Abdul El Sayed says right to bear arms meant muskets

That provision grew out of friction over the English Crown’s efforts to use loyal militias to control and disarm dissidents and enhance the Crown’s standing army, among other things, prior to the Glorious Revolution that supplanted King James II in favor of William and Mary.3Footnote Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right 115–16 (1994). The early American experience with militias and military authority would inform what would become the Second Amendment as well.

El-Sayed said it was watching President Barack Obama get elected the following year that opened the path for him to run for office. “[President Clinton] saw something in me I'd never seen in myself. And President Obama showed me something in me I'd never seen in myself. And 19 years later, I'm grateful to be the senator-elect from the state of Michigan,” said El-Sayed.

The Michigan Senate race has shifted 8.49 points toward Democrats compared with the 2024 presidential election.

In a Truth Social post prior the rally, Trump called El-Sayed “a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” adding that he believed the incoming senator wanted “our Country to go to Sharia Law.” · El-Sayed hit back days before Election Day, saying, “I’ll go through a metal detector every day. You sit through a lie detector one time … That’s the deal.” · The Michigan senator-elect’s willingness to work with the president comes after James Talarico, the newly elected Democratic Texas senator, expressed a similar desire to collaborate with Trump and the MAGA movement on affordable healthcare.

While in many ways similar to the AR-15 family of rifles, the MCX relies on a different gas system to operate and cannot be fairly classified as an AR-15. Both weapons can fire the same type of ammunition at roughly the same speeds and share a similar history.

Nor did they exist in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment, the vehicle for applying the Second Amendment to the states, was added to the Constitution. The firearms that existed in 1791 were largely the heavy, slow, cumbersome, and wildly inaccurate single-shot muskets that made up the arsenals on both sides in the Revolutionary War.

As the work of historian Kevin Sweeney demonstrates, Americans were far better armed than their English brethren, but the guns Americans desired were not the heavy military-quality muskets required for eighteenth century ground warfare, but lighter hunting muskets and fowling pieces (for more detail, see Sweeney’s article in the 2013 edited collection The Second Amendment on Trial). In marked contrast to today, government policy in the era of the Second Amendment aimed to encourage Americans to acquire weapons they did not desire, not discourage them from purchasing guns they did desire. Given this fact, almost any effort to draw analogies between Founding law and modern regulation is bound to distort the past it seeks to understand.

MS NOW Pushes Flaky View 2nd Amendment Just for Muskets pic.twitter.com/2sLnSQqYcv— Brad Wilmouth (@bradwilmouth) August 24, 2026 · Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, or at least the Republican appointees, have shown they have a ton of zeal for basically cannibalizing and eliminating common sense gun control regulation because they've adopted an interpretation of the Second Amendment that maintains firearms that didn't exist at the time the Second Amendment was ratified -- those are still constitutionally protected.

Yet that founding principle remains at the center of a modern political battle over firearm bans, constitutional amendments, and the future of the Supreme Court. During an October 17 town hall in Midland, Michigan, El-Sayed attempted to use constitutional originalism to justify a narrower interpretation of the Second Amendment. “When they promised the right to bear arms, they had muskets,” El-Sayed said, before suggesting Americans should have “equal rights to a musket.”