Yes, the Founding Fathers probably did have muskets and flintlock rifles (and pistols that worked in a similar fashion) in mind when they sat down in Philadelphia to hammer out the Bill of Rights — as well as printing presses and (maybe literal) soapboxes on which raconteurs and rabble-rouses stood in public places to gather listeners. And of course they didn’t want their people forced to make room for soldiers, kitted out like the one in the photo above or not, against the citizens’ will. After all, if the soldier got drunk or hurt or just fell deeply asleep … that put his weapons in those citizens’ hands.
But at the time, what were the weapons available on a battlefield, and what kind of havoc could they wreak? What were the “arms” the founders meant their citizens could “keep and bear”? Some articles are cited here: www.ranker.com/… by Rachel Sourby in a roundup of all the reasons why an AR-15 isn’t something the Constitution meant to cover.
There’s a problem with that.
Well, more than one, but in 1789 the US had no standing military (in fact the Constitution prohibits that, but we’ve evolved since then, right? I mean, can you imagine being responsible for a squadron of B-52s or F-15s as a single citizen, or even a town, county or small state banded together? Let’s not even go there with the next generation of stealth bomber).
In 1789, the threats to national security didn’t have to come from overseas (though the British seemed the likeliest of such threats in the still-nascently independent States, and turned out to be, in 1812, the most immediate in fact). They came from across the river, out in the woods, and down in the fields. The most immediate threats the Founding Fathers could imagine came from … Indians and slave uprisings. With that in mind they wanted the citizenry to have, handy-like, and be proficient in the use of, effective arms to meet such threats wherever found.
Sound familiar?
“Manifest destiny” not yet having become the handy catchphrase we now know as “Make America Great Again,” the citizens of these new United States of America, in Franklin’s “Republic, if you can keep it,” consisted of landowning or otherwise wealthy men, of European extraction.
Sound familiar yet?
Two hundred years later, battlefields still exist. We now have aircraft that can exceed the speed of sound, carry bigger loads of explosive ordnance, other weapons, troops and supplies, or even disaster relief teams with their gear and goods than all the cargo on Columbus’ three famous ships of 1492 in a single mission.
Soldiery has evolved. That Brown Bess in the picture’s what the British Empire built its worldwide dominance upon, in wars around the world; today, it’s an antique, a curio, a relic. Pikes no longer rule the battlefield; nobody trains tercios for glacial-speed advances to terrify opponents. Instead of horse-drawn cannons, modern battlefields often resound to the massive report of tanks, bombs, and mortars (which are still pretty much a man-carried weapon, although today you’ll also find versions hazardous to aircraft and with a reach well beyond anything imaginable in 1789). Armor’s back, though now it’s ceramic plates in special “plate carrier vests” and reinforcing on vehicles like Humvees and Bradleys. And instead of a Brown Bess or Congressman Crockett’s flintlock, soldiers carry other weapons. Or, in some cases, get carried by them — C-130s, helicopters, jets, ships, tanks, aircraft carriers, trains … and sometimes, still, horses.
Society’s evolved, too. Nowadays you go to the store to buy your eggs, milk, meat, vegetables and fruits (unless you prefer farmer’s markets and home-raised goods, but not everybody has a yard or fields anymore, and we do still have some Americans dependent on their hunting and fishery skills for their table fare); you need not hand-harvest crops to make thread, rope, cloth, clothing; you need not cut trees, hew logs, and chink cabins. You don’t have to cut hunks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds in midwinter for storage in sawdust-lined half-dugouts or caves against the summer’s heat.
In 1789, if your crop failed, your plow horse broke a leg, your cabin caught fire, varmints got your eggs — or worse, your chickens — you just might starve, or freeze, in the aftermath.
So we should stop kidding ourselves. We don’t live in 1789. We do have a standing military — five branches, not counting the Border Patrol and various police quasi-military units like SWAT teams, some of which now have MRAPs, body armor and heavy-duty rapid-fire weapons just like warriors on battlefields.
We don’t need, today, weapons of war, assault rifles, battlefield guns, in civilian hands. You can’t effectively hunt for the table with an M-16 or its variants — that .223 bullet will go right through a deer or an antelope, which will then run away somewhere before blood loss or damaged organs bring it down, most likely as wasted game. Those firearms, and their Russian-designed kin like the AK-47 used two weeks ago in El Paso, are meant for killing people.
They’re not as versatile as the old flintlocks of 1789, or the hundred-years-newer designs like a lever-action Winchester or a bolt-action Remington. They’re uni-taskers, and they’re similar in purpose and mechanics to the Thompson submachine gun regulated under the 1934 National Firearms Act.
They ought to be similarly regulated. It’s time to recognize that we don’t live in the Founding Fathers’ times, or the flappers-and-Prohibition times that gave rise to criminals like Bonnie and Clyde. We do live in a world where the NRA (among others) can buy all the politicians it can afford, and by so doing unduly influence legislators to avoid common-sense regulations on today’s battlefield weapons.
It’s up to us to change that. We’re running out of time.