There are ideas in the constitution that transcend time and place. The principle of sovereignty of the people is an example.
There are ideas in the constitution that are trapped in time and place. The nod to the slave power is an example. That appeasement was backward looking and sectional. Original intent not always is gold; sometimes it’s sulfur.
The Second Amendment did not enable slavery but still is trapped in an eighteenth-century, frontier society. Modern technology, society, and governance have eclipsed anything that the Second Amendment could have been intended to deal with. The modern world has turned Second Amendment original intent into an unintentional reductio ad absurdum.
This would be a given in a debate in which all sides were working in good faith for the public good. We are not in such a debate. We must deal with the NRA and the Republican Party, and original intent is a foundational ploy for them. It hides their lack of moral grounding, and it cloaks them in the aura of the founders. Do not get sucked into this diversion. Reason demands that we govern society and the country as they are, not as they were.
Original intent is instructive in some cases, but the intent of the Second Amendment is an anachronism in every sense. The courts nearly have acknowledged as much in limiting the reach of the Second Amendment. Bans on assault weapons have been upheld and on large capacity magazines. Even that infamous originalist Scalia, who bent the meaning of the words as far as he could, noted that the right to bear arms is “not unlimited.” That alone undercuts NRA arguments, which assume nothing less than an unlimited right as original intent.
Another NRA foundational argument is discussed in a superb article by Josh Marshall at TPM. He gives historical context to and picks apart the NRA argument that guns are a “positive good” for society. If guns are dangerous, and what else could they be as devices designed and created only for killing, it’s hard to fight regulation. So, tell people that it’s the lack of guns that is the real danger. Guns, themselves, are a “positive good.”
We cannot win without attacking these foundational arguments explicitly and relentlessly. Rage against the hideous myth that guns are beneficial to society, and shout down the blindness of worshiping an original intent that modern technology and modern society have left dust covered and immaterial.