Free Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns by Glenn Beck Page B

understand.
    It is true that the people who wrote and ratified the SecondAmendment did not specifically intend to protect the AR-15 or other modern-day weapons. It’s also true that there was no specific intent in the First Amendment to protect the right to say whatever you want on the Internet or to broadcast ridiculous opinions on MSNBC. And when our Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment they had no idea that they’d someday be protecting the right to talk privately on a cell phone (although whether or not the government is actually respecting that right is for another book).
    Anyone who claims that weapons like semi-automatics are so modern and unique that the Second Amendment does not apply to them would also have to believe that the First Amendment protects only writing done with quill pens on parchment paper, since those were the norm back then. How could we expect the Founders to have ever imagined the world we live in today?
    We couldn’t—but there is a good reason why the Second Amendment was not written to say “the right of the people to keep and bear muskets, flintlock pistols, and swords”—the types of weapons that were common in 1791. The Founders, far from being the idiots the media paints them to be, knew that technology would evolve. That’s why they wrote the amendment to protect “arms” as a class and it’s why the Constitution as a whole defines a relationship between individuals and the government that is applied across time—no matter what technology eventually brings us.
    Let’s go back to the First Amendment to illustrate what might happen if we were to take the Bloomberg/Chopra/Schultz view. At the time this amendment was written,a skilled printer could produce 250 sheets in two hours. Today, a modern newspaper printing press canproduce 70,000 copies of an entire newspaper in an hour. And, with digital publishing, a newspaper article can be read globally within minutes after it is written.
    One consequence of this technological evolution is that an irresponsible media can cause far more harm today than it could in 1791. For example, in 2005, Newsweek published a story claiming that American personnel at Guantánamo Bay had desecrated Korans belonging to prisoners there. The magazine eventually retracted the story, but it had already spread worldwide, setting off riots in six countriesand resulting in the deaths of at least seventeen people.
    Had Newsweek been using eighteenth-century printing presses, the false story would have been read by several thousand people confined to a small geographic area. It would have been months—if ever—before the Newsweek issue with the false story was read by anyone in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
    This is the same basis upon which the Bloomberg/Chopra/Schultzes of the world argue that we should ban innovations in the firearm industry, like semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity magazines. Look at the damage they can inflict! these people argue. But that point of view is held only by people who have no respect for the Second Amendment and its key role in preserving freedom. After all, if you believe in the Second Amendment as strongly as you believe in the First, then these kind of innovations aren’t dangerous—they’re necessary. A mass printing press or a racist Internet blog in the hands of a madman can inflict serious harm on society; but banning either of those things inflicts much more.
    Those who believe that freedom of the press is a basic tenet of a free society look at things differently. Instead of opposing any change that makes the press more “lethal,” they embrace it. More speech, not less. That is common sense to most progressives—yet they can’t seem to bring themselves to apply that same standard to the very next amendment.
    Aside from theoretical debates about the application of freedomsacross time, the assumption about what our Founders knew about guns at that time is totally wrong. While weapons that could fire multiple