The storming of the Bastille, which ushered in the 1789 French Revolution, was motivated by the desire to obtain the gunpowder stored there. Likewise in 1989 Beijing, the Chinese students having found nonviolence futile, tore up the sidewalks and trees for ammunition and barricades. The point is not that the demonstrators should have confronted the army with weapons but that if all Chinese citizens kept arms, their rulers would hardly have dared to massacre the demonstrators, to say nothing of the continuing purges and executions taking place now. Once a population is disarmed, any calamity is possible. Strict registration requirements, introduced in 1926, provided convenient lists of rifle owners and streamlined seizures by the police.
Constitutional principles accommodate modern technology.
If the right to private ownership of firearms is limited to the colonists' muskets, by the same logic, freedom of speech does not over radio, movies and TV, but is confined to the unamplified, untransmitted voice. The private keeping of hand-held personal firearms is within the constitutional design for a counter to government run amok, as when the military and police use such firearms against their fellow nationals. As the Tiananmen Square tragedy showed so graphically, AK-47s fall into that category of weapons, and that is why they are protected by the Second Amendment. Twentieth-century military machines are far from invincible when outflanked by armed citizen guerrillas. Tanks and even high-tech military hardware were unavailing to the U. S. forces in Vietnam and the Russians in Afghanistan.