So I've had some time to read the Heller decision, and my biggest concern with it, as a gun rights supporter, is this verbiage:
... It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service--M-16 rifles and the like--may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment's ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.
The court's writing here is essentially that "M-16s aren't covered, because they're not the sorts of things people have lawfully got around the house."
But the fundamental problem with this logic is that the reason people don't have M-16s around the house (in any numbers) is because they've been told by the government since 1939 that they can't.
The Court's logic here is circular. They don't want to override the 1939 prohibitions on automatic weapons and such, while still saying it's an individual right. But if it's an individual right to have "militia" weapons, the number of lawfully owned automatic weapons surely would have grown over the years.
In other words, the only reason there aren't a number of those types of weapons in place, is because there have been laws of questionable validity over the years preventing them. But now that they're "not common" (because of the government influence), they're not covered, which makes no sense whatsoever.
I think you're seeing it backwards, ie, "The M16 may not be really all that useful against a stealth bomber but it's all 'the militia' have got, so we can't take it away from them w/o getting rid of the militia entirely"? That's how I read it, anyway.
The specific mention of a specific weapon is the poor choice, IMHO, as it "fixes" a particular doctrinal notion: the M16 was originally a bullet-hose, light and easy to carry in the jungle. Doctrine morphed it into the "Garand Lite" of the A2 and now the "uber-SMG with LAZERS" of the M4/A4. My point being, no one thinks the M1903 is a hyper-deadly assasult weapon, but in 1917, it was.