Musket Love

I grow weary of the Lefties advancing arguments against private ownership of “assault rifles” based on their definition of such as military weapons, and that the Founders only intended the 2nd Amendment to apply to “muskets.” Allow me to point out the fallacy in that argument, which stems (as usual) from the nearly-unbounded ignorance of "progressives."

A musket was a military weapon. It was, in fact, the “assault rifle” of the period. A musket is by definition a smoothbore weapon. They were made specifically to be loaded and fired as rapidly as possible, hence the smooth bore. The idea was for a line of a couple of hundred well-trained men to fire off four to five rounds per minute each, resulting in a high volume of fire at the enemy line about 100 meters away, who were doing the same.

By contrast, most people of the time hunted large game (i.e., not fowl) with rifled longarms, of which the Kentucky long rifle is perhaps the most famous. The barrel being much longer and the bore being rifled for greater accuracy, it was considerably more time-consuming to load a rifle than a musket. A good rifleman might get off two rounds per minute. Nobody in their right mind would hunt with a musket, however, because the accuracy was atrocious. Modern tests show that, on average, only two of five aimed rounds from a musket will hit a man-sized target at 100 meteres. That’s because a musket was an early “machinegun” – with the trained soldier providing the moving parts of the loading sequence.

So the Second Amendment was meant to apply to “muskets”? I agree! And an AR-15 is a modern-day musket.

The Second Amendment does not specify types of weapons. It does not qualify what is an acceptable weapon for citizen ownership. It doesn't state that military weapons in the hands of civilians are a recipe for "mass murder." It reads: "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Which part of SHALL NOT is so confusing?