The Glade 4.0

I suppose we could have saved everyone a lot of trouble by linking to an NRA pamphlet.

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At the time of the founding of our nation, privateers were still relatively commonplace. So, yes, there were privately owned cannons. In fact, the Constitution grants the power to issue letters of marque. So I would say it implicitly condones privately owned cannons in such a fashion that makes it difficult to argue that bearing arms didn't cover cannons.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

It's still legal to own a muzzle-loading cannon.

It is what it is, and it says what it says. We reluctantly accept certain narrow limits on other rights when compelling public interest requires it, so just like you can't shout fire in a theater, you can't buy a nuke. Beyond that kind of obviousness...knock yourself out. If you can find someone willing to sell you a tank with a working gun, I don't think the Constitution allows Congress to prevent you from buying it. That said, I do think registration and "shall issue" licensing laws are permissible, at least for certain weaponry.

So you find Wisconsin, Illinois, and California in violation with their "will not issue" policies and patent violation of other states' stance on carry permits?

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I haven't really thought through the CCW debate, so I can't say definitively what my position is on it, but my instinct is that "shall issue" should probably be the Constitutional standard applicable to both the Feds and the States (via incorporation). That doesn't necessarily mean CA has to honor a license granted in another state, though. For instance, CA could argue that it has a compelling state interest in requiring a background check before issuing a license and that it is therefore Constitutional to reject a license from a state that doesn't require background checks. That's just off the top of my head, though. Like I said, I haven't thought through the issues enough yet. Also, my view of the 2nd Amendment has been evolving in recent years toward a more libertarian perspective.

I would say that the full faith and credit clause should obligate any state to honor a CCW permit from any other state.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Doesn't apply to the 2nd Amendment and Marriages ... at least in practice

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Good Point. As I said before a cannon with ball shot would past the "reasonably easy to avoid collateral damage test."

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Tactical nukes?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

FF&C is one of those screwy areas of Con law where the words on the page tell you very little about what the actual law is. The key portion of the text (for these purposes) reads, "Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state." A broad reading would suggest that any license, permit or authorization issued in one state would have to be honored in all states, but that wasn't the intent and has never been the practice. The point/practice is really focused more on getting court judgments enforced in other states - if you sue me in a MA court over a contract dispute and win, you can then take that judgment to CA and get a court there to enforce the judgment against me. Things like licenses, permits, etc. are usually not considered to be binding across state lines. For example, a fishing license issued by the state of VT entitles you to fish in VT, not in NY (even if the license in question purports to cover NY too). Arguably, the same logic applies to CCW permits, marriage licenses, and so forth. Otherwise, states would basically have no control over their own public policies.

True, but that does not mean it shouldn't. Both cases would seem to be prime examples of statuses that exist in all states and therfore every state ought to recognize every other state's marriages.

In regard to the 2nd amendment I'm not entirely sure what you mean beyond the CCWs already mentioned.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I would point out that marriage licenses (at least opposite sex ones) and driver's licenses are recognized by all states from all others, and because of the essentially permanent nature of such licensing that they fall essentially under the same category as court judgements and are, in fact, legally treated that way. Birth and death certificates are similar in that regard.

Therefore, it seems a CCW license should be the same since, like a driver's license, it is essentially permanent, really subject only to trivial burdens of renewal and good behavior.

A fishing license, despite sharing the name, is an altogether different animal, that is issued on a very temporary basis and is specific to the time and conditions appropriate to where it is issued; it does not really seem to be a "public act, record, or judicial proceeding" except in the most ancillary sense.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. All nuclear weapons are strategic, even if they are designed for physical employment in a tactical role. As such, they represent a strategic threat to other countries, and therefore fall completely within the purview of the Federal government.

Any attempt to equate them to cannons is simply a way of ignoring that they have no 18th century equivalent, not even peripherally; the concept of a strategic weapon was not something the founding fathers could possibly have understood was actually possible to build if they could envision it at all. Rough analogies can be drawn between modern artillery or even fighter aircraft or warships, but not nuclear weapons.

