All of this Second Amendment posturing may turn out to be one outstanding example of Talk Radio "mooning" the radio audience. For the past two days I spent some time chasing a topic that never really has been all that high up on my list: The Second Amendment, and what was the vision of guns that the people who wrote the Consitituion had.
This is hilarious. It is a layman's observation and I have not done any research of legal precedents on the issue in the last two hundred years or so.
Guns in the late 1700's were about half a notch beyond the Blunderbuss stage of gun development. They were muzzle-loaders. You got one shot and then you cleaned the bore, took your little bag or horn of powder and poured some down the barrel, poked in some wadding maybe, and dropped a little close-to-round ball of shot down the barrel which rattled and shuddered as it fell into place. Just to make sure you got it where it should go, you took the ram-rod again and made sure the shot was all the way in.
These were not personal self-defense weapons you would take down to the local tavern to defend yourself in case a criminal walked in the door, announced a hold-up and demanded your wallet and your gold. Yes, if you were carrying around your muzzle loader gun already loaded, you got ONE SHOT at the bad guy, and the accuracy of the weapons of the era was bad.
Here is how they were used. You lined up your men, your soldiers, your "militia" if you please so you had a line maybe 6, 12 or even 18 soldiers wide. Right behind them would line up a second tier of soldiers. The guns had long barrels... no so much to improve the lousy accuracy of these Blunderbuss contraptions, but so that the barrel of the guns in the back row would be as far forward as the heads of the people in the front row, The shot and the wadding and everything else came out of that barrel going a little bit in whatever direction it damn well pleased, and long barrels kept the back row soldiers from blowing the ears and scalp and arms off the soldiers in the front row.
The game was play with the opponents lining up in a similar fashion on the other side of the battle line so the idea was to have your troops... all 15 to 30 of them lay down a shower of flying lead which kind of went any which way it wanted to in the general direction of the opposing line, and if you were lucky, you could recognize that enough of them had just been shot that you could rush forward with your bayonets and finish off the survivors. Of course, as you rushed forward, the survivors on the other side might unleash their own shower of flying lead and come rushing out with their bayonets headed your direction.
There was no accuracy in these guns. You could not be a "sniper" in the sense that we use the word today.
Nobody who contributed to the writing of the Constitution had any vision or concept of the day when we could have little pistols hidden in our clothing and in case of a threatening situation, pull that thing out, and if you have been to the range regularly, put 6, 7 or maybe 9 well placed rounds right in the face or the gut of the bad guy trying to rob you.
It appears that writers of the 2nd amendment had two target situations they wanted to speak to. The Northern states feared the return of the English (which did happen in 1812?) and so they saw the need for citizens to have in their possession these awkward, poor results, muzzle loading belch-fire specials that could quickly be brought together to face the English or some other foreign government. The Southern states appeared to have more fear of their own national government coming after them with a demand that they give up their slaves. The Southern states representatives in particular wanted no part of a militia system that reported to the Federal government, they insisted on a militia that reported only to the state.
The Southern States in some cases were also scared that when 80% of their population was slaves, and 20% the European land owners, they wanted a militia available to put down slave uprisings.
It was not like all the people at the Constitutional convention were sitting around lovey-dovey singing Kumbaiyah every night. There were a number of hard fought compromises that a lot of people were not happy with that had to be worked out to get the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to squeak through.
For people to come along today and put out this current day 2nd amendment story that the framers of the Constitution intended for everyone to be free to bring their pistols and AR-15s to all kinds of public gatherings is not supported by history. More than 70 years after the Constitution was unveiled, when we had that little unpleasantness we call the Civil War, most of the long guns were still muzzle loaders! Six shooters were arriving in that era. The lever action Winchester 73 made famous in the movies would come along later. The idea of "bullets with powder and a primer to fire them" basically arrive in the late 1800s.
To say that the Second Amendment was hatched full developed and fully understood by The Founding Fathers the way we are asked to swallow it today.... is not THE TRUTH.
There may not be another topic that better demonstrates how messed up Talk Radio has become.
