Reading What You Want to Read

Even people on the supposed gun rights side of things tend to read the Constitution to say what they wished it said, rather than what it plainly says.

No. The proper understanding of “arms” is how the writers would have framed it.

“Arms” meant what a soldier or small militia team could handle.

NBC weapons aren’t defensive tools. they’re offensive weapons of mass destruction. You don’t use a nuke to “secure a free state”

— Based Memes (@MemezBased) June 15, 2026

Yet the Constitution plainly allows for letters of Marque. When a letter of Marque was issued, called a commission, it would describe the vessel that it had been issued to and its master. The ship was described by the guns mounted. Here is an example:

In other words, the commission didn’t authorize the master and his vessel to mount guns- they were already there. All it did was authorize the master to use the guns already mounted on that vessel to act as a privateer.

So, we know from the historical record that the founders placed no limit on the lethality or number of weapons. Trying to spin it into “well, weapons that can destroy a city aren’t useful for defending a state, so they can be banned” is no different than claiming the 2A only applies to muskets. It’s simply faulty logic.

I would point out that biological weapons have been a thing since about 1500 BC, and would have been known to the founders, yet they didn’t see fit to prohibit them. In fact, the British used biological weapons against the colonies as far back as 1763. They didn’t know how the weapons worked or anything at all about germs, but they knew giving blankets that had been used by smallpox victims to people would cause the recipients to get smallpox.

If only the founders had seen a way for the Constitution to be modified as technology changed. I mean, there is the part in there about amending it. I’m sure the issue here is that you couldn’t get the requisite 2/3 vote of Congress and 3/4 of the states to sign on, especially if Trump were the one pushing for it. After all, the left hates Trump so much that even a proposal to restrict the protection of the Second Amendment to not include nukes would fail to clear the bar for Congress.

That’s the proper way to amend our supreme laws, not by simply declaring that it means something else because we don’t happen to like the result or implications.