There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, "The only way to stop a bad guy from swatting you is a good guy with his own personal SWAT team."
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
There's evidence the framers of the Constitution intended for citizens to be able to own weapons that gave the federal government pause if the federal government decided to overstep its bounds.
Specifically, even in 1787 it was seeming likely that there was a good chance that at some point the federal government was going to abolish slavery by force, and the framers of the Constitution needed the southern states on board with the Constitution's stronger central government vs. the Articles of Confederation.
So, they probably intended weapons of some proportionate power compared to contemporary military weapons, but the ultimate underlying motivations are suspect.
On the other hand, I could imagine a world where in 1787 alcohol and/or marijuana were legal in some states and illegal in others and the framers were worried about federal troops imposing national drug policy on drugs that never crossed state lines. In that case, it seems more reasonable, which I guess lends respectability to their reasoning at a medium level of abstraction.
And yet those same people you mock, using only the tools you described, threw off the yoke of the largest world power at the time.
Amongst the reasons they did, were situations eerily similar to what we call "swatting" (and no-knock warrants), which were some motivations behind the fourth amendment.
An amendment that we have, through twisted legal interpretations and arguments for expediency, managed to largely de-fang (civil forfeiture, I'm looking at you).
He graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals and was involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, with over 300 confirmed kills. I think he knows what’s up.
