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).
"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."
It's not a red herring, and I am not a "gun grabber".
Wealth is not the issue. Arabs have oil wealth, and if nuclear weapons were LEGAL, we could not have the massive efforts to track them down and disrupt their ownership. It is not a matter of DETERRENCE. Our laws give the government the positive authority to go in and root out people who are trying to get these things and other WMD; it's illegal to have them, it's illegal to try to get them, and the government focuses a lot of energy on trapping the people who are trying to to prevent them from getting them. Legalize it, and government has no right to interfere.
It's a matter of reasonableness. The 2nd Amendment says "arms". Those who want to defend the 2nd Amendment cannot ignore the question of NUCLEAR arms. You can't shuck and jive the question away. You've got to answer it directly, and you have to answer it NO. NO, the Second Amendment does NOT give any individual the right to HAVE WMD or to try and get them. Period.
If you CAN'T say that, if you try to change the subject to avoid the problem of LIMITING the Second Amendment, if you try to pretend that WMD are NOT really an issue in a world full of terrorists, then your position rapidly loses credibility.
A properly limited understanding of the Second Amendment to give individuals the right to handguns to defend themselves is eminently reasonable grounds on which to fight. But the purist position that the problem of "arms" including mass-casualty weapons either doesn't exist, or that there IS such a right, undermines the whole position because it's either blind or nuts or both.
The Second Amendment rapidly becomes indefensible if it means that mosques in America have the 2nd Amendment right to buy nuclear weapons, using Saudi oil money, so long as they don't use them. No, they don't. If THAT'S the extreme that defenders of the 2nd Amendment are going go, you're going to lose the right.
The better answer is to ANSWER: OF COURSE the 2nd Amendment means GUNS, personal firearms. THAT'S what is protected. Not mass-casualty weapons. Guns, especially handguns for self defense, with the specific right to carry them concealed under most conditions (but not, for example, around the President). Absolutely unlimited rights for anybody at all to possess any weapon of whatever sort he decides he wants is insane. Refusing the answer the question and impugning the motives of anybody who points out that the 2nd Amendment says ARMS, not guns, makes you look like you're DEFENDING private nukes.
It's easy to get away from the characterization. Just say no. No, it doesn't mean nukes or anthrax bombs. Yes, it means personal firearms. Is that so hard? The unwillingness to do it is damaging to your cause.