“Except it was a smooth bore.”
Yep. Whenever I hear someone say “well, assult weapons had not been invented when the constitution was written”. The implication being that they would have been banned had they been. I respond by telling them they’re wrong; if our authors of the constitution had intended to stratify gun ownership by technology they had the opportunity to do so by banning the Pennsylvania/Kentucky long rifle. These are the weapons that created the sniper. In fact, the Brits hated them so much that they declared them to be unfair and that they should be banned from the field of battle. So, there you have it.....
Remind them back then that speech was written on parchment with quill and ink, and then ask them if they want that freedom confined to that standard.
“Whenever I hear someone say “well, assault weapons had not been invented when the constitution was written...”
I like to point out radio and TV and phones had not been invented so those should not have the same consideration as freedom of, “the press”. Reductio ad absurdum
The governments of serveral nations tried to ban them long before that. Rifles were so accurate that a sniper could pick off an officer with no problem. This irritated the ruling class to no end. They even brought the clergy into it, the church saying that the reason rifles were so accurate was because demons hid in the rifling and rode the bullet out of the bore guiding it to its target. They proved their point by cutting crosses on silver bullets and shooting them at targets. Naturally the deformed silver bullets shot poorly, giving credence to the clergy's arguments, or so they claimed.
Before rifles, in the earliest days of firearms, the ruling class tried to get them banned from battle because it put the peasant(infantry) class on equal footing with knights, a peasant with a gun could bring down a knight when the job of the infantry was to act as targets for the knights of both sides of the battle. No fair killing the royalty.
The ruling class of today are still trying to ban firearms from the peasants(us)but we are still fighting them off, in this country at any rate.