Do you really mean to say that even if in every document, private letter, and recorded utterance surviving from that time the people who drafted the Second Amendment repeatedly asserted that it was vital that the government be forbidden to take guns out of private hands, when it finally came down to the final version they shrugged their shoulders, said “Ah, screw it!” and only OK’d guns for a government-approved force? And don’t say “well that’s what they did” because people keep trying to explain late-Eighteenth Century terminology to you and you won’t have any of it. Suffer the little children, remember?
There were also no high-speed printing presses, radio, television, cable, and the Internet. So it’s OBVIOUS the Founders wouldn’t have supported you owning the type of communications that allow sedition, slander and pornography to flourish.
And as evidenced by the Controversial Encounters omnibus thread, people are having second thoughts about giving legally sanctioned thugs a monopoly on power. And that we’d never have gone into Iraq if the Army had not had a huge standing army at its disposal. The Founders could easily have had a large standing army and professional peacekeepers back in the 1780’s; they didn’t want them because of centuries of bad precedent.
Back to Hamilton and the Federalist #29, he gives a contemporary explanation of the term:
IOW, well-regulated at the time meant something like trained, practiced, having attained expertise. Hamilton was answering critics that complained that giving the federal government co-authority over the militia, as the new Constitution did, might allow the fed to deliberately weaken the protection an armed populace gave against a potential tyranny. The Second is effectively saying “we need a militia that has actual experience with guns, so the Federal government is not to forbid people to own and carry them”. IOW, the Second forestalls any attempt to reduce the right to keep and bear arms to merely existing only in legal theory (like gun control advocates have tried).
Do written laws mean anything at all? Maybe there is occasionally some ambiguity but by and large people presume a written law- or a provision of the Constitution- is supposed to mean something and not something else. If I say “YogSosoth is a drooling pinhead”, can I argue that isn’t a personal insult because I “interpret” those words differently?
What would be incongruous would be claiming that ordinary people can’t have child porn but special government agents can, because we can trust them you know.
The Supreme Court came up with this thing called “Strict Scrutiny”, which basically means that a right can be considered so fundamental that only a “clear and present danger” could justify infringing it. If someone came up with a way of building homemade nuclear weapons I think a ban on such would fall under that doctrine. But rights aren’t voided just because there are extreme situations where they must be infringed. Also again, no one is talking about banning ALL handguns; what they really mean is banning the Teeming Millions from having handguns while being perfectly OK with letting government enforcers have them- in other words, setting them up as an elite.
Washington D.C. had a law that you could “own” a gun- in the sense that you could have legal ownership of some disassembled pieces of metal incapable of actually firing a bullet. That’s slimy.
Did you even notice what you wrote? Your side “settles for” something while the pro-gun side “gives up” something. Let me know what current gun control provisions you’re willing to give up and then maybe it would be an actual compromise. Gun owners have already “given up” too much.
Why aren’t you beating your children? The Bible SAYS “Suffer the little children to come unto me”.
IOW, the Framers just said “Ah screw it!” (see above)
They did; we keep telling you they did, but you don’t believe it.
The Founders were as close in time to the English Civil War as we are to the American Civil War. They recalled how back then both professional armies and “select” militias- groups of men vetted for loyalty to the regime and given special permission to have guns while no one else did- were thugs in the service of tyranny. I suspect that if the Founders could see our modern police state they would start screaming for the people to arm themselves, put on camo, and rise up in revolution.
Do you agree with me that no one involved in drafting or ratifying the amendment thought it limited the rights of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to create a region of the United States with unusually little gun violence?
Many of the founding fathers, being violent men with blood on their hands from having defied the legitimate (and, by eighteenth century standards, relatively benevolent) British legal order, probably liked their guns. But their constitution didn’t mandate that preference nationwide.
As for the fourteenth amendment, you can argue both ways as to whether it nationalized the bill of rights. But if it did, that was an upturning of the original constitutional order.
No one drafting the original Bill of Rights thought it prevented Massachusetts or Connecticut from having established churches, either. And, yes, the Fourteenth Amendment was certainly a major change in the original constitutional order–I happen to think it was a very positive change.
