Bristoe....Try and use your head for a second. The FF's dealt with muskets, cannons and minimal sized explosives. Do you really think, even for a second, that if there was the weaponry of today avaiable back then, that they would have specifically written that "The People" should have an individual right to possess such weaponry?
I don't even think your RP guy would entertain that foolishness.
The sole purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that the Federal Government could never claim any say regarding what arms a private citizen may own. The purpose was to ensure that the Federal Government could never be in command of a standing army that would be a match for the mass of able bodied citizens, all in possession of the same types of arms as possessed by said standing army.
This whole issue of whether that means private citizens may lawfully possess an armed ICBM or anthrax is a canard. These are not so much arms as evidence of an intent to commit murder on a massive scale, which is an inchoate crime in the first place. An American citizen cannot conceivably aim a nuke or anthrax only at United States military personnel. Any substance or device which would constitute reasonable evidence of an intent to commit mass murder is not, I think it's safe to say, an "arm" in the sense intended by the Founders. It may have strategic application, such as a deterrence to other nations' using the same types of substances and devices, but has no application within the boarders of the United States, and is really no more an arm, in the sense the Founders understood the term, than a barrel full of mercury.
How, after all, could an armed ICBM conceivably be used by civilians to fight the United States military? Since it virtually cannot be used by a civilian other than as a sort of doomsday device, it is not an arm. That leaves, however, every other real weapon, in possession of the United States Armed Forces, fully within the scope of the meaning of "arm" as found in the Second Amendment, e.g., tanks, mortars, field artillery, machine guns, microwave beam weapons, etc. Nukes and anthrax are no more "arms" than ten barrels of mercury strung together constitutes an "arm."
