No it's not. You know who I might trust? US Marshalls on board. Anything less and that's just fucking stupid. You cram in as many people aboard a tin can and expect people to be civil, it wouldn't take very much to watch air accidents go up exponentially. You are conveniently leaving out the human equation here. A US Marshall is on board, doing his/her job. You're willing to let any schmoe with a "permit", for whatever that's worth, carry a weapon on a plane. Could be that he's had a bad day and is not in the right frame of mind to make rational decisions and being armed might just give him reasons to act irrationally. No thank you. I'd rather risk the ridiculously rare event that a terrorist tries to take over a plane than have numerous armed strangers aboard every day.
And apparently you don't think that decompression aboard a plane is a serious enough event to want to prevent. Your concept of airline safety is much different than mine.
Dies(sic) that mean the "don't kill other people" argument also wears thin, or the "don't steal" one? There is no specific mention of an invading army, the intent was "defense of self and others, regardless of the source of the attack."
You forgot this then from your original post:
They had boats, those not-so-mythical things called pirates, terrorists, and invading armies back then, and they dealt with them as they encountered them.
To which I was responding. Ah, then in your second post, you talk about what "the intent" was... So in this enlightened time where you are trying to put together an argument, I might have misread your intent? Do you see where I'm going with this? What gives you special insight to what the Founders intended or that the introduction of new information may change that "intent".
Of course, silly me... Writing letters and sending them to people was a completely foreign concept to them... oh, wait, it wasn't. Oh, maybe the "talking to multiple people at once" part?
Don't be obtuse. You write a letter back in the 1700's, it would take days/weeks/months to get to it's destination. We have the possibility to converse in near real-time on a forum and in real time if we go to something like chat or IRC. Taking your argument to the logical extreme, which you seem so fond of doing, then we really don't have much different than our ancient ancestors from Persia, or even back further. You seem to assume that nothing is that much different from when we finally came out of our caves.
If you were to bring any of the founders to today they would be shocked at where we are and might struggle to understand many concepts we take for granted. This is still a time where they treated diseases with leaches for God's sake. If I showed even Thomas Jefferson my laptop, you think he could immediately get his brain around it? The more and more we progress, the more abstract our concepts become, but no...you seem to think that they'll understand everything and want to continue on just as they did back in 1770.