*Dear *Pink Mist,
**
I never thought I’d be writing one of these letters, but recently I came home from a long shift at the ammunition factory and had the feeling that something was amiss. My hand clutched instinctively at my Smith & Wesson Model 500 as I entered the front door to find a gang of criminal thugs in my living room! There was a long-haired hippie, a turban-wearing terrorist, and a bank robber in a striped shirt and eye mask! I felt a rush of excitement as I realized they were about to consume illegal narcotics, desecrate a flag, and rape my terrified wife, and that they were completely unarmed…
Fap Fap Fap
I am unsurprised that there are multiple interpretations of the 2nd. I would imagine that they form a spectrum of opinions, ranging from strict regulations on the one hand to complete unfettered access to any kind of firearm whatsoever on the other end. The other interpretation is also “what is a militia?” Is it a regular group of trained citizens that meets regularly to practice defense of the country? Is it basically any citizen who wants to have many guns for personal protection? Does the 2nd simply state that if you belong to a militia, you have to be regulated, but otherwise, the sky is the limit for individuals? Did the framers conceive of a time when individuals could own supersonic rifles with scopes and armor piercing rounds?
A state like Utah, for example, has no need for a Permit to purchase handgun, no registration of handguns, no licensing of owners of handguns, no State waiting period, no FBI *NICS check for firearm transactions and no record of sale.
This seems like “open season” for handguns to me.
Rifles and shotguns as tools for hunting and protection of stock; I don’t have much problem with them, and have assembled, fired and cleaned both of these weapons safely.
Vinyl Turnip and Hong Kong Phooey,
It is menstrual clots like yourselves who make people who have successfully defended themselves with a gun reluctant to talk about it. As it happens, I value my personal safety over your opininion.
In this, and future, gun threads I refuse to acknowledge your presence until such time as you become something other than closeminded douchebags. Good day to you both.
Your attention will be sorely missed. Who are you, again?
Hey, I’m not closeminded!
A serious question for those of you view the 2nd amendment as pertaining to the individual ownership of weapons to defend against government tyranny. Do you feel that restrictions can be constitutionally placed on the ownership of fully automatic weapons, shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, high explosives, tanks, flame throwers, and other weapons that have been used in warfare? Why or why not?
There isn’t. There was prior to DC v. Heller, because of a poorly worded decision in 1939 (U.S. v. Miller), which anti-gun lunatics were able to spin into an alternate history where words like “the people” in the 2nd Ad. didn’t actually mean, you know, people, even if it did mean that in every other amendment. This was partially rectified in 1990, by the Supreme Court. See U.S. vs. Verdugo-Urquidez. You don’t have to read down too far to see:
But to this day, anti-gun loonies still stick their fingers in their ears and go “LALALAICANTHEARYOU” on this subject.
The fairly traditional definition of a militia.
And another.
Current U.S. federal law defining the militia
The framers never conceived of telephones, TV, or internet. Yet the 1st is considered to apply to them, as well.
Almost every firearm since the invention of smokeless powder has been “supersonic.”
Armor piercing rounds are banned, since 1986, except to the military and law enforcement (who don’t like them, for legitimate tactical and public safety concerns), and have never been available to the general public.
The vast majority of states have no firearm permit/registration, owner licensing, waiting periods. Cite.
Several states, including Utah, don’t use the FBI NICS system because they have their own state-level NICS-equivalent in place.
Perhaps if you took the time to better inform yourself…
NICS Homepage.
From said cite:
ETA: Utah is a type 1 state.
Yes. I believe that “regulated” in the context of the amendment can and should be construed to mean “in good order; adjusted for optimal function” and thus I believe that higher-end and deadlier ordnance can and should be controlled more strictly than ordinary semi-automatic or single-shot arms. In particular, a modern military unit needs relatively few fully automatic gunners and even fewer rocket launchers, flamethrowers, etc, and my proposal for firearms availability and regulation culminates in allowing civilian automatic weapon/machine gun ownership with similar restrictions to a commercial driver’s license–that is, frequent testing and re-registration, mandatory training, and high but not onerous licensing fees.
With explosives, vehicles, etc, I am of the belief that a militia (that is, non-professional citizen soldiers) is necessarily a locally-based skirmishing infantry unit, and thus would not be expected in any reasonable context to be issued or require the use of heavy explosive weapons, vehicles, etc.
Practically speaking, this means I’d consider the 2nd Amendment to apply to weapons which operate based on principles similar to those of the current standard basic infantry weapon (whatever that is) and that are single-user only (that is, the heaviest machine guns and light mortars/howitzers that are technically man-portable but require a crew of more than one to use effectively are right out).
Also, from a practical standpoint, any basic single-mass round (that is, something you could call a “bullet” and not “shot”) for any firearm you care to think of since the days of the first muskets has been able to defeat all be the heaviest specialist personal armor. Practically speaking, “armor-piercing” is a meaningless term for rifle ammunition that’s designed to work on human-sized targets.
Pistol ammunition is another matter, but in the time of the founding fathers the distinction was actually LESS–that is, even pistol ammunition could generally pierce steel armor, whereas today at least pistol ammunition has a hard time with kevlar vests.
