"Just how do you imagine that everyone would have a nuke? Why not a M1A1, or a 155 howitzer. The nuke argument is a bit Gorelike."
Free speech is not unlimited.
Can you sell child porn? No. Think you should be able to?
Can you sell porn to children? No. Why not?
Can you show fornication on the airwaves at 6 PM? No. Why not?
Can you broadcast military secrets? No. National security trumps free speech, always has. And unless we want the Constitution to be a suicide pact, it had better.
Can you falsely advertise your product? That's free speech alright, but it's also fraud. And free speech does not trump the right to not be defrauded.
Can you slander someone else in the press? That's free speech and the free press, and it's illegal. Free speech does not go so far as to printing deliberate untruths to damage somebody else. And it never has.
Free religion? Sure, people can be Islamists and believe in jihad, but those are just words. Can neo-pagans practice human sacrifice? No. There are limits on freedom of religion. Can Amerindians take peyote buds in their traditional ceremonies? No. The drug laws trump. There are limits on freedom of religion. Can neo-pagans recreate the temple prostitute cults of the East? No. There are limits on freedom of religion.
Speech is limited of necessity.
Religion is limited of necessity.
The right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures does not mean that the police cannot search private property to get dangerous and incriminating things there. It means that they have to follow process.
The right to not testify against yourself applies only at a CRIMINAL trial. OJ couldn't be forced to testify when he was on trial for his life, but his failure to testify COULD be held against him when he was on trial for his MONEY in the civil trial afterwards. The right against self-incrimination is not absolute. It's a matter of defining what "incrimination" means. We have defined it narrowly, rather than broadly.
The weapons of mass destruction issue is not "Gorelike". If nuclear weapons possession were a universal right, they would be a lot cheaper. But forget the nukes, let's just talk about anthrax, or gigantic fertilizer bombs. There are plenty of deadly WMD which can be put together without the budget of a small state. The Oklahoma City bombers managed to do it with very low tech and caused tremendous damage and death.
There are of necessity limits on individual possession of weapons to, and those limits cannot sanely be whatever any individual decides he wants, for whatever purpose. Firearms for personal defense? That makes sense. WMD are not firearms for personal defense. They are mass-casualty weapons. There is no individual right to inflict mass casualties on the neighborhood even in one's own defense, and therefore there cannot be any personal right to possess weapons with the capacity to do that. There are plenty of insane, sucidial people out there who cook off every year and take out 5 or ten people before killing themselves. Happens every year in just about every major metropolis. Have no laws to stop people from building simple, huge fertilizer bombs, and the death tolls will be in the hundreds from every such incident. The Unabomber certainly could have build dirty bombs if he could have easily gotten the materials, and if everybody has an unlimited right to any sort of weapons at all, those materials are going to be easy and relatively cheap to get. Germs are even easier and cheaper to get.
Let people walk up to the President with guns, and you are going to go through a lot of Presidents.
It's just the way the world is, and we all know it.
That is why the right to keep and bear arms, too, must be reasonably limited. It's a right to individual self-defense, and to collective defense against tyranny. It is NOT an individual right to insurrection against the government or the neighborhood. It means guns, with reasonable restrictions concomitant with national security needs (as in: no, you CANNOT take a gun anywhere near the President, and no, you CANNOT take a gun into Congress or the Courts. There are armed officers there to protect YOU, and it's a small enough space that the police CAN effectively protect people (unlike the big old world), so if you're taking a gun in there, you have the possibility of doing dramatically nefarious things that destabilize the whole country. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms is not infringed by refusing people the right to have WMD or make bombs, or to pack heat in the Capitol Building.
All rights have to have reasonable limitations on them.
And they all do, of necessity.
The most worrying thing on the right is when people don't have any sense of this and press for an absolutist position on weapons which would, in fact, result in chaos.
The 2nd Amendment means a personal right to FIREARMS, subject to necessary regulations. It means law abiding citizens can carry. The right does not extend to convicted felons. It does not extend to WMD or heavy military weapons. It can't. The carnage would be too great, swiftly.
It's the ultimate Red Herring of the Gun Grabbers. Very few folks could afford a nuke, and those that could wouldn't be deterred by a stinking law, if they were wanting to commit mass murder anyway. Pretty much the same is true, but less so, of the M1A1 and 155.
Now a nice Ma deuce or a M-249 or M-240, that's another matter. According to the last Supreme Court ruling on the subject, keeping and bearing any part of the ordinary military equipment is protected by the second amendment, just not "gangster weapons" with no military utility. (Whatever sort of weapons those might be).