Second Amendment as Muskets

A US congressman, Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.C.) used a tired, old trope that seems to limit the US Constitution to the technology available at the time of the Founders.

“This is something as a non-lawyer that I have had trouble with from the very beginning. When the framers of our Constitution considered the Second Amendment, they were talking about muskets,” Coleman said during a news conference outside of the Capitol Building on Tuesday.

Representative Coleman is being disingenuous, and for the sake of her constituents, I hope that she's not as stupid as she sounds.  The Founders were fairly intelligent men, and they knew that technology would move forward.  Indeed, they had seen great strides during their lifetimes, and they knew that every advance made would spur other advances, in mechanics, in agriculture, in every facet of human endeavor.  Ben Franklin himself was experimenting with electricity.

The press that the Founders talked about was Franklin's press.  The speech the Founders talked about was the limit of the human voice.  The religion that the Founders talked about was Christianity.

 If we take Coleman's argument to its logical conclusion, there would be no internet, no electronic communication, no religion except Christianity in the US.  There would also be no female representatives in Congress.  Persons who seek to limit freedom to a specific time period should be very careful which time period they pick.

Representative Coleman would limit technology to a specific time period, relative to human endeavor.  I call on her to limit her office to the technology at the time of the Founders.  No electric lights, no copy machine, yet no telephones, nor even a ball-point pen.  Air conditioning? Perish that though, it wasn't invented until the beginning of the 20th Century.  The Founders certainly never envisioned that technology.

Otherwise, she's simply a self-serving hypocrite.