Quote of the Day
Nothing in the plain text of the Second Amendment mentions the size of a magazine or the specific features of a firearm. The plain text provides categorical, presumptive protection for all bearable arms.
Erin M. Erhardt & Joseph G.S. Greenlee
September 8, 2025
Page 8 in 20250908164326764_25-153 Amicus Brief.pdf
In other words, “What part of shall not be infringed don’t they understand?“
Via Cam Edwards.
It would be an interesting challenge if one were to assume that only that part of a firearm regulated by the ATF is actually an ‘Arm’ protected by the 2nd Amendment. Thus, only the receiver would be considered protected by the 2A, and everything else subject to unrestricted state legislation. If RKBA proponents wanted to protect an entire functional firearm, then they would have to subject all parts thereto to serialization and regulation, including hammers, springs, strikers, firing pins, magazines, slings, and ammunition.
The only way I see that we steer clear of this is by arguing the disastrous precedent it would set. Imagine pens, pencils, paper, notepads, ink, chalk, keyboards, monitors, newspapers, TV broadcasts and the Internet subject to hate speech restrictions on the 1st Amendment. Or imagine the fifth amandment protection from self-incrimination extending to requiring law enforcement to obtain a suspect’s permission to use their likeness on a bank security camera before they could use it in court! “No, I deny the police permission to show video footage of me robbing the bank because that would be using my likeness to incriminate me.”
Does anyone know if defining a 2A protected arm to be ONLY the receiver has been tried?
Maybe we should stop adopting the enemy’s language and treating the tax collection BATFE as if it were some kind if authority on firearms. Their DNA from the start was to categorize firearms and firearm parts in order to collect the right amount of tax. They don’t have any competence in the use of firearms, the keeping of firearms or the bearing of firearms. They’re not even particularly competent at collecting the taxes they were created to collect. Misusing them as some kind of expert organization about criminal use of firearms is a very bad joke. You wouldn’t call experts from the IRS to speak about the finer details of crop rotation and fertilization strategies just because the farm pays taxes on its product.
So, don’t fret about the BATFE only being interested in the receiver, because they are specifically narrowly focussed for taxation purposes, not because they are the well-regulators of the design of firearms and all things covered by the 2A.
Tirno is right to speak of the “enemy’s language”. Just because the ATF insists on serializing receivers doesn’t mean they have any Constitutional authority to do so. For that matter, it’s obvious to anyone who can read plain English that they have no Constitutional permission to exist AT ALL.
The key point is that any and all bits needed to make a firearm are clearly protected by the 2nd Amendment, and whether they have numbers stamped on them is entirely irrelevant. Keep in mind that serial numbers are a newfangled invention; they didn’t exist in 1789 and thus are not part of the history of the 2nd Amendment, even assuming you’d want to use the history argument rather than the much more correct “contemporary plain English meaning” rule.
Read in context with the preamble of the Bill of Rights, the restriction of the 2A applies to all enumerated powers, legislative, executive and judicial. Just to pick out an apropos example, the taxation power.
And the 14th applied that restriction to the states and all powers beneath them, whether they have it in their own constitutions or not.
What makes something a part protected under the 2A is the fact that one uses it on a bearable arm.
The other half of that equation is government treatment of that part.
If you couldn’t use it on a gun, would they be trying to regulate it would they?
A suppressor has little utility outside it being used on a firearm. And they only want to control them because they are used on firearms.
Same with magazines.
Their very actions to ban them make them protected from regulation under 2A.
We really do need to find the mindset in this country that government is not here to defend us, nor our rights. They never have been. And they never will be.
Cause no sooner that mindset lapses, we find ourselves having to defend ourselves from our own government.
Car mufflers are suppressors. They were even invented by the same guy-Hiram Maxim the Younger. Not the machine gun inventor but his son who for some reason didn’t carry the moniker of Jr. or II.
They understand. They don’t give a damn. What they want is total and complete domination over us. The lust for power is the greatest opiate of all time. Those who lust for it will commit any crime, any perversion to get it.