Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

To be ever so slightly sympathetic to American cops, unlike just about anywhere else in the developed world, it is plausible that the person behind the door is armed with anything up to an automatic rifle, and any random person they stop may be carrying a concealed firearm.

Given that, if I was busting down doors in the US, I’d want to be armed to the teeth, equipped with the best body armour money can buy, and wouldn’t waste a lot of time on niceties until I was sure that nobody was going to attempt to kill me.

Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.

Simple solution: only allow weapons that existed during the creation of the Second Amendment.

Ban mechanical printing presses too then.

Why would we want to incentivize and optimize for busting down doors? Sounds more like the Bill of Rights working as intended here.

And the First should only cover religions, forms of speech, printing technologies, venues of public assembly, and petitioning grievances that existed before it was "created"?

When the cops think they are actually likely to encounter genuine armed resistance they ambush the suspect outside their home. If that's not practical they set up a perimeter. Police are not profession combatants. Their tactical doctrine is dominated by "gotta go home safe." SWAT raids exist mostly for the image and spectacle.

The printing press predates the 1st Amendment

>Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.

It's been largely interpreted this way throughout most of our history, until around the 1960s when civil rights activists started carrying them. All the modern gun regulation started then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

Of course 1934 gun control came about due to people like Al Capone and the like.

Not the fully automatic machine presses. The founding fathers had printing presses that had to be hand loaded one page at a time. Clearly, they had no ability to conceive of more advanced technology than that.

That's actually a bad solution. Weapons weren't much less brutal then, mostly just less precise. You'd have people accidentally shooting bystanders in armed conflicts.

The argument that the grandparent is making is that the U.S. Supreme Court recently created legal president that only restrictions on firearms that have similar laws that were enforced during the creation of the Second Amendment can be considered constitutional under the Second Amendment. The argument that that means only firearms similar to those available at the time of the passing the Second Amendment sounds largely similar to the thinking.

And be careful about brining the First Amendment into that... the First Amendment as it was understood by its creators was not about your write to say anything you wanted without government response, it was about your right to publish your own newspaper (or broadsheet/advertisement) without the government issuing you a license or collecting a tax (both of which the colonial government did).

The second amendment was ratified in 1791, and just 7 years later (1978) the Alien and Sedition Acts were ratified by congress, in large part other silence critics of the federal government by making it illegal to say "false, scandalous, and malicious" about it (with the exception of about the Vice-President). And it was absolutely used as a political tool, and this was approved of by the Supreme Court at the time.

So I don't think that anyone really wants this horrible president that the modern Supreme Court has yoked us with. Unfortunately, given the election results, it appears we are going to be subject to these horrible ideas for a whole generation.

We already have that: spray-and-prey is common, as are bystanders killed (even those who are just going about their lives in their own homes). But the weapons of the day were single-shot before reloading. In your argument we would only be reducing the number of bystanders reasonably shot.

No, you have history on its head. It was not seen as an absolute until the , and 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, then strengthened in 2010 in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Prior to that reasonable regulations were allowed (and what is reasonable was hotly debated) were permitted, so long as there were legitimate government interests.

The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to prevent the need (or even the existence) of a standing army. Of course from a modern perspective this is near-ridiculous.

You could have fully automatic Thompson sub machine guns mailed to your house before 1934. You could have any other type of gun shipped to your house before 1968. All this is (relatively) recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Control_Act_of_1968

Old problem: AR-15 behind door. New (old) problem: 18 pounder loaded with grapeshot behind the door.

I'd take the AR.

The repeating air rifle with a 20 round magazine that Lewis and Clark brought on their expedition was invented over a decade before the ratification of the US Bill of Rights. If you're worried about capacity for indiscriminate violence, there were also cannons and grenades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girardoni_air_rifle