This is from author Neal Stephenson's website. It is taken from an interview he did for Slashdot. I think this point (which Stephenson dismisses on practical grounds) is germane to this thread, particularly in terms of the question of flexibility of terminology. What exactly constitutes a protected arm? Mostly that line of reasoning goes to the absurd, like bombs and tanks. This time it goes to the more subtle methods of defense.
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Originally Posted by Neal Stephenson's website
SLASHDOT: right to keep and bear code - by arashiakari
Do you think that hacking tools should be protected (in the United States) under the second amendment?
NEAL:
Such is the intensity of issues like this that I can't tell whether this is a troll. I'm going to assume it's not, and answer the question seriously.
I'm no constitutional scholar but I'm pretty sure that the Founding Fathers were thinking of flintlocks, not perl scripts, when they wrote the Second Amendment. Now you can dispute that and say "No, anything that enables citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive government is covered by the Second Amendment." There might be something to such an argument. But pragmatically, the question is whether you can get nine (or at least five) non-hacker Supreme Court Justices to see it that way.
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I link only for form - there's not anything else here that relates to our discussion.