Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed says Americans have a right to muskets. Everytown insists AR-15 features have no place in civilian hands. Both arguments run headlong into American firearms history and Supreme Court precedent.
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From founding-era muskets to modern AR-15s, gun-control activists continue challenging the constitutional protection of commonly owned firearms. iStock-2191454516
Speaking at a town hall in Midland, Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed told the crowd:
“I’m gonna swear an oath to the Constitution. The Constitution has a Second Amendment in it, but the Second Amendment, just so we all are clear, even the most conservative folks, they hew to this idea called originalism, and originalism is the idea that you should interpret the Constitution in the context in which the Constitution was written.”
“When they promised the right to bear arms, they had muskets. So, yeah, everyone should have equal rights to a musket.”
The only thing that bothers me more than El-Sayed making the comment is a deep and abiding concern he actually might believe it. Considering El-Sayed is running for the U.S. Senate.
Abdul El-Sayed is very well-educated. He was born and received his primary education in Michigan. He graduated from the University of Michigan and was Rhodes Scholar, earning a doctorate from Oxford.
However, there he was in Midland, Michigan, exercising his First Amendment rights with a wireless microphone while claiming his Second Amendment rights were frozen in the 18th Century, protecting only a smooth-bore, muzzle-loading musket.
I wouldn’t expect El-Sayed to know about the Kalthoff Repeater, the Girandoni rifle, or the breech-loading Ferguson Rifle, but I have to assume he knew about the Kentucky Long Rifle.
The Second Amendment’s protection doesn’t stop there: It extends to swords, spears, lances, halberds, bows, all arms out of antiquity, as well as all the arms that appeared after December 15, 1791, the date the Bill of Rights was ratified.
I think it’s reasonable to assume El-Sayed has at least heard of District of Columbia v. Heller but he might want to Google Caetano v. Massachusetts when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously the Second Amendment protects weapons that weren’t in existence at the time of the Founding.
The Second Amendment is timeless, just like the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.
One has to assume Abdul El-Sayed was being disingenuous, if not dishonest. Perhaps he is a full member of the League of Lobotomized Parrots, mindlessly regurgitating the pap excreted by the gun control movement.
El-Sayed says he’s “Gonna swear an oath to the Constitution.” Why? He obviously knows little to nothing about it, so his oath isn’t worth much.
Some memes are like cockroaches, impossible to eliminate.
Among these is the idiotic “weapon of war’ claim, which is based on the preposterous notion that the Constitution prohibits citizens from owning not only military-style but actual military surplus equipment, including firearms, artillery, and even fully functional tanks. Congress, with its taxing power, does regulate many of these things, but they can still be transferred. The exception is machine guns not registered by May 19, 1986. The Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 closed the door on the transfer of new automatic or selective-fire guns to private citizens.
Janet Carter is the managing director of Second Amendment Litigation for Everytown Law, Not long before the wannabe Senator shared his ignorance with an appreciative audience, Ms. Carter was interviewed on The Center Square, a newswire service covering federal and state governments. Greg Bishop, the host, asked Ms. Carter about pistol grips and other characteristics, saying that gun rights advocates call them cosmetic.
“It’s not cosmetic. There’s a reason why this is the weapon of choice for mass shooters. We’ve seen this, uh, that in the l–, the 10 highest casualty mass shootings over the last ten years, all of those shooters have used both an assault weapon and a large-capacity magazine and speaking to those features in particular, so, uh, the things that define an assault weapon under the statutes that are challenged in this case are a couple of things: First is the ability to accept a detachable magazine that allows a shooter to not only fire whatever rounds are in the magazine but also quickly to reload and keep shooting. Uh, the other features, things like a pistol grip, a forward grip, those are features of the gun that allow the shooter to re-aim and keep firing quickly and that’s why these are the features that were on these weapons when they were created for the military. They are designed to allow soldiers to fire quickly at a–, uh, enemy combatants. And these are not features that somebody needs for self-defense or for hunting.”
It appears Ms. Carter knows as much about self-defense and hunting as she does about firearms.
The first American semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine holding more than ten cartridges was developed for – and marketed to – hunters. It fired at the same rate as the AR-15, one shot per pull of the trigger. The year was 1907. The rifle was the Winchester Model 1907.
Fast-forward to 1942. The M1 Carbine was a semiautomatic rifle with a 15-round magazine. It was an actual weapon of war, designed and produced for the U.S. Military and issued to warfighters by the millions.
Late in the war, the Army fielded the M2 Carbine, a selective-fire version of the M1 Carbine.
The basic M2 didn’t have a pistol grip, or a forward grip, a flash hider, or a ‘thing that goes up’, but it did have a 30-round, detachable magazine, and a rate of fire comparable to the M16.
The M2 met all the functional requirements to be considered an assault rifle. Since it was semiautomatic only, the M1 Carbine did not meet those requirements. On the other hand, the M1 was still military grade and was used in combat in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
In the early 1960s, the U.S. government began dumping tens of thousands of surplus M1 Carbines onto the market. Prices were as low as $20 for NRA members. They could be bought at five-and-dime stores, such as F.W. Woolworth’s.
In 1968, Congress changed the National Firearms Act of 1934 because the M1’s barrel was less than 18 inches long. M1s have been used in seven mass shootings beginning with the University of Texas Tower incident in August 1966. With all that, the M1 Carbine was not among the guns proscribed by the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban.
Compare that to the AR-15. Virtually every gun-grabber claim is completely false, from Josh Sugarmann’s 1988 paper “Assault Weapons and Accessories in America” where he suggested using the term “assault weapon” to make the AR-15 and similar rifles appear more threatening, to the fantastic claims about lethality and rate of fire.
Of course, no gun control zealot worth their salt can mention “assault weapon” without breathlessly invoking mass shootings.
Americans own an estimated 30 million rifles like the AR-15, AK-47, SKS and others. Of that number, 92 have been used in mass shootings over the past 49 years.
Hardly seems like an existential threat.
Despite the mountain of data arrayed against bans, Ms. Carter says she’s “cautiously optimistic” because multiple federal district courts have upheld bans in the past. Guess she missed the memo about the Third Circuit Appeals Court declaring New Jersey’s bans on certain rifles and standard-capacity magazines were unconstitutional. This was an en banc ruling with the judges voting 10-5 to ban the bans.
The rulings supporting bans, like those from the Seventh and Ninth Judicial Circuits, used suspect reasoning, such as a resemblance to military weapons, to arrive at a politically palatable decision. Since the U.S.government has been selling surplus military firearms to citizens since 1903, that line of reasoning is unlikely to sway the Supreme Court.
Related: Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Thinks the Second Amendment Only Protects Muskets
About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago. He has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
