yes automatic loaders have been standard for a long time, I may be wrong but I doubt the firing of the main gun is anything like a machinegun on auto.
tell you what you are on here saying outrageous things so I'll match you in absurdity for absurdity.
Quote from piezoe:
I just finished reading Scalia's opinion in the D.C. v. Heller case. He jumped through all manner of hoops to get the stated reason for Madison's second amendment separated from the right to bear arms. Breyer and Stevens of course dissented. They wanted to tie the two clauses together. I read just the briefs on Breyer and Stevens' dissenting positions.
This ruling leaves the door wide open to legislating precisely what type of guns you can own as an individual, and Scalia so much as said that in his opinion. The ruling does preserve, with exceptions, the right to own firearms. There is no question at all there.
One could not ask for a better example of how the court can by interpreting freely our eighteenth century constitution, move it along with the times, and keep it alive. A literal reading of the second amendment would suggest it is obsolete, as there is no longer a need to raise a militia; we have a permanent one in the National Guard. Yet through some rather strained arguments, the court was able to dismember the amendment, which Scalia presumes was there because the States were fearful the federal government might try to consolidate its power by seizing the arms of state militias. Through skilful surgery, the Court separated the individual right to keep and bear arms from any consideration of a militia.
Curiously, Scalia was not impeded in his interpretation of the "real reason" for the amendment by the definition of "militia" embodied in the constitution itself. There it is made very clear that the militia is for protecting the federal government from rebellion or foreign invasion. There is no mention in the constitution of the states using their militias to protect the states from the federal government.
Scalia has always insisted he is a "strict constructionist" yet the calisthenics he went through in handing down the majority opinion that separated the reason --the overt one, not the imagined one-- for Madison's second amendment from the rights it endows would have done Houdini proud.
The single most amazing statement in the entire 64 page opinion was that the 18th century definition of arms is exactly the same as today's definition. The support Scalia's bevy of young clerks turned up for that unbelievable pronouncement was rather unconvincing.
So Lucrum, after reading the majority opinion in D.C v. Heller I am' inclined to think it will be somewhat easier to legislate what arms you are allowed to own now that we have Heller. If you read the opinion, I think you will agree the door was left wide open.
When I asked if the allowed arms could be legislated outside the Constitution you had it exactly right! When you said, "I don't think so, but the Supreme Court does."
