Recall, if you will, that the very nature of the topic is personal attitudes toward guns and their effects, and that to address those areas with those with whom one differs will almost necessarily appear to the casual reader to be insulting.
I’ll overlook the false equivalence in this note.
Thank you.
What’s amazing is that they changed that in 2008 and I had no idea. I guess I’ve just never felt the urge to call someone a liar since then.
Such as those requiring background checks to determine if one has a record of mental illness? Like the ones in the Colorado laws, which are still in effect (and which you acknowledge knowing little about other than that they’re gun-control regulations), but whose proponents you denounce anyway
If only there were any data to support that. Manchin-Toomey, for instance, had 80% support. But that’s extreme, is it?
No, not only them. That wasn’t the question. But it’s an example.
Unless your argument is that NRA membership equals mental health, that isn’t an argument at all. The point was about the position itself, that a fantasy is real and that killing is abstract, and whether that is mentally healthy or not. Again, do you think it is?
Yet. Rome wasn’t torn down in a day.
More’s the pity.
Which is why, in addition to my paleoconservative wish that our enormous, expensive standing military could be scaled back, in a perfect world cits could buy and own any weapon that wasn’t indiscriminately destructive.
Which means we’re screwed if the political culture ever changes and someday some general decides to cross the Rubicon.
Nukes are what turned the world upside-down in terms of military and defense policy. A WW2-style mass invasion of N. America simply couldn’t happen today. The Second Amendment is still relevant for internal reasons.
Given the political leanings of the military and the NRA, I think it is more likely that the NRA would be on the side of the military coupe rather than against it.
But realistically in order for any of this to occur the entire political landscape would have to change so radically that whether or not some law on magazine size was passed or repealed in 2013 would be irrelevant.
That’s one of the main points of the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights—to establish certain principles and rights which are not easily alterable, to protect the rights of the minority against a tyranny of the majority. Elected representatives and all other public servants are obligated to obey the Constitution over everything else, even over the wishes of those that they represent.
Religious freedom is one of these principles. The Constitution affirms and protects the right of every American to adhere to and practice whatever religion he will; and forbids government from violating this right.
If the people of a community want government to favor one religion over the others, or to forbid one religion, then the only legitimate path to this policy would be to ratify a new amendment to the Constitution, which supersedes the First Amendment, and which establishes the authority of government to enact such a policy. By wise design, amending the Constitution is possible, if there is enough overwhelming public support for it, but it is not easy to do.
Short of such an Amendment, any public official who represented a population that wanted religious freedom to be violated would be required to disregard this desire, in favor of upholding the Constitution.
The Constitution also affirms and protects the right of every free American to keep and bear arms, and again, forbids any violation of this right.
Here is a case that is not like the hypothetical of a population that wants to do away with religious freedom. Here, the Constitution explicitly affirms the right to keep and bear arms, and here,the population of this state has made it absolutely clear that they wish for this right to be upheld. Corrupt public servants violated not only the will of their constituents, but the Constitution itself. This is an act of corruption, and gross, criminal-level malfeasance; and those guilty of it deserve much, much worse than to simply be removed from office. Hard prison time would be much more appropriate. In my opinion, any public servant who willfully has such a role in so blatantly violating the Constitution ought to face a minimum of twenty years in prison, and thereafter be permanently barred from ever again holding any public office.
This is a whole different issue. One serious shortcoming I see in the way government works is the disconnect between costly public services, and the taxes to pay for them. It’s easy to get the public to support costly benefits to themselves, but not nearly so easy to get the public to support tax increases. We have a model of government that encourages and promotes fiscal irresponsibility.
Much better would be a requirement that every proposed benefit be tied to a tax that will pay for it, rather than it just being assumed that it will be payed for out of a general fund, and that any increase in taxes to feed that general fund will occur separately.
Which industry? And, did you mean to include the “not”?
Actually, the 2nd Amendment speaks only of “the people” and is limited neither to American citizens nor to free persons. By a strict reading, prisoners have the right to keep and bear arms. Or slaves, when there were slaves. But no one ever read it that way.
:rolleyes: Ah. The “insurrectionary theory” of the 2nd Amendment. Less said of that the better. The original text of the Constitution does not sanction insurrection, naming it as one of the few circumstances when the right of habeas corpus may be suspended, and it expressly authorizes the President to command all militia. The broadest conceivable reading of the 2nd Amendment does not change any of that one iota. The notion that we should have a smaller Army is defensible, but the notion that we should have a smaller Army to make it easier for civilians to fight it is preposterous.
Not to hijack the thread, but does this mean that if a religion wanted to practice human sacrifice, the Constitution must be upheld and we must allow them to do so?
No, the Constitution forbids “respecting an establishment of religion”- enshrining an official government religion, or having the government favor one religion over another.
