To reduce the likelihood of a totalitarian state. It was written by people who had recently participated in a violent secession from the world's largest empire. Self defense against ordinary criminals was another factor, and the Supreme Court has ruled that individuals have the right to own weapons for that purpose.

I can see the purpose of the "Free Speech" it makes sense today more than ever.

Limitations on the right to free speech are active political issues today. There has recently been a major push to limit "blasphemous" speech in western Europe and the US, for example. Source code as speech when the code does something governments want to regulate, like cryptography or DRM circumvention is not an entirely settled question, to provide another example.

What if unpopular rights are those that kill children

I count at least six out of ten amendments in the Bill of Rights as likely to have led directly to children dying. Free speech has led to violent action. Availability of weapons makes violent people more deadly. Four more amendments protect the rights of those accused of crimes, some of whom are required to be released when they would otherwise have been jailed. Some of those have killed children after their release.

Rights that are just a little unpopular don't need so much protection. The important rights all have the potential to get people killed, as does the lack of them.

Ok but doesn't that imply that the founding fathers somehow foresaw the advent of nuclear arms, school shootings, the internet and created a concise set of laws that would prevent us from sneaking in laws by creating loopholes.

Of course not. That's why we have courts.

The courts try to apply the original intent of the Constitution to modern situations. The authors of the Fourth Amendment probably couldn't have imagined laser microphones, but the courts have held that using one (or anything else high-tech) to eavesdrop on conversations you have in a private place is just like a search and requires a warrant. In other cases, the courts have limited the application of rights to new, unforeseeable technologies. The Supreme Court ruled, for example, in DC v. Heller that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to unusual and dangerous weapons; it protects the right to own handguns, but not nuclear warheads.

It is, of course perfectly reasonable to have a discussion about whether a right protected by the Constitution has a place in a modern society or if it should be eliminated or changed. My original point in this discussion is that we should not want it to be trivial to bypass Constitutional rights, e.g. by banning ammunition instead of guns because it would then become trivial to bypass any of them, at any time, for any reason.

That is my beef with that Amendment -- it doesn't apply anymore. It will not make a difference. One can say we have been slowly sliding towards totalitarianism (plutarchy maybe) and the fact that some people in Michigan are gathering regularly, putting face paint on and then shooting beer cans from AK-47s doesn't make a difference at all.

As you agreed Founding Fathers could not have predicted massive surveillance that would make Gestapo proud, satellites, tanks, nuclear weapons, etc. So in their time 100 militia people with rifles could take 100 government solders with rifles and it would be a nice match.

> Of course not. That's why we have courts.

Alright I agree only if the courts would correctly reinterpret the amendment and let me have a couple of nuclear weapons, some drones with weapons, tanks, and fighter planes. Because what is really meant by "arms" these day. But I can't even buy a fully automated machine gun.

To me personally, most times guns are used in this country against someone by a civilian they are used either by drunk family members against each other or by criminals.

> The authors of the Fourth Amendment probably couldn't have imagined laser microphones, but the courts have held that using one (or anything else high-tech) to eavesdrop on conversations you have in a private place is just like a search and requires a warrant.

But their hands are tied. So they can reinterpret the Second Amendment (which I have concluded they haven't as citizens don't get access to matching arms as the government does) but only up to a point. Like it can't reinterpret it so take away the guns. At some point if it is written it is followed blindly like some magic book from the sky.

The original article was trying to use the "reinterpretation loophole". I don't agree with using loopholes. But I agree with the intent (remove the weapons) by do it by fixing the Amendment. If Amendments can't be passed anymore (practically) then there is something broken about this country.

The way it is now, the Amendment does more harm than good.

The continuing difficulty the US military is having subduing militants in Afghanistan armed with relatively unsophisticated weapons suggests otherwise. A subtle, boiled-frog style slide in to totalitarianism is still possible, of course, but the direct approach would likely bring reasonably effective armed resistance.

A nuclear weapon, tank or drone is effective against an isolated base or compound, but when insurgents are mixed in with the population of a city, soldiers go after them with rifles. Very similar rifles are sold at Walmart[0].

That said, the self defense argument is more applicable to a modern society. Unfortunately, it turns out to be really difficult to evaluate its effectiveness. Comparisons to other countries are problematic due to the huge number of variables involved. Every study I've found purporting to offer a number of self defense incidents is severely and obviously flawed (studies with low numbers only count incidents where the police took a report of a crime; studies with high numbers include self-reported incidents of dubious veracity). The number of violent crimes in which a criminal was visibly armed falls between the high and low numbers for self defense, so it is not possible to say whether guns are used by civilians to stop crimes more often than to commit them.

One less-problematic correlation I've been able to find is that states enacting right-to-carry laws generally saw their murder rates fall faster than the national average afterward - often substantially faster, suggesting that the perception that any person might be armed provides a deterrent effect.

I can't even buy a fully automated machine gun.

The Supreme Court has not made an unambiguous ruling on whether or not you can have a machine gun. As the law is currently written, you cannot own a newly-manufactured machine gun as an ordinary civilian. DC v. Heller established a minimum level of protection - that guns in common use for lawful purposes cannot be banned - but not a maximum. US v. Miller suggests that guns suitable for militia purposes cannot be banned. Given that (selectively) fully-automatic rifles and light machine guns are the standard weapons for infantry soldiers, it is very likely that a legal challenge to this prohibition would succeed.

If Amendments can't be passed anymore (practically) then there is something broken about this country.

The last amendment was 20 years ago. That's not an unusually long time. I didn't mean that all amendments are impossibly difficult; I meant that a repeal of the Second Amendment would be impossibly difficult.

[0] http://www.walmart.com/ip/Sig-Sauer-M400-Enhanced-Carbine-OD...