NBC weapons are "arms", but if you keep them in your basement, you are creating an unreasonable risk to everyone else and your "right to keep and bear arms" is trumped by this. Since those wise men who wrote the Constitution could not have forseen the development of weapons of mass destruction, they made no provision for dealing with them.
I think they are an excellent place to draw the line as far as personal ownership of weapons.
Since those wise men who wrote the Constitution could not have forseen the development of weapons of mass destruction, they made no provision for dealing with them. First of all, the Second Amendment doesn't cover everything that could conceivably be used as a weapon; if it did, the federal government would be unable to impose any excise taxes or restrictions on much of anything. Rather, the Second Amendment covers items which by their nature would be suitable for use as arms in a well-functioning group of armed citizens. Since I don't think nuclear weapons would be suitable for use in such a context, the Second Amendment probably doesn't apply to them.
As for things like miniguns, if they are deemed to be such a public menace that they must be outlawed, the proper approach--as for anything else the Founding Fathers failed to see--would be to amend the Constitution to correct for the Founding Father's lack of vision:
- The rest of this Constitution and amendments notwithstanding, Congress shall have the authority to place whatever restrictions it sees fit on large-caliber repeating firearms that can, or can be adapted to be able to, in the course of one minute, fire more than 1,200 separately-launched projectiles each with a diameter of 0.5" (1.27cm) or greater.
- No weapon which would not be forbidden under this section under the definitions of "inch", "cm", "diameter", or "minute" which were in common usage when this amendment was enacted, may be forbidden as a consequence of changing definitions of such terms
If such an amendment were proposed, I should see no reason it wouldn't pass,
except that anyone ratifying it would thereby acknowledge that the government did not have the ability to place arbitrary restrictions on firearms without such an amendment.