I want to clarify my previous response a bit–I am of the opinion that Iraq shows us what many of us military thinkers already knew–local citizen militias can do a ridiculously disproportionate amount of harm to a modern military force, even in the absence of heavy or specialist weapons. Due to this, in any realistic scenario where a citizen militia rebels against a tyrannical US government, too, the real danger to the militias isn’t raw military force, but police/intel work.
Thanks for the thoughtful responses. I have no idea what the 2nd amendment is about. As far as I know the founding fathers were against a standing, centralized army. Even during the Civil War there was a lot of state-based groups fighting. A lot of standardization occurred during and after the Civil War because of lessons learned during the conflict. So given that, I’m not sure how the 2nd amendment should be interpreted.
In the case of Iraq, IEDs, require more than just light arms. A lot of them use artillery shells as explosives. And of course car bombs use a variety of explosives. IEDs are the leading cause of death for US forces in Iraq, so maybe an argument can be made that to effectively fight federal forces light firearms are less useful than other methods.
It seems to me that often 2nd Amendment rights defenders see it as prohibiting any restriction on the kind of firearms that are kind of fun, while still allowing regulation of weapons that would otherwise so horrify the general population they might think of amending the Constitution to clarify the 2nd amendment.
Explosives would definitely be more useful in *offensive * attacks by a small insurgent group against a large army. But the firearms are invaluable for defense. In addition to the saboteurs going out and planting explosives, there would need to be guards, scouts, small raiding parties, etc; all of them would need to be armed.
Are the Iraqis on offence or defense?
As an amateur military historian, something I know and that you may not is that a lot of those kinds of traps in wars past and even in current wars are made with improvised, captured, or retooled dud warheads–dud/discarded artillery shells just happen to be relatively plentiful in Iraq at the present time. Timothy McVeigh didn’t need legal high explosive to devastate a federal building in Oklahoma City.
I don’t like that mindset, either, which is why I stand pretty firm on the (to many horrifying) prospect of general ownership of fully-automatic single-user arms such as squad-level light machine guns (WITH appropriate training/regulation)–it makes sense with what I think the original intent is, which is that the citizens of this country should be able to own and operate weaponry similar to that of a typical light infantry skirmishing force just in case something unthinkable happens. That way makes sense based on what the citizen’s militias consisted of at the time the Constitution was written–by and large they were a foot infantry with good to excellent rifles/muskets/pistols, but they were almost never equipped with things like grenades or cannon.
Well, yes, I do know that IEDs are improvised from materials at hand, hence the name. So the question is does/should the 2nd amendment allow access to warheads to be prohibited, or did the founding fathers think it good enough to rely on capturing those sorts of material from the enemy?
And, yes, I do know that it was ANNM, that brought down the federal building in OK City. I also know that Congress has passed a law to make it more difficult to acquire the precursors in bulk. I am glad, are you?
Muskets were more common than rifles. Muskets, bayonets, and cannon were the most common weapons of the Revolution. The militias did have some cannons, and that’s among the things the British were attempting to capture on their march on Lexington and Concord. It was well known that the lack of cannons put the American militias at a disadvantage to British forces. Do you think it was the intention of the 2nd amendment to keep the militias at a disadvantage?
This is a kind of misinformation due to the simplification of popular history–you see, the first units that fought at Lexington/Concord were the local militias, certainly, which were after the initial engagements either fighting as partisan units disrupting British transit or were absorbed into Washington’s Continental Army, which was raised in 1775, had close to 16,000 soldiers with some effort to provide uniformity of uniforms and weaponry, and which had the the cannon (organized as an artillery under the command of Richard Gridley.
Broadly speaking as I understand it, there was a distinction between the line battalions of the Continental Army and the local citizen militias which supplemented it at various points. It’s not always helpful that some local units formed the core of line battalions, were integrated into the (paid, equipped) Continental Army, yet kept the “militia” name as a nod to tradition.
Missed the edit window, by the way.
Rifles were more common among the militias from the more rural areas–the long rifles (“Kentucky rifles”, “Pennsylvania rifles”) had almost triple the effective range of the Long Land Pattern “Brown Bess” used in the main body of the army, but had a smaller ball (.50 vs .75) and took almost four times as long to reload, making them more suitable for snipers and insurgent-style combat and almost useless in open-field army vs. army encounters.
But yes, suffice it to say that local militias and the Continental Army had significantly different equipment and used different tactics, and to say that Washington or the founders in general would have intended that they would be uniform is a bit absurd. After all, at the time, army doctrine focused on mass firepower, formation tactics, etc, all of which required a large amount of training and discipline. Militia forces were used in hit-and-run attacks on unformed British units, and when they stuck around long enough for the British to line up and use formation tactics they generally got slaughtered.
It’s not a question of wanting the militia to be “inferior” or “at a disadvantage”, it’s acknowledging the differences in tactics and expectations between an “Army” and a “Militia”–militias are light fighters tied to an area they know well, with less training as a group but potentially equal or greater marksmanship, gun-handling, and fieldcraft skills.
I’m glad, I suppose, but mostly because none of my hometown friends’ fathers have complained about it making ammonium-based fertilizer prohibitively hard to get for their farms, which means as far as I’m concerned it’s a sensible law–the law abiding get what they want, criminals have it harder.