In my Utopia, the gun laws will be simple: no guns at all except (a) ordinary rifles for hunters of game and (b) usual weapons of the military, the police, and specially authorized persons. Period. What stands in the way of that as law in the United States? An array: the gun manufacturers, their trade associations, gun aficionados, reluctant congressmen, the Second Amendment, and, finally, the Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).
Consider the simple text of the Second Amendment. In its entirety, it provides, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” We no longer speak of militias, but men of the 18th century like Adam Smith (1776) did: he explained that the state may “oblige either all the citizens of military age, or a certain number of them, to join in some measure of the trade of a soldier to whatever other trade or profession they may happen to carry on.” In short, the militia was a part-time soldiery.
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