One of the more amusing arguments made by citizen control cultists is that they think you shouldn’t be able to own arms of military value, even though that was precisely what the Founding Fathers intended for Americans to have.

The Second Amendment was never about hunting or even personal defense, but was instead about ensuring that Americans would always be armed with weapons of contemporary military utility to depose both foreign invaders and domestic tyranny.

As we’ve noted before:

At the time that the Second Amendment was written, citizens owned and possessed or were familiar with the following technologies:

• edged weapons (knives, swords, spears, etc)
• muskets
• shotguns
• blunderbusses
• rifles
• pistols (both fixed and revolving barrels)
• the breech-loading Ferguson rifle, which fired four times as fast as contemporary muskets and which saw service during the Revolutionary War
• a quiet 30-shot rifle with fast-loading 21-round magazines called the Girandoni (pictured below) developed circa 1779 (Thomas Jefferson purchased two of them)
• hand grenades
• cannons
• howitzers
• pivot guns
• mortars
• rockets (“red glare” included)
• early auto-cannons (the Puckle Gun, circa 1718)
• early machine guns (Belton’s “new improved gun” commissioned by the Continental Congress for George Washington’s Continental Army in 1777, an order later cancelled due to cost)
• surface warships
• submarines (the Turtle was supported by General Washington, and used in the Revolutionary War)
• biological weapons (including smallpox) had been used in previous wars in North America including the French and Indian War
• chemical weapons (Admittedly, they were in a developmental lull during this time. The last prior use of “pure” chemical warfare had been by the English Navy, which used powdered calcium oxide to blind the French fleet during a battle during the reign of Henry III. The “traditional” poisoning of enemy food and water supplies was still known during sieges)

Nuclear weapons are some of the few weapons that the Founders might not have been able to envision (early manned aircraft had already taken flight in the form of hot-air balloons, and Leonardo de Vinci had designed tanks), and so perhaps they might not constitute “arms” under the Founder’s definition. I will concede that the Founders would not likely support the private ownership of a city-killing weapon such a nuclear weapon. Virtually everything else, however, they knew of in one form or another… and approved.

You’ll note that one of the weapons the Founders would have known of (and approved of) included the forerunner of all current weapons short of nuclear weapons, and explicitly included tanks, such as the one Leonardi Di Vinci designed in 1487.

Like military aircraft and flamethrowers, tanks are perfectly legal to own… and a large batch of them has recently come on the market for sale.

Jacques Littlefield amassed an amazing collection of military vehicles in his lifetime, and by the time he died in 2009, he has amassed more than 200 armored vehicles… more than some armies. A number of vehicles from his collection are now for sale, and will be auctioned off in July.

Would you like a Centurion Main Battle Tank? They have one, and it can be yours for an estimated $200,000.

Are you a World War II history buff? Why not drive this Sherman home?

Would you prefer the ultimate expression of the Sherman? Try this Israeli T50. The main gun works!

My personal favorite in the Littlefield auction is the M5 Stuart named “Rattletrap.”

I’ve seen one of these run and fire its main gun as recently as several years ago, and while it is certainly obsolete by modern standards, it is relatively small and fast and easier to maintain than some of the larger vehicles.

While it has to be absolutely terrifying to citizen control cultists, we have a right to bear “arms,” and that indeed include tanks.