Jarlaxle wrote:The same reason the first amendment should apply to any means of communication tbat did not exist in the 1790s, and which therefore could not possibly have been intenxed by those who enactex it to be covered by it.
You are confusing speech with the means used to deliver it to its audience. "Speech" today remains pretty much what it was in the 1790s - spoken and written language, art, music, symbols, silence even, whatever form will convey that which we want to express. All that modern communication does is allow it to reach many more people, much faster and much cheaper.
To reverse your analogy back to the 2nd Amendment, there are modern manufacturing techniques that could mass produce 1790s era weapons, and transportation networks that can get them to a worldwide market literally overnight if desired. It's still the same gun, regardless of how much easier and cheaper it is to make it, and how many more people can buy it. If I had said that the 2nd Amendment should only apply to guns individually forged and finished by hand, and transported from manufacturer to purchaser using a horse and buggy, then your analogy might have worked.
Burning Petard wrote:Well Scooter, first of all, because of the 9th and 10th Amendment.
8th Amendment - excessive fines and cruel/unusual punishment - no relevance. A 9th Amendment argument would say, what, that there is a right to keep up with advances in technology?
And because the other amendments apply to technologies that did not exist in 1798, such as the need for a court order to wire-tap a telephone.
Wiretaps were deemed to require a warrant because they provide a means for law enforcement to get around the 4th Amendment protections that apply within the confines of our homes. Before the invention of the telephone, the conversation in question might well have taken place through letters, as people had been doing for hundreds of years before the Constitution. Whether intercepted at the post office or taken from a home, reading someone's mail requires a warrant. That should not change because the conversation travels over a wire instead of in a mail carrier's bag.
And by the way, a non-governmental entity or private individual cannot own many particular armaments that did exist in 1790.
And never could own some of them, I would guess, which supports the contention that the Founders never intended that people should be able to own the most powerful weapons that technology can produce. They had the common sense to recognize that protecting the right to own pistols and muskets did imply a right to own a cannon.
I have to wonder, when guns of the era could fire only one round per minute, what the Founders would have thought of civilians being able to legally own a weapon that can fire 600 RPM.
And Long Run, strict constructionists...originalists...tomAYto...tomAHto...it is an approach to constitutional interpretation that they follow when it suits them and jettison when it doesn't
