Why don't people recognize that, when the founders wrote freedom of press into law, they were clearly only talking about newspapers?

@DrWatson Now you get why anti-gun proponents arguing "The founders were only referring to muskets when they wrote it down" is quite the fallacious hill to die on.

@MickRogers The founders lived in a different world, and a different US. I don’t particularly want Bezos to have ICBMs, but you do you,

@DrWatson
Ironically, when broadcast media began and for many decades after that, it actually had to operate under the Fairness Doctrine laid out by the FCC which included providing certain community news services, equal time to political appointments, public service announcements for the community good, etc., in order to qualify for a license to use the public air waves. Under those rules, broadcast media actually tended to be more objective than print media which had no restrictions and , given the large number of newspapers, tended to be more competitive. The politicians took out the FCC rules and broadcast media found that ideological competition was the biggest money-making reality TV of all.

@QuixoticSoul I personally don't want the #1 imperial power in the world right now to have access to nuclear power enough to destroy the entire planet but, like you said, you do you.

@MickRogers You want to denuclearize the US? No thanks on that front too.

@MickRogers Well, in one sense, namely the sense that you point out, they were only talking about muskets because muskets were all they knew.

So I think the irony is that conservatives accuse liberals of generally ignoring "original intent", when in fact one needs to view the constitution as a "living document" (to Judge Scalia's horror!) if the goal is to have a more extended understanding of gun rights.

On the other hand, while any reasonable person, in my opinion, would have to accept that the right to bear arms would apply to a wide variety of weapons never envisioned by the founders, I think it is valid to raise the question of whether the founders intended any one individual to be more powerful than the entire well regulated militia! [And THAT is the point of "the founders were talking about muskets." Gun control advocates are NOT saying you should not have a handgun or a hunting rifle. But they are saying that the possibilities for individual weaponry are now insane.] I do not think that limits on the kinds of weapons an individual is entitled to purchase is a denial of the right to bear arms, any more than limits on when a woman can have an abortion is a denial of the right (at least for now) to an abortion that Roe ensures.

@QuixoticSoul The #1 power that is responsible for many dead brown kids in Syria and Iraq? Sure.

They've been the bad guys more than they've been the good guys for a big majority of the 20th century. Why would denuclearizing the biggest threat to world peace be a bad thing?

@dancingtongue I miss the fairness doctrine.

@MickRogers Ok good luck with that.

@QuixoticSoul Hey, youre the one licking the state's boots. Thats not my problem.

@MickRogers 🥱