It is legal to buy a tank and a bunch just came up for sale!
SAN FRANCISCO, Kalifornia (PNN) - June 2, 2014 - One of the more amusing arguments made by citizen control cultists is that they think you shouldn’t be able to own arms of military value, even though that was precisely what the Founding Fathers intended for Amerikans to have.
The Second Amendment was never about hunting or even personal defense, but was instead about ensuring that Amerikans would always be armed with weapons of contemporary military utility to depose both foreign invaders and domestic tyranny.
At the time that the Second Amendment was written, citizens owned and possessed or were familiar with the following technologies:
- edged weapons (knives, swords, spears, etc)
- muskets
- shotguns
- blunderbusses
- rifles
- pistols (both fixed and revolving barrels)
- the breech-loading Ferguson rifle, which fired four times as fast as contemporary muskets and which saw service during the Revolutionary War
- a quiet 30-shot rifle with fast-loading 21-round magazines called the Girandoni, developed circa 1779 (Thomas Jefferson purchased two of them)
- hand grenades
- cannons
- howitzers
- pivot guns
- mortars
- rockets (“red glare” included)
- early auto-cannons (the Puckle Gun, circa 1718)
- early machine guns (Belton’s “new improved gun” commissioned by the Continental Congress for George Washington’s Continental Army in 1777, an order later cancelled due to cost)
- surface warships
- submarines (the Turtle was supported by General Washington, and used in the Revolutionary War)
- biological weapons (including smallpox) had been used in previous wars in North America including the French and Indian War
- chemical weapons (Admittedly, they were in a developmental lull during this time. The last prior use of “pure” chemical warfare had been by the English Navy, which used powdered calcium oxide to blind the French fleet during a battle during the reign of Henry III. The “traditional” poisoning of enemy food and water supplies was still known during sieges)
Nuclear weapons are some of the few weapons that the Founders might not have been able to envision (early manned aircraft had already taken flight in the form of hot-air balloons, and Leonardo de Vinci had designed tanks), and so perhaps they might not constitute “arms” under the Founder’s definition. I will concede that the Founders would not likely support the private ownership of a city-killing weapon such a nuclear weapon. Virtually everything else, however, they knew of in one form or another… and approved.
