The Founders Could Have Envisioned Repeating Arms

     A repeating arm is a gun that can hold more then one round and fire round after round successively. One of the arguments often made is that the Founders, when writing the Second Amendment, could never have imagined the types of guns that we have today. While this could possibly be true with regards to machine guns, it is likely not true with regards to repeating guns. It also is a flimsy argument because if applied to the First Amendment, one could argue that the Founders could not have imagined mediums such as radio, television, the Internet, and so forth either.

     One of the great misconceptions many people have however about the time period in which the Second Amendment was written is that the state-of-the-art in terms of firearms were single-shot muskets. That isn't the case. The reality is that repeating arms had been in existence already for decades at the time, it's just that they were not widespread. You had arms for example such as the Cookson repeating rifle (invented 1750) which held twelve shots and the Girandoni air rifle (invented 1779, eight years before the Constitution was written) which held twenty-two shots, that was created for use by the Austrian Army and of which one was carried by Lewis and Clarke in their expedition. So the technology existed for repeating guns, just they were not as widespread. The earliest repeating guns date all the way back to the late 1600s!

     When muskets and cannon were first invented, they too were not widespread. It took improvements in the design, manufacturing, etc...of such weapons before they began to become widespread, but they eventually did. Cannon were also widespread at the time (the vast majority of cannon before and for a time after the Civil War were privately-owned---there were also privately-owned gun boats with multiple cannon). So it would have been perfectly logical to assume that as time went on, and manufacturing technology improved, that repeating guns would eventually become widely available as well, and that is exactly what happened.

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