Being totally amoral and incompetent are two different things.

Charlie Kirk is more analogous to Jerry Springer than Martin Luther King Jr.

They were also loose powder hand loaded weapons, you could fire three rounds a _minute_ if you were really skilled. Everyone in town had to store their powder in a (secure) communal location because it was, duh, an explosive.

I think you've moved the goalposts here a little. You are making (good) arguments on why the second amendment maybe shouldn't apply any longer and that guns of now are different. You're arguing for gun reform.

However I was speaking in the context of the tradeoffs of danger and the awareness of what blood you get on your hands for agreeing. Although the writers of this bill couldn't forsee AR15s and drone strikes, I'm sure they could forsee that there was a cost to freedom to bear arms.

And yet the founding fathers made it pretty clear that they were all for every able-bodied man having guns, including private citizens owning artillery.

The relative lethality of a particular style of rifle doesn't seem to matter. Better guns than muskets were available at the time, and they didn't seem to think it necessary to limit that amendment.

I don't think your opinions about the history and purpose of the second amendment holds water.

The Second Militia Act of 1792 clarified that assumption somewhat when it specified all free able-bodied white male citizens must be part of their local militia and are required to own a gun among other things.

What they couldn't have predicted is that the Bill of Rights would also apply to the individual state and local governments since that wasn't true until the 14th amendment almost 100 years later and didn't really kick off until the 1900s. This is obviously important to understand what the original amendments mean.

The supreme court ruled that the first clause of the 2nd amendment was just flavor text. We aren't going to be Switzerland, which has an actual armed militia where kids take military-issued guns into their community to support it (on the train even! although the bullets are kept somewhere else to reduce a suicide problem they had a few years ago).

I think that’s pretty much the only way you can make that work? I’m against gun ownership, but I feel like you really need to stretch things to read that any other way than ‘people shall be allowed to own their own guns’

That's interesting. What is a reasonable alternative interpretation of "the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" than individual gun ownership though?

"Wilder times" is an interesting description of the early days of the country. When I look around at the violence the last several years (mass rioting, looting, uptick in murder pretty much everywhere, etc. etc.), I feel like that description applies pretty well to our times as well.

That being the case, I would say their opinions and beliefs are pretty important to the current national climate.

It was also written at a point in time when the absolute peak of firearms technology was a musket.

The logic behind the 2nd amendment doesn't hold once Uncle Sam has nuclear tipped icbms and I'm not allowed to have them. I'm also not allowed to have tanks or rocket launchers or even high rate of fire Gatling style guns.

To paraphrase, "if you think the 2nd amendment is what's keeping the government off your back, you don't understand how tanks work"