> In Second Amendment cases, this Court applies the Amendment to semi-automatic handguns even though those did not exist in 1791 or 1868.
"Shall not be infringed" apparently applies to unimaginably better weaponry, but they couldn't have anticipated immigrants being pregnant.
“Oh, those aren’t arms. They’re, uh, destructive devices!”
The NRA has a lot of overlap, but Reagan was never particularly pro-gun - he was literally a California Actor, and it was under him that most federal gun laws were passed. (1984 GCA being huge)
In many ways, he was just really good at pretending to be/pushing folks on the rights buttons, while being a smokescreen for all the other laws that people needed to pass. In that way, a lot like Trump is right now.
Notably, Reagan also had dimentia/Alzheimer’s through a large portion of his terms, not that it is related to our current situation at all…
If you can afford either of those you have enough invested in the system that you probably won't use it lightly and if you don't you should and that's kind of the system's problem.
That's why Elon Musk is both the richest man in modern history and also the most upright, caring, and self-restrained one too!
Protection
Participation in military / national defense
Resistance of tyrannical government
Hunting
Depending upon whether or not you think the Constitution is a living document, a modern reading of 2A could reasonably include things like explosives, drones, radar, etc., but maybe exclude things like nukes, fighter jets, biochemical weapons, other purely offensive things. I'm very pro-gun regulation, but I think this would be a fine reading as long as we're doing the same thing across the Constitution, i.e. substantive due process.
But while conservatives love modern readings of 2A, they deny modern readings of anything else. So they have to find some way to fit their desired outcomes into originals/textualism, leading to absurd dilemmas like "either the founders meant muskets or they meant nukes", or tortured standards like scanning all firearm or self-defense laws in effect around the late 18th century to discern intent, which predictably do not emerge from consistent foundational principles because their authorship is scattered across space and time and thus really are no help... unless of course you cherry pick shamelessly.