I’m not going to pullquote it – it’s really too stupid to want to do more than acknowledge. \u00a0But it makes a point that some would-be public intellectual always tries to make whenever there’s a debate about the Second Amendment; in this case,\u00a0this\u00a0<\/em>is what “arms” looked like when the founding fathers wrote the Amendment:<\/p>\n A British “Brown Bess” musket. The AK-47 of its day, it equipped both the British and most of the Continental Armies during the Revolution.<\/p><\/div>\n Right – the flintlock rifle was bleeding edge technology back then. \u00a0The “Brown Bess” smoothbore musket was the AK47 of its day; simple, rugged, built in immense numbers, capable of smothering firepower by the standards of the day.<\/p>\n Of course, at that time, the First Amendment referred to pretty much the printing press,<\/p>\n They never envisioned photography, linotype, telegraph, radio, television and the internet!<\/p>\n Freedom from Unreasonable Searches and Seizures and a general right to Privacy? The founders never envisioned organized crime, transnational smuggling, terrorism and cell phone encryption!<\/p>\n Trial by Jury? The founders had no concept of “paying for daycare!”<\/p>\n When society starts conflating “rights” with “technology”, we are doomed as a free society.<\/p>\n Maybe we are anyway.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That so much of our mainstream media is grossly uninformed about the Second Amendment debate is a challenge. That so much of the mainstream media gets their information from people who are actively trying to disinform the public is an affront. This article – a WaPo piece from Christopher Ingraham – is a little bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59196,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59195\/revisions\/59196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.thespecialistsltd.com\/files\/imagecache\/product\/Brown-Bess-Musket.jpg\")
![](\"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/_7yB-eeGviiI\/TTLmrf2b6FI\/AAAAAAAAGE8\/aek8SmErvr8\/s1600\/Printing+Press.jpg\")
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