The US Supreme Court decision in Hemani offers great support to the 2A challenges to Virginia gun ban laws. [Watch]
He’s right when he observes “shall not be infringed” must be viewed and argued in the context of what The Framers would have considered to be infringements when it comes to “dangerous and unusual.”
I’d like to see him acknowledge that “in common use at the time” needs to include arms that standing army soldiers deploy with, not just what’s commercially popular, because otherwise, the machinegun ban will continue and any new developments in arms technology will be withheld from We the People.
And the bottom line is, prohibition does not work in a society that has rights, and you need to amp up the totalitarianism to where it does. If someone can’t be trusted with a gun…
[Via Jess]
“… in common use at the time.”
From what reading I have done, I gather that in the Revolutionary War times, the existing militias were more or less organized as Josiah Quincy II imagined a “well regulated militia” to be: drawn from and organized by the people, self equipped and provisioned, and prepared to defend their communities against all comers, including King George III’s government, General Washington’s general disgust with their preparedness in all three areas notwithstanding.
And it would seem that the colonies has a sufficient supply of current and previous pattern British and French muskets about to allow the militia to be more or less uniformly self equipped. So any lists of required equipment and provisions that were put together would not have conflicted with what was “in common use at the time.” Anyway, this is the period focused on by the Bruen test.
Later on, however, in the era of “The War of Northern Aggression”, it would seem that much of the militia’s needs were supplied by the various government(s). Again, probably from what was “in common use at the time”, most notably the 1861 .58 caliber Springfield rifled musket and the similar 1853 Enfield .577 caliber although some of the more well off Northern units did acquire Gatling guns and various breech loading cartridge firing carbines.
So one wonders, if by some miracle of SciFi or fantasy, the militia were to be brought back to something like the founders envisioned, which pattern of provisioning would be followed, by whom, and to what standard? Would the result reset any notion of “in common use at the time?”
Just throwing the idea out there to see if it draws any fire. 😉