At last, a couple of federal judges have followed to a logical conclusion the “originalist” fallacy often applied to the Second Amendment. In a case before a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., that seeks to undo gun regulations in Maryland and beyond, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III had a question for an advocate representing gun rights groups.
“Have you ever fired an M16?” the judge asked, as reported last week by the Washington Post. The advocate said he had not “I have,” said Wilkinson, an Army veteran President Ronald Reagan appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. The judge said he remembered firing an M16 at targets of human silhouettes while serving in the 1960s. “When the bullets struck the human being, it splintered them into all sorts of different pieces,” he said during oral arguments in cases challenging gun laws in three states “There was very little left of the human being,” Wilkinson said. “And that was a much earlier model of the M16. It’s since been perfected and perfected and been turned into a more lethal weapon than the one I used.”
A civilian version of the M16 is the semi-automatic AR-15.
