Second Amendment - Where's the Dumb Line

When the Second Amendment, the one so often abused by the Right, was penned, the most fearsome weapon fired less than one shot per minute. A musket was good for one shot and, if you didn't hit the person you were firing at, they could take it from you and beat you to death with your own weapon before you could reload. There was a good reason, though, for authorizing the citizenry to bear arms: America was broke. By allowing the citizenry to keep arms for hunting and defense - Kentucky was the western frontier in those days, the nation had an armed pool of recruits for the inevitable next war.

Fast forward to April of 2007. Weaponry has come a long way - one man armed with a modern assault rifle could hold off hundreds of War of 1812 regulars. Or kill 33 people including himself on a college campus. The weapon's manufacturer and the seller to the young man who had been committed to a mental institution without his consent are protected by laws based on the same Second Amendment. The Right would hold, again proving that we disappoint ourselves when we expect intellectual honesty from them, that the young man was perfectly within his right to buy the assault weapon.

Imagine the brouhaha if someone wanted to buy a combat-ready surplus MIG from the Soviet Union. I'm sure those very authorities would defend the right because the Second Amendment doesn't specify which arms we are entitled to bear, the very defense used for assault rifles, yes? They'd be all over the guy. He'd never be allowed to fly it, it would be taken from him by the very people who just defended the right of a disturbed young man to buy deadly weapons. What about nuclear weapons? Are they defended by the Second Amendment? A strict constructionist reading would lead to the conclusion that I, a citizen, given my unrestricted right to bear arms, could buy a nuclear weapon from whomever and keep it in my basement.

Ridiculous? Okay, where's the dumb line, then? I'd place it at the point where someone who'd been arrested for stalking, who'd been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, who was referred to campus counseling for the content of his essays. Perhaps you'd place it at nuclear weapons. That is the unrestricted right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment and the Founding Fathers whose idea of a weapon of mass destruction was a musket volley, one per minute.