Well, a couple of things. First off, Madison wasn’t exactly Rambo, and he was the main drafter of the 2nd, so I don’t think you could honestly call him one of the ‘violent men with blood on their hands’. As to defying legitimate authority, yeah, that was the whole point of the rebellion. THEY didn’t see the British rule as particularly ‘benevolent’, but obviously opinions on that would vary.
As to what I think is your broader point, yes, some of the FF and contemporaries (though I don’t think Madison would be one of them) had a more states rights oriented view verse a more federalist view. The Constitution, however, was what tied the disparate states together into a unified union, so while I think that many of them did think states could and should decide some things for themselves, it was within the overall structure of the Constitution. Why have a union, otherwise, if the states could set it aside as they liked?
Of course, they didn’t feel that everyone should have access to arms, be they guns or swords or knives. Only free citizens would have access to them. I’m fairly sure most of the FF would be horrified if they saw how the franchise has been extended, including the right to keep and bear arms.
Which leads me to this:
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
The Founders were as close in time to the English Civil War as we are to the American Civil War. They recalled how back then both professional armies and “select” militias- groups of men vetted for loyalty to the regime and given special permission to have guns while no one else did- were thugs in the service of tyranny. I suspect that if the Founders could see our modern police state they would start screaming for the people to arm themselves, put on camo, and rise up in revolution.
[/QUOTE]
I doubt they would, but the thing is it doesn’t matter what they would think of the world today. They were wise enough to know that they couldn’t set everything into stone, that things like the Constitution were living documents that could, would and most importantly should change as times and attitudes change and shift. This includes even the 2nd. If there comes a time when the majority of Americans really do think that a personal right to keep and bear arms is no longer needed, then the mechanisms are there to change that, and it will change. As I said, I won’t be particularly happy, but then the previous generation isn’t happy about things like gay marriage, or the previous one to that things like civil rights, etc etc…folks, especially older folks always seem to be bummed when things move on from the way they were when they were growing up. Times, they are always a changin’, and all that. What I want to make sure is that some anti-gun banner types don’t sneak it in through the back door, against both the Constitution AND the will of the people.
Changing the Constitution takes a lot of political energy and is unlikely to be attempted unless that majority is, first of all, a super-majority, but, more than that, unless that majority sees the Constitution blocking its will. As someone from the gun-unfriendly side, I don’t see the second amendment blocking practical moderate gun controls. Seven of the nine current justices continue to give wide latitude to most kinds of gun control Democratic party politicians favor – as shown just this past June:
Changing the constitution has nothing to do with prospects for universal background checks or smart guns or magazine size limits or keeping New York City’s gun ownership rate, as now, blessedly low. The benefit of eliminating (or, more likely, weakening) the second amendment would be narrowly political and rhetorical – to make it a bit harder for gun enthusiasts to moralize about how the rest of us disrespect the Constitution.
It depends on whether rising up would have economic advantages, as it did for the likes of George Washington, heavily invested in land west of the Alleghenies that the British Proclamation Line reserved for the natives. No economic cause, no rising up. But, in principle, if the time-traveled Founders saw that police state harming their economic prospects, an uprising can’t be ruled out. They disrespected the British constitution, so there’s no reason that crowd would respect the post-Civil War amended US constitution.
First, I’m under five systems of government (international law, federal, state, county, municipal). All have their strengths and weaknesses. I live in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania’s democratic system of government already present in the late 1780’s (universal male suffrage, slavery abolished, freedom of religion), unique in the US, was more important, if I then lived here then, than the US Constitution.
Second, the system now is quite different from the one established when the US gave up the Articles of Confederation.
Third, I don’t think I have the qualifications needed to immigrate to countries where the people speak my language and the national constitution is a bit better (Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand). If here in the 1770’s, and if my family agreed, maybe I’d have moved to New Brunswick. If I didn’t keep my mouth shut back then, maybe I would have been forced to move to New Brunswick. Today, I’m thinking they want me as a tourist only
Fourth, that sufficiently simpatico system of government is partially controlled by a Supreme Court so contemptuous of the right to keep and bear arms that it arrests you if you enter its building with a gun. The fact they can do that is part of our system of government. I like that part. If I can repeat a link from my last post, what’s, for someone who favors moderate gun control, not to like?
