Senate Candidate's Musket Myth

Abdul El-Sayed, a Michigan U.S. Senate candidate, told a Midland town hall crowd that the Second Amendment only protects muskets because that's what the Founders had in 1791 — and he says this while claiming he'll "swear an oath to the Constitution."

What's new: El-Sayed invoked originalism to argue gun rights are frozen in the 18th century. "When they promised the right to bear arms, they had muskets," he said. "So, yeah, everyone should have equal rights to a musket." He's running for Senate on this reasoning.

The legal reality: The Supreme Court already rejected this argument — unanimously. Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016) held the Second Amendment protects weapons that didn't exist at the Founding, striking down a stun-gun ban on exactly those grounds. District of Columbia v. Heller said the same thing about modern firearms generally. Originalism doesn't mean the right only covers 1791 technology — it means the right itself, and its scope, carries forward. The First Amendment protects podcasts and the internet, not just printing presses. The Second works the same way.

El-Sayed's timing is almost comic. He made the musket comment not long after Janet Carter, Everytown Law's managing director of Second Amendment litigation, sat for an interview defending "assault weapons" bans by pointing to pistol grips and detachable magazines as uniquely military features.

What they're saying: Carter told The Center Square that AR-15 features "were on these weapons when they were created for the military" and "are not features that somebody needs for self-defense or for hunting."

Reality check: That's not how the history runs. The Winchester Model 1907 — a semi-automatic hunting rifle with a detachable magazine holding more than ten rounds, firing one shot per trigger pull just like an AR-15 — hit the market in 1907, decades before anyone built an assault rifle. The M1 Carbine, a genuine World War II combat weapon with a 15-round detachable magazine, was sold through the early 1960s at five-and-dime stores for $20 to NRA members. It lacks a pistol grip or forward grip entirely and still wasn't banned under the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons law.

Zoom in: The actual military-grade descendant of the M1, the selective-fire M2 Carbine, had a 30-round magazine and a rate of fire comparable to the M16 — with none of the "scary" features Carter cited. Meanwhile the one real legal boundary on full-auto ownership, the Hughes Amendment to the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, already closed the door on new machine gun transfers to civilians. The "weapon of war" framing skips past the law that actually exists.

The bottom line: A Senate candidate telling voters the Second Amendment stopped at muskets, paired with an Everytown lawyer calling standard rifle features inherently military, isn't a coincidence — it's the same talking point delivered two different ways. Courts have already rejected both versions.