As such, they are utterly outside the purview of the 2nd amendment, and will remain so until and unless we advance to some sort of interstellar situation out of science fiction in which people need nucelar weapons to defend themselves and their starships (or whatever) against likely everyday threats. At that point they would no longer be strategic weapons and would fall under the equivalence to the armed privateers that have been mentioned.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What if we were to design something with about 1/10 the yield of the W54, that was the rough equivalent of 1 ton of TNT?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I do not know if that is physically possible. To the best of my understanding, there is a lower limit for the yield that can be produced from a nuclear explosion; as it was the W-54 was horrendously inefficient in terms of mass-to-weight, and such inefficiency might, below a certain design yield, reach the point where a sufficient chain reaction for a nuclear explosion simply might not be made to happen. I'm not a physicist so I really can't answer that issue any better than that but maybe Rafael or Arathain could give you a better answer.

However, lets assume it could be done.

In and of itself, this would not be problematic; 1 ton is simply a relatively large aircraft bomb. Radiation complicates things a bit, but lets leave that aside. All you would have is a horrendously expensive and complicated 2000-pound-equivalent bomb.

That, however, does not change the fact that this baby nuclear weapon remains a strategic weapon because it represents the ability to create much larger ones, and larger ones that would be vastly more efficient and cheaper in a yield-to-cost ratio simply because of the realities of physics. Similarly, the 2000-pound HE bomb is not strategic because much larger yields are directly proportional to much larger weights, and of course before long the HE bomb is far too heavy to actually use. The nuke has the opposite phenomenon until you get a a yield of around 6 megatons per metric ton of bomb which is, to my knowledge, the upper practical efficiency limit. Or, to put it another way, our fictional 1-ton nuke has a yield 1/475,000 of the W88 warhead but clearly the W-88 does not weigh 475,000 times more than it, or 47,500 times more than the W54.

In other words, the weapon is different in nature, and simply drawing an arbitrary line at a certain yield still creates all the strategic problems with other countries that a much larger weapon would. If private citizens have access to complicated, purposefully-inefficient 1-ton weapons, they easily have access to weapons up into the low hundreds of kilotons without even needing fusion weapons. This is a strategic threat, both to the other citizens of the country they inhabit but to every other country. I would not think it an exaggeration to say that other nuclear powers would expand their arsenals and would be far more likely to strike first now that they simply do not know who controls what in this country.

The 2nd amendment does not cover weapons like this in any way. It can't; they have no equivalent at the time and could not possibly have been a serious consideration in wording it. I find it hard to believe that more than maybe one or two of them could have even wrapped their minds around the concept, starting as they were from an 18th century knowledge base.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Still rather indiscriminate for self/property defense purposes as per the article I posted.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I think there still are tactical nukes, unless they disassembled them from that big bore artillery experiment they did in the 50's.

There isn't really a minimum amount needed in modern (non gun type) devices since they depend on compression via conventional explosions to reach critical mass/volume.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

To the best of my knowledge all tactical nuclear weapons except for the B61 dropped from aircraft have been disassembled. They have definitely all been deactivated. The actual warheads from some of them may still be stockpiled but they are not mated to any weapon system and probably don't even have one that is compatible.

In any case "tactical nuclear weapon" gives the wrong impression, and is a term I ahve come to dislike. A tactical nuclear weapon really just refers to the type of target it is likely to be employed against. Any tactical exchange is highly likely to result in a strategic exchange in a matter of hours, and many tactical weapons like the aforementioned B61 are also used as strategic weapons in different models or when delivered by different platforms. Tactical weapons are generally smaller than strategic weapons in yield, but event hat depends on the type of tactical weapon in question; many naval tactical weapons had much higher yields than those intended for land attack, and ICBM/SLBM warheads as low as 40-50kt have been in use at various times, while land-attack tactical weapons in excess of 20kt have been manufactured as well.

The term gives the impression there is some sort of barrier between the tactical and strategic use of nuclear weapons, when the only barrier is the calculus of national leaders facing both possible national annihiliation (not to mention personal) and the destruction of ability to retaliate if they do not strike.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."