Stoi, I threw that pointed jab in there to get your attention.
It has come to my attention that there are people on this board that completely disregard, or at best selectively disregard, any post by anyone with a dissenting opinion.
Note the word “opinion”, and not “fact”.
I haven’t had the chance to look up your cite; but considering that it came from Purdue’s Liberal Arts History Dept., I would venture a guess that its information might be a little…skewed?
Unless they cite the actual documents and their general availability to the internet browsing public, your cite might (not “does”, though :)) have the weight of opinion, not fact.
But, on the other hand, thanks for having the conviction to actually look up a cite and provide it for us; it shows the beginning of the ability to emotionally divest oneself from their position and approach it from a logical, debateable angle.
Remember, your words are your sole representative on this board; choose them with care.
Stoi, you did bring up one good point in responding to my post.
Those of us in the trenches do tend to try to develop a protective disassociation from our enemy. The classic "them and “us” mentality. Normal mentally well-adjusted people do not lightly take another person’s life; if anyone doubt’s that, go to your local Police Dept. and talk to a Dept. Psychologist about how cops react after taking a person’s life, even when deadly force was justified.
Fighter pilots and Tankers and like used to think that we were somewhat more fortunate than an Infantryman, in that we are destroying the enemy’s machines, and that we didn’t have to look upon the human results of our handiwork. We replaced a human enemy with their “machine”, and thereby de-humanized our human adversaries.
This false armor was shattered in Desert Storm; not only did we see the human results of war, first hand and in technicolor with surround sound that’d make George Lucas sick with envy, but worse, we smelled it as well.
CNN couldn’t even begin to touch what we saw and experienced.
War is a terrible necessity of the human condition; often brought about by leaders like Slobodan Milosivek, who are too far removed from the reality they invoke through aggressive, expansionist nationalistic policies.
Or in the case of people like Saddam Hussein, violent thugs who don’t bat an eye at sacrificing hundreds of thousands of people to achieve personal power and glory.
Someone, sooner or later, has to stand up to them. These people are just grown up versions of schoolyard bullies, applied to a national scale.
History has decided, for now at least, that it will be us.
So to try and bring us back around to the OP, yes the Machinegun is a strictly military weapon, and always has been.
It has one purpose: to “spew hot lead” at an alarming rate and kill the enemy faster than the enemy can replace those casualties, thereby destroying both the enemy’s ability and will to wage war.
But the machinegun has always been an “implement of war”; and not a weapon that would have been considered by our Founding Fathers, had it been around, the type of firearm that “the people” could “keep and bear”.
This is why I reject the notion that the Second Amendment is outdated and needs to be abolished as a social anachronism; we are more than capable, at all levels of society and government, of looking realistically at new types of firearms and ballistic technology, and arriving at informed and reasonable gun-control laws that allow people to keep and bear without jeopardizing public safety or compromising the Second Amendment
The BATF strictly regulates all fully automatic weapons, from sub-machimeguns like the Uzi through assault rifles like the M-16 family of weapons, with very stiff penalties for unlawfull possession, transfer, transportation, modification and import/export.
It costs an arm and a leg to obtain the ClassIII license to own, sell, and ship full-auto weponry, after rigorous and lengthy background checks.
Then the BATF regularly drops in, often unannounced, to inventory and check up on the licensed owners. That’s a lot of governmental oversight. There are very, very few individuals in America with ClassIII licenses for fully-automatic weaponry.
And despite misinformation to the contrary, The NRA believes that this is rightly so; that there is no Constitutional infringement in it being so.
But the semi-auto variants, and even the 5- or 10-shot civillian rifles shooting similar caliber bullets are not machineguns by the classifications of Law, precedent or practice.
<FONT COLOR=“GREEN”>ExTank</FONT>
“And that’s The Straight Dope.”