The president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) says that the Second Amendment was designed to protect the right to own muskets and the AR-15 military-style assault rifle — like the one used to slaughter 20 children in Newtown — is just “the musket of today.”

“This nation was founded as a result of the fact that people – citizens – who had a musket above the fireplace grabbed the gun when an emergency confronted them,” NRA President David Keene told Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in an interview published by The Daily Caller on Sunday. “For four million Americans, the AR-15 is the musket of today.”

“You hear some of the gun controllers saying, ‘Well, the Second Amendment only applied to muskets, it didn’t apply to AR-15s or semi-automatic pistols or semi-automatic shotguns, for that matter.’ That was handled by the Supreme Court in the Heller decision. That was the technology of the day. The technology of this day is different, and those guns are as protected by the Constitution today as the single-shot musket in the 1780s and 1790s.”

Keene pointed out that the AR-15 was the “civilian semi-automatic platform that the Army uses” and if President Barack Obama was successful at banning it, “that would make people less safe” and “take the firearms of over four million people who are law-abiding citizens and punish them because two or three people misused a firearm.”

In fact, the bill recently introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) would ban the sale, transfer, manufacturing and import of 158 types of semi-automatic assault weapons, but it does not propose confiscating “firearms of over four million people.”