In quite a large number of nations, they think similar about the USA’s ideas of religous freedom, and even freedom of expression.
I felt that you were advocating, basically, “If you’re such an intellectual lightweight that you can’t debate the concept yourself, you don’t deserve to be here.”
I have a hard time seeing how your comment was a warm fuzzy welcome and an invitation to self-improvement.
If I could press a magic button and make all guns vanish, I would do so without hesitation. But the guns are here to stay… the toothpaste is already out of the tube.
Banning “Assault Weapons” isn’t going to prevent any deaths. It might give some Democrats a warm fuzzy feeling, but it won’t actually have any real world benefits, and it’s just going to piss a bunch of potential democratic voters off. I thought we were the “reality based community”, so I think we should stay true to that value.
If the Democrats have any desire to hold on to power, they won’t pursue gun control legislation.
I’m with you this far. In fact, if this is where you’d stopped, and allowed the OP to answer the implicit question of if she attributed the debate points she used in the other conversation, I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.
This, especially the last two sentences, was unnecessary and condescending. Adopting an argument, both with and without attribution, is common in virtually all debates. I’d put good money on a wager that in any protracted discussion on gun rights on the Internet, someone is going to copy-paste from the NRA and probably not attribute it. This does not make them bad people or disqualify their contribution. It is possible to be an intellectually active and useful participant and yet to simply concur, or join with opinions instead of developing your own. The Justices of the Supreme Court do it all the time(although the rigor of the form they observe demands attribution). Surely they should be allowed to vote, and I’m pretty sure they could hold their own in GD.
Enjoy,
Steven
“Mild” Gun Control legistalation, like the AW ban, does not seem to cost many votes. In general, there’s voters who are scared of all guns, voters who fear "assault weapons’ and those that don’t really care much.
Really?
No less than President Bill Clinton himself said during his 1995 State of the Union Address that the Assault Weapons Ban cost the Democrats both sides of Congress.
There’s one way for you to find out. Pass another one and watch what happens.
You’d think that the lesson of 1994 would have been enough.
What’s the definition of insanity? 
I’d ask Jim Zumbo how many people care about AW’s.
It’s rather disingenuous to ignore the obvious fact that a Chicago-based Democrat is going to be, given the opportunity, enthusiastic about any activity that disarms private citizens.
It isn’t about race, it isn’t about outmoded notions of legitimacy, It’s about the general trend of urban Democrats favoring the disarmament of private citizens and other forms of gun control.
Having said that, the guy’s an ass-hat fuck-wit, and self-respecting citizens in favor of being armed don’t need this guy on their side.
Painting every member of the pro-Second Amendment movement as such is not valid.
Even if this is true, if the government is going to ban something they should require a better excuse than irrational fear. It’s not like the Assault Weapons ban was introduced to halt a spree of bayonet-stabbings and rifle-grenade-shootings, is it?
I’ve asked that in many different forums and never got a good answer from the anti-gun crowd. The ban specifics were just stupid and made no sense, and to see that Obama wants to renew it really makes me think he’s just ignorant about guns.
President-Elect Obama is almost certainly ignorant about guns. Ignorance can be cured.
Look, I agree that AW bans do nothing, and it’s catering to the “will of the masses”, and likely that “will” is caused by ignorance and/or a irrational fear. BUT, we live in a representational Democracy thus I can’t blame too harshly any Politico that does what his constituents want, no matter why they want it.
In the modern world, I can no longer be a “single-issue voter”.
I don’t think Obama will push any anti-gun bills. But I don’t doubt he’ll sign them. And, given that 51% of the elected Representatives would then want such a bill, why should he go out of his way to veto them?
Being a Brit, I’m an outsider to this, but in the bill of rights it says “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” That is, fire-arms were made legal for civil defence reasons, not home defence or sport.
I’m not saying that a document written in 1791 should be the only guiding principle, but being able to quote it might just take the wind out of the sails of folks who believe they have a constitutional right to use an automatic machine gun firing lord knows how many rounds per second for “personal defence.”
We have an organization called the Supreme Court whose function is to argue about this sort of thing as vehemently as Rabbis arguing whether walking by a Synagogue and hearing the shofar qualifies as the commandment to hear one at Yom Kippur…but I digress.
How did you come by your user name?
Thank you for stating this common contradictory nonsense in such an efficient way. You say the 2nd amendment is about civil defense (and hence militarily useful weapons) and in the next statement say it’s ridiculous that Americans think the 2nd amendment is about civil defense (and hence militarily useful weapons).
It’s remarkable to me that you can state these things so closely together and yet feel no cognitive dissonance.
In any case, you’re wrong - it’s not common for Americans to own “automatic machine guns” - it was always difficult since 1934 subject to rigorous requirements, and production/introduction to the market of new “machine guns” was banned in 1986. Whatever it is that you think are “machine guns” are not.
Furthermore, I think it is worth pointing out that the Second Amendment did not “make” firearms legal; it merely asserted an explicit limitation of the government’s power to restrict them. Of course, it is also a limitation of powers which were never granted in the first place, making the idea that the Second Amendment rendered firearms lawful doubly ridiculous.
The poisonous notion that the Amendments in the Bill of Rights are merely abridgements of the innate authority of government was a danger that the Federalists foresaw at the time of the framing of our Constitution, and it has imperiled all our rights in recent years, not only our right to bear arms. Hamilton said it best: “…why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”