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Note the Second Amendment does not specify what the word “arms” actually means. That is likely because everyone knew that arms meant muskets, which is hardly the case today.

Outside of cannons, the musket was the only weapon — aside from knives and axes. It took roughly 20 seconds to load and fire. A good marksman could get off three shots in a minute, assuming he was not spending time ducking hostile fire.

Everyone knew that arms meant muskets, which is hardly the case today

A musket cost between US$40 and US$60, about $700 in today’s dollars. That would have been a fortune for a poor farmer or an itinerant craftsman. Today a swipe of a credit card can have you ready to roll in minutes.

The framers could not have imagined the kind of weaponry that exists today, let alone its wide availability and ease of purchase. Nor, I’ll venture to guess, could they have imagined the killing power of today’s weapons: automatic and semi-automatic weapons, hand grenades, bazookas, mortars and hand-held guided missiles.

Consider that Hiram Maxim did not develop the first fully automatic weapon until 1885. The first semi-automatic assault weapon, similar to the AK-47 that is popular with many gun enthusiasts, was not invented till the late 1940s.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

The American Founders would have had to have been clairvoyant to look that far into the future to envision the kind of mayhem a single weapon could do today.

But I think there is an even more important point about the Constitution that Second Amendment absolutists miss. Those who love the Constitution will often say it is a living and breathing document. To me that means the fundamentals were meant to stay the same but the interpretation could evolve given the march of time and new technology. This is especially true about weapons.