New guns need new regulations

The Sept. 9 letter “Firearm owners need no excuses” suggests that gun regulations should be limited to only those created when the Second Amendment was written. This might be reasonable for guns that also remain unchanged. But obviously the amendment authors couldn’t weigh in on regulations for technology that didn’t exist in their time.

If we froze regulations to those from the 1770s, it follows that all technical advances since then would also be illegal (since they were not explicitly covered by the amendment at time of writing). It can’t go both ways: Either we stick with exactly the intentions of the writers (and forbid new gun technology) or we add regulations as we add new weapon capabilities.

The authors of the Second Amendment didn’t address rapid-fire, automatic, concealed guns at all since these advances didn’t exist at the time. The modern mass shooting risks would be different if offenders had to hand load each bullet into a musket in the 1770s way.