SORRY FOR THE LIGHT POSTINGS: It was a busy day, and after I got home with takeout sushi (and managed to squeeze in the brief post below) I had to go back out and pick up and then deliver some prescriptions for my mother-in-law.

But what made me late getting home originally was a field trip with my Advanced Constitutional Law seminar. We’ve been doing the right to keep and bear arms, so I arranged a field trip to Guncraft Sports, which has an excellent indoor range and instructional facilities.

We compared the differences in guns protected and unprotected under the Tennessee Constitution’s right to arms provision with the difference between legal and banned weapons under the federal assault weapons ban, with examples. (Guncraft also sells used guns, and therefore had grandfathered pre-ban weapons). The Tennessee rule is functional: guns that are the “ordinary military equipment” are protected. (The Tennessee right to arms, according to the Tennessee Supreme Court, exists “to keep in awe those who are in power” by making a revolution possible. Read a long treatment here, or a shorter one here.) Those that are only useful for crime — chiefly derringers and the like — are not.

The federal “assault weapon” ban, on the other hand, is basically cosmetic, as illustrated by the comparison of an semiautomatic “assault weapon” in .223 caliber with flash hider, pistol grip, and bayonet lug and a traditional Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle in .223 without those features. Functionally, they’re identical: both will shoot the same bullets as fast as you pull the trigger, and there aren’t any drive-by bayonetings. The Ruger just looks old-fashioned. You can explain this stuff, but it’s helpful to show it.

The students got a chance to shoot a variety of guns, from a .45 automatic to a .357 magnum revolver to an HK MP5 submachinegun, which last was especially popular with a couple of the women. Indeed, the bellicose-women trend was pretty visible in the class. All the students had been shooting before, something you probably wouldn’t find in a law school in the Northeast or in California, but the women were notably enthusiastic. (One even knew from experience that Tuesday is “ladies’ day” — free range time — at Guncraft.)

I suppose that in some ways the teaching value would have been higher if some of the students hadn’t had any experience with guns. On the other hand, perhaps the legal parts of the lesson would have been eclipsed by the sheer novelty of the experience. And I’m just happy to have had a successful field trip in a class that doesn’t lend itself to field trips very well. The Environmental Law folks get to go to the Smoky Mountains and measure air quality with lasers. I couldn’t match that, but this was pretty good.