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Around _400_[1]. That's ALL rifles. Hunting rifles, bolt action, "assault weapons", whatever, in a country with ~300M-1B guns and a population of 330M. While we should look at why these deaths happening, banning the tool used to commit such an incredibly low number of crimes is just silly. I'd compare it to trying to ban swimming pools because 390 people drown in them per year [2]. "No one NEEDS a swimming pool, ban them all!"
People like you that want to go off and "ban everything" while being completely uninformed and refusing to do any kind of simple research are the worst kind of voters / citizens.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
[2] https://www.edgarsnyder.com/statistics/swimming-pool-statist...
Not saying I agree with this line of thinking, but that is a common retort.
My understanding is that it is up to the courts (ultimately the US Supreme Court) to interpret the Constitution, and define things like "Arms", "security", etc..
> I can’t own a nuclear weapon
Careful what you wish for. If personal nuclear weapons ever become a thing, they too may be "Arms" "necessary to the security of a free State". It is hard to understand some rulings of the Supreme Court.
At the time of writing the 2nd Amendment (December 15, 1791), the accepted "Arm" was a musket, with a muzzle velocity between 1425 fps (434 m/s) and 1700 fps (518 m/s) with a ¾” (19.05 mm) diameter ball (. 640 caliber), and an approximate weight of .9 oz (25.5 g) [1]. Today the court accepts that an ArmaLite AR-15 is an "Arm", with a muzzle velocity of 3,300 ft/s (1,006 m/s) using a .223 Remington cartridge with a 55 g FMJ bullet [2].
The momentum of the AR-15 round is therefore approx 55,330 gm/s compared to 13,209 gm/s for the musket ball (ie more than 4 times greater). Too many American shooters make the mistake of thinking these modern "lightweight" weapons translate into less lethality, but it is the increased momentum from higher muzzle velocities that does the devastating damage to soft tissue and bone.
Take a look at the X-ray of a leg showing a bullet wound delivered by an assault rifle used in combat compared to an X-ray of a leg that sustained a bullet wound from a low-energy bullet, inflicted by a weapon like a handgun in Philadelphia. [3]. The trauma surgeons of the 19 children killed in the Robb Elementary massacre reported "They were so pulverized, he said, that they could be identified only by their clothing." [4]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2019.16...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Remington
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/health/parkland-shooting-...
[4] https://khn.org/news/article/trauma-surgeons-uvalde-mass-sho...
Why is it that political philosophy that hates constitutional originalism in every other case wants to try and selectively apply some weird quasi-originalist argument not to the amendment itself but to two individual words within it?
If the amendment was written before muskets were common would you argue in only applied to swords, bows, slings, and catapults? The amendment is about providing the populace with a mechanism to keep tyranny in check, its not about caliber and projectile ft/s.
Example: The US military just replaced the .223 with .277 Fury for exactly the reason that the .223 is _too fast_ and doesn't shed enough energy when hitting a target.
Furthermore, you're mixing grains (gr) and grams (g). A 55gr (grain) bullet is 3.56 grams. A 0.9oz musket ball is 25.5 grams. So your momentum calculations are (11'067-13'209) grams * m/s for a musket and 3'581 grams * m/s. So the musket actually has 3+ times more momentum than the .223 round.
Musket balls are absolutely huge, there are effectively zero modern rifles which shoot a .640 caliber round. The .223 is a very small rifle round.
https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-worse-to-be-shot-with-a-mu...
Can you stop with the nonsense? You produce it faster than I can correct you.