Mike McIntire
speaker
322 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Mike McIntire’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The AR-15 is a slightly different animal because it's, first of all, the pedigree of it only goes back to the 1950s, and it's really only taken off as sort of a cultural icon among gun owners since the early 2000s.
A number of things happened during that period that caused a huge escalation of gun
AR-15 type weapons in circulation.
They went from maybe 400,000 or so that were sold, manufactured and imported in 2006 to the millions each year by the time you get to like 2010 and beyond.
So there are no doubt a lot of them in circulation, but I think the question becomes what qualifies as common use, right?
I mean, this is what some lower courts have been grappling with.
As a percentage of the people in the United States, population-wise, the number of people who actually have an AR-15 is quite low.
But then within the group that's gun owners, there's, you know, it's quite popular.
So these are the kind of conundrums that I think the court has created for itself that they need to sort out.
And I think a lot of people on both ends of the divide when it comes to gun rights and gun control are looking to this approach.
But I do think given statements that some of the justices have already made in the past, including Justice Kavanaugh, who as an aside in an earlier case just sort of mentioned he thought that AR-15s were unquestionably in common use, I think it's likely that they're going to decide that this type of gun is and that therefore these bans are unconstitutional.
Well, at the time that the founders were drafting first the Constitution and then the Bill of Rights, there was a lot of concern about the role of the citizens and militia going forward because a big fear of the founding generation was that a professional standing army could be misused by a despotic ruler against the people.
And militia was the answer to avoiding that, they felt.
And so that was an existential threat that they wanted to deal with.
And it could also serve in the role of defending the state against an external threat.
So it was sort of intended to be both kind of a bulwark against potential federal tyranny and also just a simple security function.
And anti-federalists, who were those that were concerned about states' rights, were
Complaining that, you know, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as it was shaping up didn't go far enough to protect gun rights, essentially.
And James Madison, who wrote the Second Amendment, was getting somewhat annoyed with some of the arguments that were being raised as potentially, he felt, unrealistic scenarios of government oppression.
And he had a great quote that I've always liked.
Showing 41–60 of 322 · page 3 of 17
← Previous
Next →