Well, the First Amendment also says Congress shall make no law “prohibting the free exercise” of religion, or “abridging the freedom of speech”, and yet we have no problem with “common sense” restrictions like totally prohibiting the free exercise of Huitzilopochtli worshippers if they want to sacrifice people to the Hummingbird God in order to keep the Sun coming up every day; or “abridging the freedom of speech” of child pornographers.
A key difference is that (despite some claims to the contrary) there is no real support for outlawing the free exercise of religion. Sure, there’s debates about stuff on the fringes of free exercise, like allowing members of American Indian religions to use peyote in religious ceremonies, or whether or not businesses owned by religious people have to provide healthcare plans that can be used by employees to purchase birth control. And there are debates about stuff on the fringes of free speech, like campaign contributions or commercial speech or obscenity laws.
But–“Everyone has a right to worship or not worship as they see fit” and “Everyone has the right to speak their mind freely (including criticizing the powers that be)” are pretty bedrock to almost all Americans.
By contrast, a substantial chunk of the American population regards the Second Amendment as some sort of unfortunate inkblot; worse yet, rather than campaigning to repeal it, they’ve spent the last few decades trying to pretend we can just ignore it; that the government can and should pretty much outlaw private ownership of nearly all firearms, and restrict the hell out of the ones that aren’t flat-out illegal. This does make any sort of discussion of “common sense” gun regulations difficult, since the other side’s definition of “common sense” is so radical.
As Will Rogers said, “Your right to swing your fist ends, where my nose begins.” In a perfect world, we would be able to hold every right absolute and inviolable. The reality is that form time to time, one “absolute” right will conflict with another, and a choice will have to be made which one to violate in order to uphold the other.
As essential as religious freedom is, it doesn’t trump another person’s right not to be killed.
Tell that to the Muslims of Murfreesboro, TN.
Remember everyone’s panties in a twist over the supposed mosque at Ground Zero? I think we overrate our devotion to freedom of religion, many would gladly deny it to some religions.
Are there any *other *rights that don’t trump another person’s right not to be killed? :dubious:
That was kind of my point. Why is religious freedom not absolute while gun ownership is?
If you can ever prove that one person, by merely possessing or carrying a gun, violates any right of any other person, then you’ve got a point from which to argue for legitimate restrictions on the right to possess or carry a gun.
But you can’t. There is no right that anyone has, that is violated because someone else ha a gun.
A gun doesn’t become relevant to any violation of rights until the person in possession of it chooses to use it in a manner that violates someone else’s rights; by using it to unjustifiably endanger, threaten, or harm another person. I don’t think any rational person interprets the Second Amendment as affirming any “right” to endanger, threaten, or harm others without just cause.
It’s silly to claim that no one has ever died because someone who was carrying a gun got angry, or drunk, or scared, or did something foolishly unsafe. There are tragic stories in the news every single day about those cases, and in most of them the victim would not be dead if there were not a gun handy.
So, unless you are seriously promoting a fundamental major change in human nature, along with a practical plan for achieving it, then yes, you do have to acknowledge that the mere presence of guns can indeed “endanger, thread, or harm others without just cause.” If you agree, then would you be ready to agree that the Second, however you wish to read it, can be infringed in the cause of eliminating that threat to others’ lives? If not, why not?
You violate no one’s rights by carrying around a suitcase-nuke, either. That does not mean you should be allowed to.
As long as we’re doing reductio ad absurdam:
Here is a list of things that the government of Tampa wanted to ban during the 2012 Republican convention:
The wanted to ban, throughout the entire city of Tampa, firearms…and also: “pieces of wood, hard tubes or anything else that could be used as a club, as well as water guns, super soakers, air guns, paintball guns, explosives, switchblades, hatchets, slingshots, brass knuckles, Mace, chains, crowbars, hammers, shovels, or any container containing urine, fecal matter or other bodily fluid.”
Now things like switchblades are the sort of things that have been banned since the Fifties. But water pistols? “Anything else that could be used as a club”?
In a large area of downtown Tampa–not just inside the building or buildings where the convention was being held, but the whole of downtown Tampa–they wanted to ban “ropes, straps, tape or string longer than 6 inches, glass containers, ceramic vessels, light bulbs, padlocks and bicycle locks, things that could be used as portable shields and gas masks.”
A New York Times editorial referred to these policies as “sensible”.
So–the Second Amendment puts us on a slippery slope to people walking around with suitcase nukes, does it? Apparently gun control puts us on a slippery slope to citywide bans on water pistols and any object “that could be used as a club”, and bans–affecting large areas of a city–on “ropes, straps, tape or string longer than 6 inches”, “padlocks and bicycle locks”, and “light bulbs”.