Since Bruen, lower court judges applying its test have been, to use a legal term of art, all over the place, a fact repeatedly highlighted during oral arguments by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sought some, any, guidance on how the court should understand its own ruling. Again, lower courts are equally confused. One court, for example, decided that Florida’s ban on the sale of guns to 18-to-20-year-olds passed constitutional muster; another concluded that a federal law disarming people convicted of certain crimes perhaps did not.
A few judges have publicly aired their frustrations with the sudden analytical primacy of law-office history. “We are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” wrote one in 2022. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” Another castigated the court for creating a game of “historical Where’s Waldo” that entails “mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.”
Just goes to show how shitty, stupid, and partisan this Trump Supreme Court is.
This is a false trope that always gets brought out in the gun control arguments.
There were actually magazine-fed repeating rifles in the era of the founding of the USA. In 1779 the Girandoni air rifle was produced, which was carried by Lewis & Clark on their expedition across the frontier. It was a repeating rifle that could fire at least 19 times and was as powerful as a 9mm handgun cartridge from modern times, but more accurate up to 300 yards.
There was also the Puckle gun (machine gun) and the Gatling gun is pretty old too.
So to claim that the authors of the Constitution had “no idea” about how advanced guns could get is obviously false.
The Puckle gun had been invented but it was never in wide use or used in war. There is only good evidence for 2 of them to have ever been built. It was also basically nothing like what we would call a machine gun now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puckle_gun
The Gatling gun was invented in 1861 and first saw wide use during the American Civil War. (Approx 4 score and 7 years after the Revolutionary War.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun
The Girandoni air rifle was invented and used shortly after the revolution and the founders likely would have been aware of it but it is an air gun not an automatic or semi-automatic rifle. The air tank was good for about 30 rounds but filling the air tank required pumping the hand pump about 1,500 times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girardoni_air_rifle
In terms of the advancement of firearms technology here’s something to consider. While both breach loading and rifling were crudely implemented much earlier it wasn’t until America’s westward expansion in the mid 19th century that they came into their modern forms and became standard features on batch produced weapons.
Gatling gun wasn’t a good example, but to rectify that mistake here is an actual machine gun from earlier:
How long did it take to load? How portable was it? How easy was it to set it up and mow down a bunch of unsuspecting civilians before anyone had a chance to respond?
The Chambers Flintlock Pattern Gun is also not equivalent to a modern machine gun. Modern machine guns are recoil driven meaning they use the recoil from the last shot to fire the next. Pattern guns chain charges with a projectile between each charge. Once you start firing a pattern gun it doesn’t stop until there is no more ammunition. This was a ship mounted gun that couldn’t be reloaded quickly enough to be used more than once per battle. There were pistol and musket versions created but their capacity scaled down with their size. The ship mounted version is the only one that saw wide manufacturing and use because the single burst slow reloading gun was less effective than the faster reloading more accurate muzzleloader musket.
It could fire 19 times you say… Well then, let’s pass out the heavy firearms!
While the detachable air reservoir could take around 30 shots, it took nearly 1,500 strokes of a hand pump to fill those reservoirs. So, no, your example is not correct, as it would take nearly 40 minutes to pump it up to be able to shoot like that.
Nope it’s perfectly correct, as humans have access to preparation time before they choose to do things. A rifleman with the Girardoni rifle could simply carry extra reservoirs of pre-compressed air and be able to swap out as needed. The air reservoir was built with a check valve that allowed it to be removed while maintaining pressure.