Thread by @Rand_Simberg

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG This reminds me of my open letter to Bill O'Reilly: transterrestrial.com/2012/12/28/sto…

"For only $4.99, with not so much as an ID requirement, let alone a background check, I was able to purchase an “assault keyboard,” with several internet hotkeys."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "[The keyboard] was fully automatic–holding down any key would result in a torrent of characters being spit out, hundreds per minute. I even saw teenaged children buying them."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "The Founders would realize also, just as Bill O’Reilly and I do today, that no one, other than the police and politicians, needs the kind of “idea assault” publishing capability offered by word processors, blogging software, and even fifteen-page-per-minute ink-jet printers..."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "..., which really have no legitimate use–they only propagate calumny and wrong-headed notions, tragically damaging innocent celebrities’ egos, sometimes permanently."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "Let’s be reasonable–of course it’s fine to let people have typewriters, and copiers, as long as they don’t have a paper magazine of more than a quarter-ream capacity, and can’t print more than two pages per minute in high-density color."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "There are legitimate uses for such things–printing up book reports for school, making PTA meeting notices and party invitations, and the like."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "Of course, we should outlaw the cheap Sunday-night specials, old manual machines still available in pawn shops, with sticky keys that cause ink stains, & from which a large number of late term papers are produced by the criminal procrastinating class during the witching hours."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "When the Founders wrote the First Amendment, they could never have conceived a technology that would allow anyone to publish anything at any time, at almost no cost, and have it readable by millions instantaneously."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG surely the Founders never intended for *every single citizen* to be able to exercise such a right–in their wisdom, they would have known it would lead to chaos and unfettered thought."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "They couldn’t possibly have imagined the rapid-fire distribution of dangerous ideas made possible by twenty-first-century technology."

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG These tweets are excerpts from this First Amendment analog to the ahistorical (and generally ignorant) arguments against modern guns that I wrote several years ago: transterrestrial.com/2012/12/28/sto…

@chasrmartin @JammieWF @NewYorkStateAG "I'm not worried because my AR-15 self-identifies as an undocumented handheld wireless peacekeeping device of color."

transterrestrial.com/2019/07/23/rap…