Oh, the Argument

Eugene Robinson makes the argument that "assault weapons must be banned in America.  Nothing else will do the trick.  He even invokes the Founders.

When the framers wrote of “arms,” they were thinking about muskets and single-shot pistols. They could not have foreseen modern rifles or high-capacity magazines. They lived at a time when it was impossible to imagine one man barging into a crowded room and killing more than one or two people before having to reload and surely being subdued. Today it is not only imaginable but also tragically commonplace.

Mr. Robinson is very short sighted.  When the Founders wrote the Constitution, they wrote it broadly enough that they allowed for technological advance.  Let me rephrase that paragraph in a way that Mr. Robinson might understand.

When the framers wrote of a "press" they were thinking about Franklin's press, a device that might crank out several hundred papers an hour.  They could not have foreseen an idiot such as Robinson sitting at a computer screen, spewing his screed in Washington, immediately available to readers across the globe. They lived in a time when news traveled slowly, when the press was limited to paper and ink, and  news moved on horseback.  if you had told them about the internet, they would think you truly insane.

Here's Franklin's press, Mr. Robinson.  This is what the Framers envisioned when they talked about the freedom of the press.

I'm pretty sure, Mr. Robinson, that the Founders knew that technology would move forward.  That's why they didn't limit the constitution to a particular technology. They knew we'd advance and figure it out.

Mr. Robinson goes on with other ludicrous arguments, and I'll leave others to burn those strawmen.  But, I would caution the learned Mr. Robinson.  As I wrote earlier, there are conservatively 10 million of these rifles across the United States.  That horse is well and truly out of the barn. The genie is out of the bottle.  You're not putting it back in.

In the past forty years, the AR-15 has become America's rifle.  You might as well get used to it.