I'm still going to maintain my (recently remade) Tumblr blog, before anyone asks that. Same username. I'm simply curious what questions you all might have for me, since I see people from Reddit and Voat doing this thing.
Tumblr might be pretty different from any of these sights, but it's worth a shot.
Private citizens owned cannons and artillery shells back then. I'm sure they imagined the path that weapons could take, and it really wasn't until the mid 20th century that restrictions on gun ownership started to creep in. I'm not going to pretend to be a constitutional lawyer (since you'll find plenty of blowhards on both ends of the debate claiming the intentions are clear), but at least the history is fairly unambiguous.
I can understand single shot at a time (or at all) simple pistols and rifles, but even revolvers need to get the boot in my book. much less semi-automatic or automatic weapons.
That's what the US founders assumed as single shot weapons. Hell, they assumed flintlocks! They had no way to predict those sorts of engineering advances.