fox files

ANTI-GUN POLITICIANS, pundits and activists like to characterize their restrictions against lawful gun ownership as fresh thinking. They smear the Founding Fathers (“Old White Men”) as being so unimaginative that they couldn’t possibly have foreseen today’s technology. Their patronizing argument that the Second Amendment only guarantees a right to own a musket makes about as much sense as claiming the First Amendment only guarantees a right to own a quill pen.

On the contrary, the writers of our Constitution were subjected to—and pursued—advancements in firearms technology that rocked their world. Over the intervening decades, successive achievements have enabled better concealment, improved accuracy over greater distance, faster rates of fire, easier reloading, increased magazine capacity and more efficient ammunition. Each one has changed the balance of power between nations, between the weak and the strong, between predators and prey and, perhaps most importantly, between citizens and their would-be masters.

The fundamental changes wrought by such revolutions mock the histrionics of present-day gun control advocates. Cory Booker and Eric Swalwell rail against 19th-century inventions as if they had just been 3-D printed on some terrorist’s kitchen table. Presidential candidates threaten to jail formerly lawful gun owners for possessing technology dating from the Grover Cleveland administration. News flash, Elizabeth Warren: The semi-automatic 1911 pistol was developed by John Moses Browning in … 1911.

We’ve gotten over it. The NRA has created Museums called “Disruptors:’ They highlight firearms featuring a technological leap that created a tectonic shift in society. You’d be surprised to see that the changes they wrought are the same ones being debated today. Despite dire predictions, modern society seems to have survived—perhaps even thrived—because of them.