Fifth, and more important than all the above, I have family ties and responsibilities that quite properly keep me living in Pennsylvania, despite it, unfortunately, having a gun rights provision in its own state constitution.
Maybe you could consider advising me to move to New Jersey, which has no such clause.
You complain considerable about guns. Your side is losing the political battle here. Realistically, you have a better chance of getting citizenship in the UK than you do of changing the gun laws here in the US.
Changing the Constitution takes a lot of political energy and is unlikely to be attempted unless that majority is, first of all, a super-majority, but, more than that, unless that majority sees the Constitution blocking its will. As someone from the gun-unfriendly side, I don’t see the second amendment blocking practical moderate gun controls. Seven of the nine current justices continue to give wide latitude to most kinds of gun control Democratic party politicians favor – as shown just this past June:
[/QUOTE]
But what are you disagreeing with me over? Recall that I was arguing with someone who was talking about broad bans, not ‘practical moderate gun controls’. Pretty obviously it’s not un-Constitutional to put in regulation, restrictions or even narrow bans on Constitutionally protected rights…free speech/child porn being the example I used above (or on the gun side, the very strict restriction/ban on automatic weapons). I don’t have a problem with some gun control or regulation measures, or a problem with some restrictions on speech…simply a problem with those that are used as slippery slopes to broad bans on large categories, such as backdoor bans on all hand guns or broad categories of speech (say, all porn, for example), or attempts to create mythical categories like ‘assault weapons’ based on firearms that look scary but are no different in function to other rifles, and are pretty obviously being used to wedge in broader controls and bans.
Well, I agree with some of this, and think that the last part is horseshit. You can work within the Constitution for some regulation, restriction and even narrow vertical bans…which is exactly what we DO wrt to guns, speech, assembly and other protected rights today. Or, if you are wanting more (which YogSosoth was advocating) then there is a process for doing that too by amending the Constitution and vacating a previous amendment. Anything other than that, IMHO, degrades our entire system and sets up a slippery slope and precedence that can be used to attack other protected rights down the line. While you might not care about fire arms ownership, I’m guessing you do care about free speech and other protected rights.
Just like how it was obvious to Lumpy yet he cites the 18th century equivalent of a self-published newsletter. The Constitution is pretty clear, that is my cite, if you wish to change its meaning, you’ll have to do better than “one guy wrote about it once”. Answer the question: Why didn’t they include that in the Constitution if they felt so strongly?
Things change but pro-gun people always point to the infallibility of the 2nd as a reason not to change. I use that argument against them, which is why mine is valid and theirs is not. If things change, then you would never try to claim that we cannot reinterpret the 2nd to ban certain guns because you would realize and acknowledge that such reinterpretation is a part of change. Until you realize that, all your talk about change and immutability doesn’t hold water
I’m not the one ignoring words in the 2nd and pretending things like “well regulated Militia” means “anybody who’s alive”. Seriously, what do those words mean if anyone can have a gun? You might as well not have them at all. If we had replaced it with “unregulated mob”, would things be any different? So I don’t need a cite, I know what the Constitution says and I know you’re ignoring it. I can claim just as you do that 200+ years of court cases has reinterpret those words to mean anything I want too. Its just unfortunate that pro-gun people have the political power that they do to be able to ignore their favorite Amendment’s words like this
Again, yes I can, because 1) banning some guns isn’t the opposite of the intention of the 2nd, and 2) reinterpretation can be done in any way so long as the political will is there to enforce it. There is nothing underhanded or slimy about a proper use of litigation at all
You don’t have proofs, you have arguments. I gave you actual examples of things that are protected broadly in the 1st but are banned or restricted in practice. That we have a blanket ban on all child porn is proof. That porn is severely restricted for children to consume is proof. That we have laws, not Amendments, that ban speech that harasses, threatens, or is seditious is proof. That you reinterpret such things as narrow and a handgun ban as too broad is additional proof that my argument for reinterpretation is sound.
