If you want to limit legally-allowed weapons to only those available at the time of the writing of the Constitution, then you have to also accept that the First Amendment doesn't cover speech on the internet, on television and radio; The 13th Amendment outlawing slavery doesn't exist; and the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, doesn't exist.
How about it? If you want to arbitrarily limit freedoms, limit them all.
That's an interesting logic-leap. Let's take it apart...
While the progression from sloppy musket to Minié ball to semiauto to nukes can be said to radically redefine the nature of "arms", the same cannot be said of the concept of "speech" as a result of internet and broadcasting. True, these technologies greatly expand the scope of the audience hearing that speech, as arms technology greatly expands the scope of what arms can do; but since speech is communication of ideas and arms is communication of deadly force, they are of two different natures. To make this equation requires that the criterion be reduced to how many people are affected by said Constitutional right, rather than the nature of that right. The
reach of speech changed with mass media, but the nature did not. And more to the point, speech is not life-endangering.
I'd say the question of
types of speech (hate speech, pornography, yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater) would be much more to the point of defining A1 than how many people you can reach with it.
An interesting extension, although how you can apply the same extension to A13 and A19 eludes me. These are neither a question of quantity (how many women or slaves exist) nor of nature (definition of woman, definition of slave).
