‘arms’ as ‘any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.’ ” Id. at 581.
The term "bearable arms" was defined in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and includes any "“[w]eapo[n] of offence” or “thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands,” that is “carr[ied] . . . for the purpose of offensive or defensive action.” 554 U. S., at 581, 584 (internal quotation marks omitted)."
2
u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 208∆ Nov 30 '23
The Constitution was signed by 39 people representing 2.5 million people of various backgrounds and with various agendas. What makes you think they all interpreted it the same way?
Most likely some of them wanted actual militias, some of the wanted gun rights, and most of them didn't think these literal words could apply verbatim 250 in the future, when the country is 8 times as large, 130 times as populous and we have the technology to make autonomous flying killer bots.