Political will. Bad people can keep a bad law in place for a long time. Ask any black person.
I consider harassing and threatening speech to be a broad based banning of Constitutionally protected free speech. Slander and libel are two specific categories. Sedition is covered by the Sedition Act. Once again, child porn is a broad category of porn that is banned, and even regular porn is severely restricted. Religions have freedom but when’s the last time someone was allowed to marry 2 other people at the same time? When’s the last human sacrifice? It took a long fight until Wicca was recognized as a religion, do you think something like that which pre-dates Christianity wasn’t a religion before? And what part of freedom allowed the internment of the Japanese in WW2? You don’t think pretty much every right they had was violated by that? We’ve apologized, yes, but how many people who believe in guns like you do would like to do the same with Muslims?
Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. Where there is political will to do something, the law is about as powerful as wet tissue in stopping it. You and I will never agree on gun bans, but fact and reality shows that you’re wrong such a thing cannot happen, nor would its happening be illegal or somehow anti-Constitution. If we ever get a handgun ban, it will be legal, it will be Constitutional, and it will be in full compliance with the 2nd. Just as the banning or restricting of everything else in the list above was done so legally.
The Constitution is not good enough I see. Guess there’s no convincing you then
Because you refuse to read the Constitution and what it says
And there’s the money shot. “Who cares what they think?” is what you’re saying while at the same time worshipping the memory of their code words and hidden messages on guns. That’s really all this debate boils down to: What the fuck does it matter what some dead racists think? Let me distill this down to why you still don’t get it:
Me: “I want to ban guns, its legal to do so, and fuck the Founders for thinking differently”
Pro-gun people: “But what about the 2nd? What about America?”
My counter-argument:
Me: “Things change. Besides, look at the words in the 2nd”
Pro-gun people: “Tough titty to them”
There’s really no point in going forward with this is there?
Because all laws can and should be reinterpreted once in a while, because times change. Look at the great things we’ve done with giving minorities and women rights. Those are things that I’d happily tell the Founders to fuck off on because they were utterly, completely, 100% wrong. It will, hopefully, happen with the 2nd sooner rather than later
What I mean is I believe you are overestimating the support of your interpretation of the 2nd, and its highly doubtful that every one of the Founders felt that way or else they would have included a slightly more wordy explanation of what they meant in the actual Constitution instead of leaving it laying around in letters and newspapers. And like XT says, even if that’s what they think, tough titty, because times change. It really doesn’t matter what they think, but if people are going to be using the 2nd’s language to defend it, then I’m justified in using it to attack it, and it just so happens that you cannot defend the 2nd without referring to the objectively wrong Founders
And that’s why it doesn’t matter what the Founders think. It only matters how we reinterpret their laws, and if we wanted to ban handguns, it would be perfectly legal and consistent with the 2nd to do so. Otherwise goodbye radios!
I would feel much better about the 2nd if every yahoo couldn’t simply go buy one, but had to submit to regular training to be licensed to carry one, and such regulations included what Hamilton wanted like regular practice and a standard of expertise set by the government. Would you think that’s a good idea?
If I actually drooled and my head tapered to an acute angle, then yes, you can interpret that not as an insult but as a statement of fact. Written laws mean everything until they are changed, and the change through reinterpretation and litigation is what I’m arguing is legal and occurs all the time. It is not me that wants to freeze laws on guns in place forever, arguing only one correct interpretation. I merely want you guys to acknowledge that, and acknowledge that even closely held laws can be changed, are changed, all the time, legally and none of that process is slimy.
No, I don’t agree with that. Partly because that is the law. There are people in government who are allowed, as part of their job, to view child porn, typically in the process of stopping it. So not only is your example wrong, but your argument is also wrong. The same can be, should be, of handguns, or guns in general. There is nothing remotely anti-2nd Amendment by allowing only the military and LEOs to have guns. You want guns? You are free to join them.
