Law was passed following Highland Park shooting in 2022, and has been challenged by gun shops and gun rights groups
The US supreme court has refused to overturn an Illinois ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition, which was passed following the deadly mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022.
The court rejected the request, made by a gun shop and a national gun rights group in an appeal of a lower court’s decision not to allow a preliminary injunction to block the law.
Killing these laws is a great idea. Shall not be infringed and all.
There is no guarantee of assault weapons, only “arms”. What that means exactly was purposefully left as a matter for society to decide.
That last like sounds faily clear and cut to me. Shall not be infringed.
The question here, is what are “arms”? It does not promise unrestricted access to “all arms”. Or to “any arms”. It also does not define arms here or anywhere else in this document.
It simply says “arms”. In legal texts, especially of the time, this implicitly grants the people interpreting the law (our judicial system) the privilege of deciding what undefined terms mean. This means the courts get to decide what is okay and what isn’t. And that’s probably a good thing. The founding fathers were intelligent by just about every measure. They realized that for a legal code to last it had to be flexible, to account for changing times. So many words are undefined legally, and there are many mechanisms to change the laws set forth.
For example, I could take an extremely permissive (and might I add, literal) interpretation of “arms” to be “all weapons” and carry the given example further to interpret this as my right to own a HIMARS artillery rocket system. And it would be necessary, since George over in Shelbyville 10 miles south recently acquired an m777 and hasn’t liked me since I rear ended him in the highschool parking lot.
Now, intuitively, most people accept that military equipment such as medium range artillery shouldn’t be owned by civilians. In fact, we have many laws to that effect. Instead we’ve chosen to interpret “arms” as just guns, which actually bucks the actual English definitions both of today and the time. So it’s really about interpretation.
Perhaps we say “arms meant muskets, or even some rudimentary single shot pistols to our founding fathers” and that’s our new legal interpretation of the second amendment. Or perhaps we say “no assault weapons” and try our best to narrowly define that as a legal term that carries real weight.
Either way, it’s just a word in an amendment added after the writing of the Constitution. It can be changed or repealed. Nothing is ironclad.
It’s very well established colonial Americans could own the most high end and powerful weapons of the period for their personal use and continued to do so until around the Civil War, this being large cannons. It is also well established the founding fathers understood technology advances and the second amendment should cover any future weapons of war. See private ownership of cannons, privateering, the St. Albans Artillery Regiment, and the Kalthoff repeater for more details.
Your misreading of the second amendment is the main reason you have this viewpoint. When most people think of the second amendment they think of its purposes for hunting, recreational shooting, or self defence against other individuals. However, the purpose of the second amendment is to keep the citizenry armed against the government itself lest we fall under a tyrannical government again. The militia in this case is standard citizens using their own arms against the government in ad hawl units. The founding fathers just fought and won a war against such a government mostly because of their ability to acquire such weapons, and the first thing Britain did when they suspected rebellion was attempt to ban weapons.
In any case, your last point is true. It is just a word in an amendment to the highest document in the land. In which case it takes precedent to all other laws. If you wish to control arms, you need to have an amendment to do it, and until then they shall not be infringed.