I have been over my working decades mostly a writer and perpetrators of lessons about writing, with occasional stints as an editor for small presses. I am also a gun owner with various licenses allowing me to carry and collect. As such, I have to acknowledge that if the Second Amendment had been submitted to me for review prior to publication, I would have asked for details on what its author did and did not wish to achieve, followed by suggestions for revision.
It is not that the amendment is unclear. Rather, it ends up lacking clarity by attempting too much with too few words:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Modern abusers of commas will feel validated by that sentence, though said mark of punctuation at the time still retained the function of a reader’s notation—i.e., a hint as to where to pause in proclaiming to an audience, and contemporary teachers of grammar would likely only want the one that comes after State. The capitalization is also of an older age—or what can be found fully expressed in German even today—but that does not seem to disturb anyone. What is politically distressing is the multiplicity of concepts all running together with the expectation that readers will see how they inform and limit each other.
The people are identified as the possessors of the right in question, and without any qualifiers, these people ought to be the same who appear in the preamble, in other amendments of the Bill of Rights, and so on: every one of us. (I gladly leave matters of citizenship, immigration, majority age, and on and on for another discussion.) But what are we to do with the protected right to keep and bear a category of items?
As a hypothetical editor, I would ask why not simply say, “possess.” But “bear” is present, and I have to take it as a significant qualification: The objects to be kept must be such as can be born. Yes, Americans may own tanks, with its typical weapons deactivated and with various caveats about where they may be driven, but the Second Amendment does not have such things in mind, even in anticipation of technological developments. No one can bear a tank. Warships were also something that our forebears could have if issued a letter of marque and reprisal, but that—with its Germanic capitalization—is covered elsewhere in the Constitution. Unless we intend to load a swivel gun in a canoe, however, once again, this is not something that anyone is going to schlep about during grocery shopping.
But what about the Davy Crockett? This was a recoilless gun that fired a nuclear warhead up to 2.5 miles with a blast yield of twenty tonnes or a conventional explosive as a practice round. Variants weighed between a hundred and a bit over three hundred pounds, with the projectile adding seventy-six pounds, so good luck finding a holster-and-belt combination for it. Bombs with a blast yield of around two kilotons of explosive force have been made that could be put into a backpack, weighing around a hundred pounds, thus in theory providing a tactical capability for people hiking the Appalachian Trail, and so it is at least conceivable that such a weapon is covered under the Second Amendment.
Gun control advocates should withhold their outrage, however. They love to refer to the well regulated militia portion of the text, and herein those of us who support rights can find a salvation from undesirable effects by taking the whole amendment into consideration.
Since as indicated warships are addressed in another part of the Constitution and the right protected by the Second Amendment deals with bearable objects, there is the implication that “arms” requires analysis. What arms are intended?
The “well regulated” portion of the amendment is debated endlessly, and the reality is that both gun control and gun rights advocates are correct: Regulate, in the language of the day, could mean both ordered according to a set of rules and tempered for accuracy. But the inclusion of a militia is helpful. Militias throughout history have been made up of citizens who are not professional soldiers but who are ready to come to their nation’s aid if needed during armed conflict. Levels of organization have varied, but such citizens were generally expected to work in practice on their own time of such martial arts as would be useful for militia service and often to provide their own weapons both for that training and when called up.
There we may dispense with any nuclear devices. Even if it were practical to learn to use nukes on one’s own, the industrial capacity to make such gadgets is beyond what a citizen-soldier is likely to have. And since we must take effects into account, even conventional explosives are generally beyond the pale, given their propensity to knock things over and to start blazes.
Personal weapons—weapons that an individual human being can carry and whose effect can be limited to one opponent at a time—are, by contrast, eminently suitable for militia service and are thus protected under a comprehensive reading of the Second Amendment. This, for the gun control advocates, includes such weapons of war as a single person can both handle individually and engage in practice with outside of government ranges. So yes, full-auto guns are included. As are such magazines for rifles, shotguns, and pistols as are commonly available. So are suppressors. And short-barreled rifles. The list goes on.
Thus, gun control advocates have laid siege to their own position by attempting to ban what they refer to as weapons of war. If a weapon is 1) useful in war and 2) of such design as a single person can operate in the terms discussed above, it is beyond question that under the Second Amendment that each of us has a right to possess it.
In terms of nuclear weapons, it’s also worth noting the common law tradition. Weapons which were “dangerous and unusual” could be, and can be under current interpretation, restricted. Now, anti-rights types would surely try to do too much with that and say “oh well an AR-15 is dangerous!” But despite these lame attempts at distorting the common law, I think we can at least say a nuclear weapon would be both particularly dangerous, and unusual even in actual warfare. Just another litmus test to discern what may be limited outside of the “bearable arms” thought process.