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.
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 It can be changed or repealed.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.
Man, all these world class athletes from Russia have these horrible heart conditions at such young ages!
Must be something in the water…