In 2001, a Los Angeles Times op-ed laid out what the author believed was the definitive limit of Second Amendment protection. American citizens, the author wrote, had the constitutional right to own flintlock muskets and pistols — and nothing more.
“I believe that the framers of the Bill of Rights intended that the right of every American citizen to bear flintlock muskets and pistols should not be infringed,” the author wrote. “I believe that American citizens today — without fingerprinting, without a license, without a background check — ought to be able to own as many flintlock muskets and pistols as they want. If they want to fill up their garages with them, that should be nobody’s business but their own.”
The piece was satirical in framing but earnest in substance. The argument — that the Second Amendment’s “arms” should be limited to 18th-century weapons technology — was a serious gun-control position in 2001 and remained so for the next two decades. Variations on it appeared regularly in mainstream commentary, in academic legal arguments, and occasionally in judicial opinions.
Twenty-five years later, the position has reversed. The Associated Press published a piece on May 14 taking the opposite stance: that the lack of regulatory infrastructure around muzzleloading firearms is itself a problem requiring legislative attention.
TTAG covered the AP story and the underlying antique firearm regulatory framework at length last week. The piece you’re reading isn’t about that legal landscape — it’s about how dramatically the gun-control commentariat’s position has shifted on what the Second Amendment supposedly does and doesn’t protect.
The 2001 framing
The LA Times op-ed represented what was, at the time, an emerging strategic frame in gun-control commentary. The argument went: the Second Amendment was written in 1791, when “arms” meant flintlocks. The framers could not have anticipated cartridge firearms, semiautomatic weapons, or modern firearms technology. Therefore the Constitution’s protection should be limited to what existed in 1791, leaving all subsequent firearms technology — meaning effectively every firearm in commercial production today — outside Second Amendment protection and available for regulation or prohibition.
The argument has obvious legal problems. The First Amendment doesn’t apply only to quill-and-parchment newspapers. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply only to physical searches of 18th-century homes. The Constitution’s protections extend to modern technology in every other context. But the flintlock-only framing had rhetorical power, and gun-control advocates leaned on it heavily through the early 2000s.
It was also a frame that gun-rights advocates were happy to engage with — because the implicit concession was clear: even if we accept the absurd premise, flintlocks themselves were absolutely protected.
The 1968 Gun Control Act exempts antique firearms manufactured before 1898 from federal firearms regulation entirely, treating modern replicas of flintlocks and percussion-cap firearms similarly. The flintlock framing was rhetorical losing ground for gun-control advocates: even the maximally restrictive reading of “arms” still protected the flintlock.
The 2026 reversal
Fast-forward 25 years. The AP article from May 14 takes the position that flintlock and muzzleloader exemptions are themselves a problem.
“With 165 grains of black powder in the barrel, a .75-caliber Brown Bess flintlock musket like the ones the redcoats carried in 1776 can hurl a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet per second,” AP author Kevin Breed wrote. “Imagine what that can do to a human body. Now, imagine that it’s almost completely exempt from gun regulations.”
The piece walks through the federal antique firearm exemption, discusses state-level variation, and frames the regulatory gap as a problem requiring attention. Maryland’s Shadé’s Law — passed after a convicted offender killed his ex-girlfriend with a cap-and-ball revolver in 2017 — gets cited as the appropriate policy response that should be replicated elsewhere.
The contrast with the 2001 LA Times framing is stark. In 2001, the gun-control commentariat’s position was that the Second Amendment protected only flintlocks. In 2026, the position is that flintlocks too require regulation. The Second Amendment-protected category that gun-control advocates were willing to concede 25 years ago has now disappeared entirely.
What this signals
The reversal isn’t an accident, and it’s not an inconsistency the gun-control commentariat is going to publicly acknowledge. It reflects two strategic developments over the past quarter century.
First, the post-Heller and post-Bruen legal landscape made the “flintlock-only” framing untenable as a serious legal argument. The Supreme Court in Heller (2008) explicitly rejected the framing, noting that the Second Amendment protects “arms” in common civilian use, including modern firearms. Bruen (2022) reinforced this with the historical-tradition test. The flintlock-only position had to be abandoned not because gun-control advocates changed their minds, but because the Court closed the door on the legal theory.
Second, with the flintlock-only fallback closed off, gun-control advocates needed a new framework for regulating firearms. The current approach — accepting that Bruen requires historical analogs while pushing back the perimeter of what’s protected — naturally extends to argue that even the formerly-protected flintlocks should be regulated where state legislators can manage it.
In other words: the position 25 years ago was “the Second Amendment only protects flintlocks.” The position today is “even flintlocks should be regulated.” The constitutional carve-out the gun-control commentariat was willing to concede in 2001 has been quietly eliminated from their public framing.
Whether anyone in gun-control commentary will publicly engage with this reversal remains to be seen. Charlton Heston’s famous “from my cold, dead hands” flintlock moment at the 2000 NRA convention drew mockery in the AP article — Breed concluded that Heston “needn’t have worried” because the flintlock was never threatened.
The 2001 LA Times op-ed and the 2026 AP article, read together, suggest Heston was reading the trajectory more accurately than his critics realized.
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