Do you favor laws restricting felons from owning guns?
2 things I disagree with in there:
That owning one type of object makes you an “elite”, as you call them
That its legally wrong for such “elites” to exist
If I accepted your argument, the first thing I would ask is “So what if they’re elite? Where is that illegal or wrong?” If I were a right-winger arguing against you, I’d call that communism because you want everyone to be equal when they’re clearly not. So we have a gun-owning elite, so what? Be one, that’s your way out of it. Life’s not fair. If I were a right-winger though…
LOL, really? I didn’t know about that, sounds hilarious.
I know what I wrote. I know that not only you, but other pro-gun people have said our current gun culture goes too far even for you. My hypothetical argument takes that into account. I want to know what ideal gun laws you would settle for. In the same vein, there are gun laws I’d settle for that wouldn’t go as far as I would like, but I’d give up going for stricter ones. That you consider even such a hypothetical undebatable and unfair shows that you’re not really interested in having a conversation about what’s safe, but rather about what you can get. Remember, the whole reason why I’m against guns is that its unsafe. If guns never shot me, I couldn’t care less about its proliferation, it’d be like chewing gum to me, people can do what they want with it. But because its unsafe, I want our laws to make us as safe as possible, which to me means banning guns, but I’d happily settle for simply being safer than I am right now
“The 2nd Amendment doesn’t even talk about guns, it talks about arms, you know, like the ones you’re born with?”
I guess its after that whole part about the “well regulated Militia” right? They went into depth in the rest of that paragraph, in invisible text, about the definition of what a militia is and what regulations there are, including specifically the age in which one is allowed to own a weapon, and of course all those regulations on who’s able to own one (non-felons, and of course, at the time, restricting it from black people and women). What else do these regulations in the Constitution say? I seem to have misplaced my copy :rolleyes:
So in order to be more like what the Founders wanted, you’d like us to disband the military and give all those shiny jets and bombs and missiles to local control?
If you actually care to be educated, here’s a pretty good history of the precedents to and the early drafts of the Second Amendment: http://www.constitution.org/2ll/2ndschol/89vand.pdf Long story short, the final draft of the Second was a trimmed-down version that avoided nitpicks and got to the heart of the guarantee the drafters wanted.
How many times do we have to say this? If you want to be able to ban guns, and it’s been held that the Second Amendment forbids this, then PASS A FORMAL AMENDMENT!!!
In the late-18th century, every able-bodied man with a gun could be mustered at need. For the reasons Hamilton said nobody wanted a universal training requirement- it would have been seen as a government conspiracy to regiment the population. But they didn’t propose to have just the people who volunteered for training armed.
Yes, it is.
Well of course the people in power can get away with ignoring the law- it more or less voided civil rights in the South for a century, and made the guarantees of freedom in the Soviet Constitution a mockery. But I’m astonished that anyone could actually defend this is business as usual.
Explain why a handgun ban is narrow and specific enough that it does not infringe on a more general right of people to own weapons; in Heller the court ruled that handguns are such a fundamental tool of self-defense that they couldn’t be flatly banned. I doubt you could, since you’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t believe any such right exists. No wonder you can only interpret the 2nd in terms of regimented state troops- it doesn’t make any sense to you otherwise.
True, a piece of paper won’t protect us; that’s WHY gun owners fight tooth and nail against gun control. We’re exercising our political will, which according to you is a wrongheaded tragedy.
:dubious: You must have “reinterpreted” what I wrote: I said that by your argument, freedom of speech and the press could be held to only apply to late-18th century standards.
Well we won’t because it is slimy; again, while resolving ambiguity is fine, coming up with a “reinterpretation” that guts what the accepted meaning of the law had been is a travesty. Change the law (or in the case of the Constitution, amend it), but don’t take the position that if we all just agree to ignore it, it’s void- that’s more or less what was done to civil rights in the South for a century.
Convicted felons forfeit a lot of rights, not just firearms. So no, it isn’t inconsistent of me to be OK with restrictions on felons and the adjudicated incompetent.
