I think I'll go write an article on "modern musketry."
I dunno how I'll structure it, but I find it hopelessly ironic that in a "thoroughly modern" society, where communications, news, and entertainment ride the very latest technologies, where the movement and markets have jet-age transportation, where the our movements, whereabouts, and conversations are now "public," privacy having been trumped by "conveniences" built into the high-tech things we buy, from cars to cell phones, the business of self defense, personal security, and resistance to tyranny are somehow supposed to be constrained to primitive devices from two centuries ago.
There's this premise that seems to have coalesced around the concept that somehow "assault weapons" are this über-modern latter day invention and just happened in the last decade or two, and that's why we've seen this sudden rash of spree shootings in gun-free zones. "Automatic" weapons are just "too modern" and nobody "needs" anything that advanced for "legitimate" purposes.
Our "über-modern" plus-five machines of doom are based on designs that are, in most cases, over a hundred years old, with some of the more recent ones based on designs that are merely 50 and 60 years old, enhanced only by advances in metallurgy, high-strength polymers, ergonomics, and optics. The
really modern stuff is solely in the hands of the military, and costs staggering sums to build and maintain.
No, our small arms are not excessively modern and, despite the protestations that, notwithstanding that the word "musket" never once appears in the CONUS or in the BoR, the framers somehow meant for that specific piece of technology to remain frozen in time, the primitive arms permitted the common man today fall short of the original intent: that
"every terrible implement of the soldier" is
"the birthright of Americans."It is not the
terrible implement which is new.
What is new is mass school/mall/church shootings.
It must be late. My mind is starting to wander again, and I find myself reviewing the "talking points" being chanted by the usual suspects. There is so much wrong with each of the assertions, that the only possible response to them in general is "mu" (
see here for
clarification on mu, or "
unask").
"Why does anyone
NEED a machine gun for self defense?" --> "Mu!" ("I reject your premise, your question is not answerable as stated." Alternatively, "your question is broken.")
Go sleepy bye now. Come back and read tomorrow. Maybe rewrite, maybe expand. Maybe delete.
