Doesn't the M16A2 and A4 have Safe/Semi/Burst fire modes? They would still be considered assault rifles.
Yes, but you can't buy one in most states. In others, you still need to get an ATF tax stamp and approval process that takes months to years, which can be denied for no reason. And you also need to find one for sale, since all automatic firearms made after 1984 are illegal. When you do find one, and did get the tax stamp, be ready to pony up $10k+.
And that near-religious reverence for the literal words of the Constitution is also the millstone around America's neck.
Seriously, politicians don't argue about outcomes or statistics or real people's lives, everything is based on this 200 year old piece of paper. It's aggressively anti-empirical and it's the root of American anti-intellectualism.
The whole Republican campaign against Obamacare is rooted in constitutional objections. Did the Framers have an opinion about socialized medicine? No. Did the Framers have any of the information that would be helpful in forming an opinion about it? No.
Other countries have constitutions, it's true. But they tend to cover the rights of the citizen and the rules of elections. Politicians don't have to view every single law through the lens of an eighteenth-century document.
Before I begin, I do want so say that I agree we should not view he constitution as infallible and unchangable. Nor have we, historically. There's a host of amendments that have been added since the document was drafted, and there will absolutely be more. It begins to get dangerous to hope that a simple majority should be able to rewrite parts of that, though. Tyranny of the majority, and all that.
There's also a lot of people who believe in the principle of an armed populace, and feel that deaths as a result of that right are not something that can be measured against the value of it.
The sane ones in that camp (like myself), understand that things absolutely need to be done to minimize the casualties while also maintaining the right, hence my suggestion in the OP.
the constitution isn't really the problem since it's generally worded in such a way as to allow diverse interpretations to exist. the problem is conservative interpretations.
"a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" is the opening line of the second amendment, and for quite a while we had reasonable gun laws because SCOTUS used that phrasing and the historical context of the way 18th century militias were armed and organized in their rulings.
then the NRA became a serious political force and hijacked the republican party who appointed federal judges and justices incubated in an extremist school of political thought, and now that opening clause might as well not exist.
it could easily go back the other way with the right kind of judicial appointees, who could rule that the second amendment was not intended to provide the right for a citizen to own arbitrary numbers of any kind of gun they like and carry them in public whether concealed or in the open.
Did you just ignore my post earlier?
There's reams of case law regarding almost every aspect of the 2nd Amendment. It's not just one decision that can change all of it with a single stroke. That's not how courts work. They'd essentially need to undo almost all of it, one at a time, in order to get to a point you're describing.
What you are describing is what an amendment is, not a SCOTUS decision is.