Har-har.
I think requiring people to undergo training if they choose to own a gun is a great idea. What I don’t think is a good idea is forbidding people to own a gun if they don’t. That is, the right to own and carry weapons would be sacrosanct, with any penalties being for refusing training, not owning the gun.
The thing is, gun owners (which included just about all the Founders) believe in something broader and more general than the specifics of this gun or that. We believe that people have a fundamental right to have weapons; because without weapons people are dependent upon those authorized to have them (yes, an “elite”). And ultimately the price of dependency is obedience. Never mind the American Bill of Rights for the moment, the English Bill of Rights upheld a right to be armed. Because after decades of civil war, revolution and counter-revolution, the English had seen with their own eyes what happens when people are forbidden to own weapons: the people who do have weapons end up saying “Shut up and do what you’re told, you goddamn peasant!” To quote one pro-gun person “To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state”. The original ideal was that the government wouldn’t have the power to enforce a law that didn’t have broad popular support. Certainly that it wouldn’t have the power to overwhelm and conquer the population. Which is why I think they’d be aghast at our modern military and police. True we don’t have a dictatorship; but Rome didn’t fall in a day either, and it took a century after Rome moved to professional career Legions for the Republic to become an Empire.
Well, I was going to reply to YogSosoth, but I think Lumpy hit all the high points and did so much better and with less heat than I would have. Great post! Basically, there is no point in further debate with YogSosoth on THIS subject, I think…that level of stubborn ignorance concerning this issue simply can’t be fought because there is no debate, simply YogSosoth asserting stuff with no basis in reality. He’s not even current with the anti-gun arguments, but frozen in some sort of time warp of fringe anti-gun babble from like the 70’s! :eek:
At any rate, I think the OP has been answered at this point wrt if guns were banned would civil war break out (answer, no, since so much would have to change and be done to prep for it that it would necessitate a sea change in American attitudes and laws that I don’t see a civil war as likely).
Your last post is a good statement of the myth of the militia – the idea that an armed populous can resist standing military and police forces. They can’t.
The states with the highest incarceration rate – one, two, three – are Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Mississippi – all states with strong gun rights and gun ownership in the top third of the states. You say the founders would be “aghast at our modern military and police” which has given us frequent foreign wars and an incarceration rate, in those states, three times that of Russia. Wouldn’t they also then have to admit (that is, at least the non-racists among them) that having an armed populous hasn’t had the desired effect?
Well not if we go ahead and create the enormously powerful standing army that in any other society would have imposed a junta by now. An armed population was supposed to mean that we wouldn’t need such forces; but we decided from the Spanish-American war and on that America would be a quasi-imperial power and we ended up with modern day Legions.
The incarceration rates are the result of laws that (used to) have broad support. It’s absurd how many non-violent drug offenses are punished with prison time, but no one cares enough to do something about it. About the only time enough people felt outraged enough to rebel against the government was the Civil War, and even then the guns of the people of the South were “outvoted” by how many Northerners were willing to take up arms against it.
We’re getting pretty far from the thread topic, but:
When it comes to the 9.7 percent of US incarcerated persons in federal prison, I tend to agree you. But:
Both sides used conscription, the South starting it a year before the North. The “outvoting” occurred because the North had over twice the population of the South, including slaves:
If you count the pre-war USA as a whole, then yes the secessionists were “outvoted”. And in the North the draft mainly was a crude method of encouraging enlistment for bonus, with less than 10% of those serving having been involuntarily inducted. As it was, if enough people hadn’t been willing (or begrudgingly acquiescent) to serving, the Union would either have run out of men or sparked a second revolt in the north.
I see you used the past tense. Why should we be interested in what English law was hundreds of years ago? If you have such reverence for the wisdom of the English, you might want to look at how the English have organized themselves today – after seeing things “with their own eyes” and giving those things due consideration in the fullness of time and the context of the modern world.
