Nowhere in my essay did I suggest that the government “couldn’t afford a national standing army.” My point, as many Second Amendment scholars will attest, is that the government didn’t have a national standing army. This is not a controversial detail.

I am not aware of any law that says citizens can possess MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems), otherwise colloquially known as shoulder-launched anti-aircraft weapons. See U.S.C. 18 § 2332g for more on this. (Machine guns and M134 Miniguns aren’t anti-aircraft weapons.) For the record, civilians also can’t own chemical weapons or biological weapons, both of which could be broadly construed as “arms.” I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of that prohibition. We’ll never know.

We can’t have a perfect world. Of course criminals will find guns. Criminals will also find anthrax. My argument is that gun ownership should not be perceived as a right; it should be perceived as a privilege on par with owning an automobile. You don’t have a right to own an automobile — and I argue that this view should be applied to guns. Keep in mind an important distinction: Automobiles exist to transport people; guns exist to destroy things (target practice) or to kill (hunting). In other words, because guns are used for violent purposes, the rules and regulations for owning a gun would be far tighter and stricter than the laws we have for owning and using an automobile. For example, you can drive a car across state lines. In my ideal post–Second Amendment world, would a gun owner be able to travel across state lines with a gun? That’s a decision that the states would decide.