The Founding Fathers were farsighted men. They were wise enough to write iron-clad protections of individual liberty into the Bill of Rights and wise enough to craft those protections with just enough wiggle room that, three centuries on, they would still be relevant.
Take the Second Amendment:
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.
Note that they didn't say "muskets," which were eventually rendered obsolete by rifles and handguns, among other weapons; they say "arms." Exactly what this means in modern times has been and continues to be a subject of debate among constitutional scholars, but the prevailing view, laid out in the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller, is that it applies to weapons "in common use at the time" for individual protection.
David Barton, the Aledo-based author and pseudo-historian, has a more expansive view of the Second Amendment -- much more expansive. He detailed it today on "Wallbuilders Live," a portion of which was transcribed by Right Wing Watch:
The belief of the Second Amendment was you as a citizen have a right to defend yourself whether it be against a thug, an aggressor, a crook, or against your government.Now this is where a lot of liberals go through the roof; are you saying that you think individual citizens have a right to own a machine gun?
Yeah. And an Abrams Tank, and a bazooka, and a F-16 because you've got a right to defend yourself with the same size of weapons that might be brought against you ... You have a right to fight back with whatever you can get your hands on to defend your life, your property, your possession, your family, your whatever.
And chemical weapons? Biological? Nuclear? Barton didn't mention those specifically, but why the hell not?