And what you’d find is that the American-style unrestricted right to bear arms hasn’t existed there since at least 1824, with successively more restrictive legislation enacted between 1903 and 2006 – most significantly the Firearms Act of 1920 – to the point that handguns are practically non-existent among the general population in the UK and long guns are very tightly regulated. No coincidence that the UK has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the world. No coincidence that the US has the highest, excluding third-world backwaters that are basically war zones.
Indeed, no civilized country in the world has the kind of unrestricted constitutional guarantee to own guns that the US does, the kind that seems more inspired by a cowboy western than by considerations of a peaceful modern society. Not one country in the world. Only a few mention guns in the constitution at all, and those provide for all manner of restrictions and prohibitions. Even Switzerland, which really does have a national militia with mandatory participation, has extremely restrictive laws governing those guns.
I see that there’s another mass shooting in the news today. It seems that any gun control discussion that goes on for any length of time is always punctuated by news of yet another mass shooting, yet the real carnage is mostly the individual homicide, and is so commonplace that it mostly goes unreported, at least on a national level.
My view on this is very simple. The 18th century colonial thinking about militias that led anyone to think that the Second Amendment was a good idea is arguably the most disastrous blunder the Founders ever made. It’s resulted in the greatest ongoing unresolved catastrophe that has ever cursed any first-world nation in the modern world.
And to whatever purpose it was supposed to have served it is either moot or counterproductive. We don’t have citizen militias in the 21st century, armed mobs are in no position to overthrow the federal government in the 21st century, and the mythology of the gun as a source of protection is refuted by the facts that (a) a gun in the home statistically results in a much greater danger of being shot, not less, and (b) you’re more likely to be murdered in the gun-infested US, on average, than in most other first-world nations that are not so infested. Even putting aside the gun as an efficiently lethal enabler of suicide, the gun homicide and gun accident rate alone in the US is like all the fatalities of 9/11 occurring over and over again four times a year, like having a 9/11 catastrophe every spring, summer, fall, and winter, year after year. And yet some consider this acceptable.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
Indeed, no civilized country in the world has the kind of unrestricted constitutional guarantee to own guns that the US does, the kind that seems more inspired by a cowboy western than by considerations of a peaceful modern society. Not one country in the world. Only a few mention guns in the constitution at all, and those provide for all manner of restrictions and prohibitions. Even Switzerland, which really does have a national militia with mandatory participation, has extremely restrictive laws governing those guns.
[/QUOTE]
Meh…who gives a flying fuck? Most other nations don’t live here, nor are they Americans…they are, by definition, other nations. They can do as they like. I don’t give a rats ass what other nations do, since I don’t live there and they don’t live here. If I move to another nation then I’ll abide by their rules.
How many people died today due to alcohol related accidents or tobacco use? You saw this latest incident because it was in the national news (being sensational and all), but the 100’s who died in traffic accidents or the 1000’s who died due to other stuff pretty much went unreported except perhaps locally.
Yeah, but you live in Canada, so your view is kind of moot. You can keep your hyperbolic language and be smug up north there.
Blah blah. But if my fellow citizens decide that this view is correct then the proper way to go about doing it is to produce a new Amendment that strikes down the 2nd due to changing times, new attitudes, The Carnage™, The CHILDREN(arr)!! or global warming. THEN lawmakers will be free to do what all the other ‘civilized’ nations do and ban their citizens (or heavily restrict them, or whatever) from some, most or all gun ownership.
British citizens are subjects of the Crown. That government decided that it’s citizens can not be trusted with weapons. The subjects didn’t have a say in the matter.
The U.S.A. began with the understanding that it’s citizens had an unalienable right to bear/own weapons. For self-defense. The anti-gun nuts do not have the votes to change or supersede the 2nd Amendment.
What ever makes you think that insurgencies are not still effective? What’s different in the last 15 years that suddenly makes an insurgency unable to be effective? Why hasn’t Assad or the government in Afghanistan waved the magic “It’s the 21st Century” wand and made their insurgencies go away?
As to defying legitimate authority, yeah, that was the whole point of the rebellion. THEY didn’t see the British rule as particularly ‘benevolent’, but obviously opinions on that would vary.
: