And what do you do about the guns that are already in criminal hands? You really think that what happened in Chicago(Or NYC or Washington, D.C.) won’t happen nationwide?
I don’t have an answer to that. But trying to point out that bodyguards who still carry guns in a city where restrictive gun laws exist is hypocrisy is stupid. Obviously restrictive gun laws don’t take all guns off the street, so to characterize the citizens as “disarmed” is incorrect. But it’s lose-lose, because if you’re in favor of restrictive gun laws someone will shout at you “but they don’t do anything because there are so many guns out there already, ha!” and if you say well then take guns off the street someone shouts at you “you’re a crazy gun-grabber! why do you hate America!!!”. I think it’s pretty clear that people who are pro-gun don’t have a solution to the problem, and they don’t like any ideas anyone comes up with. They’ve decided that the occasional massacre, sometimes of schoolkids, is the price we pay for our freedom to own guns. That’s fine to think, I just disagree that this should be accepted as the new normal.
We can’t perpetually hide behind the theory that we can’t regulate something that’s already in the hands of the public. A lot of people make moonshine, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t control alcohol sales. We can’t let an impossible quest of perfection interfere with our desire to improve the situation. If I’ve got a fire hose and a garden hose putting water in my basement, and for some reason I can’t turn off the garden hose, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any point to shut off the fire hose.
Well gee, given that you and a bunch of other people equate owning guns with owning and using narcotics- presumably, as a needless harmful vice- why do you think gun owners oppose [del]confiscation[/del] “information” lists on guns?
Remember that both sides can take the position of “to hell with what you think- f*** you”.
Except the disarmed citizen can’t use his gun for defense without facing prosecution.
Probably because they keep implementing scare quotes around the word information and pretending like the government is going to confiscate their guns. That’s what I would guess anyway.
Cool. What’s your point again? That illegal things don’t happen?
ETA: Because you’re trying to use the word “disarm” in a way that doesn’t mean what you think. Disarmed means “without a weapon”, not “it is illegal to have the weapon I possess”. Saying that Chicago is “disarmed” is stupid and inaccurate.
Who’s pretending? The gun control faction themselves are saying it. They’re openly singing Hosanna to the heavens, “at last, we have a mandate to ban guns!”. And while the gun prohibitionists might ignore the hoi polloi, the ex-Marines and Army who are trained in combat are a little more worrisome.
This has gotten ridiculous. You will see fighting in the streets over this if a hard-line gun ban goes through. It will be the biggest civil insurrection since the 1960s.
Piffle. Like the rest of us should care about someone’s opinion because he’s an ex-Marine. We’ll fight it out in the ballot box and the Congress and state legislatures and the courts, and when we win you will give up your weapons or go to prison.
And this is why we can’t have a civil, rational, truthful discussion about this. You have a goal that you finally admitted to that has no middle ground.
Go put out your house fire with your garden hose.
It’s the other side that took away the middle ground. They insist that if we want to restrict any kind of weaponry or require any kind of registration, then we must also want confiscation of all weapons. OK, if the choice is that you get all the military arsenal you want or nothing, I’ll choose nothing.
So much for law-abiding gun owners then.
And the threat of civil insurrection, a battle in the streets, is a rational position?
Because law-abiding gun owners are going to keep sniping at the fire department when they show up?
There’s the rub - it is basically impossible for anyone to own military hardware. A rifle that looks like an M-16 is not an M-16, not even close. And those few that do own these legally are very law abiding.
Yeah, it’ll be just like Ruby Ridge except all across the nation, baby! Yeaaahhhh!!! 
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I don’t think owning a gun and wanting to change the laws about gun ownership (even a total ban) are hypocritical in the least. Just because one believes a law should be changed does not mean one can’t live in the current state of laws. Tax-idiots trot this one out way too often, as if people who believe taxes should be higher are hypocrites for not voluntarily paying higher taxes. I think it quite reasonable that Sen. Feinstein would be okay with getting rid of her own handgun as long as everybody else does too. I don’t see the hypocrisy.
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I’m willing to give Sen. Feinstein a pass on whatever views she might have on guns because… you know… double murder. Two people she knew well were murdered by a guy (who she also knew) with a gun. So two politicians get murdered in SF. Sen. Feinstein is also a politician in SF. Gee, why ever would she want to both own a handgun and want handguns banned?
Except socialized medicine. Lucky bastards.
Well, try to understand that it is a rational position if you hold the second amendment to be as important as the first. I would certainly hope, if word ever came down to “give up your blogs or go to prison,” that it would never enter the minds of my countrymen to obey the law. Compliance with the law is not always a virtue.
For myself, I don’t take that view. If it came down to that, what would I gain by fighting? And if the popular will was sufficiently strong to gain the legislative supermajority necessary to repeal the second amendment, would I even want to win, even if that were possible? At legally-sanctioned gunpoint, I would hand over my guns, though I’d feel a bit of a coward for doing so. As regards the eternal struggle for liberty, it would change little. If they came after the first amendment then, I would fight with whatever weapons the prudence of the nation still allowed me – even were that just my razor-sharp wit. (In which case, sorry folks, liberty’s fucked. :D)
But I don’t think that “from my cold dead hands” is necessarily a statement of antisocial lawlessness. I think we can all agree that it is possible for unjust laws to exist; we just don’t all agree on what those might be. Compromising on our thresholds for violence is one of the important functions of the social contract.
I find your hyperbolic position just as shocking as you probably find the give-all-the-children-guns crowd, but this is a legitimate point and a real fear of mine. If we don’t make the reasonable compromises, we might find ourselves facing growing support for the unreasonable ones. Scorched earth politics capitalize on strength but don’t build it.
During which people… did what? Threw rocks?
Okay.
Remind me, what did people do when the government told them they couldn’t own Tommy guns any more?
I don’t know about “first to discover the bodies,” but she was the one who announced their deaths to the public (BTW, the mayor was George Moscone; IIRC, San Francisco became the largest city to have an assassinated mayor); she felt it was her duty as Chairman of the city’s Board of Supervisors.
However, the real reason for her staunch anti-gun stance is probably the shooting at the building at 101 California Street in San Francisco on July 1, 1993.