David Kopel debunks a stupid set of claims with a made-up set of indices that proves nothing, all promulgated by the idiots at Duke University (among others).  We’ve run into these dummies before.

The authors, one at Duke, and one at Wesleyan University (who has probably never shot a firearm in her life), should read Kopel’s analysis and be ashamed for the poor “research” and bad analysis and writing they did.

Anyway, if you want to read all about this stupid notion of the lethality index, read Kopel’s analysis of what these writer claim.  I found the most interesting part of Kopel’s article to be these few paragraphs.

Miller and Tucker write:

The Founders lived in a period when they could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because the basic flintlock hadn’t really become significantly more lethal in the previous 150 or so years. If the Constitution had been written in the middle of the nineteenth century, instead of the 1780s, the Founders would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. (p. 2511).

This is incorrect. The American colonists from Europe who arrived in the early 17th century came mainly with matchlocks. In a matchlock, pressing the trigger lowers a smoldering hemp cord to touch the gunpowder in the firing pan. Over the course of the century, Americans shifted to the more expensive flintlock. In a flintlock, pressing the trigger causes a sharpened flint (held in the gun’s “jaws”) to fall forward. The flint strikes a piece of metal, and the shower of sparks ignites the gunpowder in the firing pan.

Unlike matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept always-ready. There is no smoldering cord to give away the location of the user. Flintlocks are much more reliable than matchlocks, and all the more so in adverse weather.

Americans made the shift from matchlocks to flintlocks sooner than did European armies or European civilians, because the flintlock was so vastly superior for use in the dense woods of the eastern seaboard, and for Indian fighting, which was very different from the rigidly organized, linear tactics of European warfare. For the same reasons, American Indians greatly preferred flintlocks to matchlocks. The TLI of a 17th century musket is 19 and the TLI of an 18th century flintlock is 43. So the transition of firearm type in the American colonies more than doubled the TLI. There is no reason to believe that the American Founders were ignorant of how much better their own firearms were compared to those of the early colonists.

Besides, the men who penned and approved the 2A had spent their lives and fortunes on overthrowing tyranny, which is the singular point of the 2A.  It would be idiotic to believe they would have written the 2A any other way based on a “lethality index” created by ne’er-do-wells in the twenty first century.