Dogface: I wasn’t quoting the second amendment, and I think I did pretty well to capture the jist of it considering that it’s not from my constitution.
So you think it would be constitutional to limit arms ownership to sticks and swords? Or reasonable to allow ownership of nuclear weapons and tanks? Why draw the line at guns?
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I did no such thing. It’s just my belief, which is determined from context and common sense, that ‘arms’ isn’t arbitrarily limited to ‘firearms’.
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Doesn’t make sense to me. You seem to be saying that if we allow the word ‘arms’ to be arbitrarily redefined to only include firearms, then we must take the rest of the amendment at face value. Strikes me as a non-sequitor.
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I’m still confused. Even if I take the rest of what you say to be logical, is somehow saying that sticks aren’t a protected weapon under arms going to create a slippery slope in which I’m rendered defenseless because I can carry guns, but not sticks? I’m still not sure what you’re getting at.
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No, that’s not what it says. It says “arms”. Firearms are a specific subset of the group “arms”, as are swords and clubs.
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Well, you’re trying to make some sort of odd semantical argument saying that arms necesarily means firearms, with nothing other than your own decree to support it. Since both your semantical arguments are unfounded and what you said clearly goes against the spirit in which the amendment was written, I figured I’d point out both issues.
The second amendment was written as a protection against government interference in self defense. There’s no reason that it would be limited to firearms, rather than all arms.
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Alright…
Well, then stop making random arbitrary declarations about how you’ve decided that “arms” only refers to “firearms”, and I won’t have to respond to them.
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No. Where did I say anything that pointed to that as a logical conclusion? Restrictions on arms are still restrictions on arms.
Arms vs. Ordnance. We covered this subject several times in past debates. The short version is that weapons meant to be employed by individuals intended for discrete targets are generally considered to be arms, whereas area effect and heavy weapons are considered to be ordinance.
In my focused opinion, the word “arms” as used in the 2nd to support having a well regulated militia to insure the security of a free state, refers to guns.
The thing is obvious.
The First Amendment guarantees me the right to hold and express that opinion.
There’s an old trick, going ftom specific to general, ignoring context.
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Well, good for your focused opinion. You’ve given no evidence that the second amendment is meant to protect only firearms, just “that’s my opinion”. If that’s the best argument you can come up with, then so be it.
You apparently believe that the weapon is more important than the sentiment. It doesn’t apparently apply to all arms, only firearms, because that’s just some arbitrary thing they came up with. And, apparently, the logical conclusion is that if firearms weren’t invented at the time, and we were battling with swords and bows, the second amendment wouldn’t have been written - because it has nothing to do with self defense or the possession of arms - only firearms.
Your position strikes me as utterly nonsensical. The meaning of the second amendment doesn’t change whether you’re referring to sticks, swords, or guns. They might’ve had firearms in mind when they wrote it because that was the common weapon in use by soldiers at the time, but what does that matter? The intent behind it applies to any personal, discrete weapon.
What context am I ignoring? You said that arms only refers to firearms, because you decided such. So I said that firearms are only a subset of arms, not the whole set. There’s no context being ignored - that’s perfectly in context.
I have no idea what you’re going on about, in general. You still haven’t explained what slippery slope argument you asserted I was making. The only thing I can think of is that you think I’m making this whole argument so that no one can pass stick-control legislation.
I still can’t make much sense of your position, and you seem to be purposefully making your position unclear. The only thing I have been able to interpret for sure is that you’ve decided that ‘arms’, as written in the second amendment, only applies to guns, and not arms, as is written, because you’ve decided that’s how it is, with no supporting logic whatsoever.
So, clarify what I asked you to clarify, because you’re not making much sense to me, or just decide you’re expressing an arbitrary opinion and withdraw any semblence of making an argument.
This is the correct answer.
Of course, negative rights impose only negative obligations, positive rights impose positive obligations. Since I do not believe that positive obligations should be imposed on anyone except with their explicit consent (as in the rights and obligations of parties in a freely negotiated contract), then I would be glad to see the entire notion of positive rights done away with.
Positive rights, after all, create positive obligations which by their very nature cannot always be paid. It’s within anyone’s power to refrain from using force to prevent another from acquiring something, so negative obligations can always be paid. Ultimately you can’t really force anybody to pay an involuntary positive obligation, even if they have any productive ability in the first place. Even if you send them to the gulag to work and use the profits of their work to give somebody health care, it still remains in the power of that person to simply refuse to work and get shot.
Shooting the man will certainly fulfill any negative obligation he has (after all, he can’t interfere with anybody once he’s dead), but it won’t fulfill any positive obligations. Involuntary positive obligations depend for their efficacy upon the delusion of the obligor that he must live his life for the sake of others, that he must continue to produce and pay these obligations out of some altruistic morality or sense of civic duty. The obligor need only discard this notion, and the obligation can no longer be met.
For the “too long, didn’t read” crowd: I think positive rights are a problematic concept, and ought to be discarded entirely, but they are still considered “rights” as the definitions presently work.
I wonder what “circumstances beyond his control” really means, anyway? What man finds himself out of a home purely as a result of things he had no choice about?
Let’s say a tornado sweeps through town and demolishes his house. It was certainly within his control to choose to purchase tornado insurance. It was certainly within his control to choose to live where there aren’t any tornados.
How about a woman who can’t afford housing because she has to support her four children? The circumstance that produced those four children (the sex act) was within her control. Even if she was raped, in this society you can have abortions, so the very existence the children was a circumstance within her control.
What we consider the real “hard luck” cases could still be interpreted to be due to circumstances entirely within the person’s control. The only way to give that phrase any bite would be to change it to read “circumstances beyond his reasonable control”, which would of course leave it to courts to decide what is reasonable.
This is what I suspect was their purpose in passing it. The UDHR basically represents the “social justice” ideas of democratic-socialist Europe, and whatever college-educated intellectuals they can dredge up to speak in the name of the Southern Hemisphere’s dictators and warlords. It represents their ideals, what they think government ought to do for its citizens, and represents what they would like the future to be around the globe. It’s there, I think, as their visionary document.
Not a vision I share, but as long as they don’t try to enforce that on member states then they can prattle on about all the socialism they want.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, there, Rex… the UNUDHR was passed in 1948 by the charter members of the UN, essentially the victors of WW2, and IIRC was mostly drafted by folks from the American delegation. Sure, the Americans were Roosevelt-Truman appointees and the Russkies were already in the SC Five and Labour was in charge in the UK, but I don’t think there were many there to “speak in the name of the Southern Hemisphere’s dictators and warlords”. They have been most eager to jump on the bandwagon ever since – sure thing. But I think it’s that they take advantage of the UDHR for cover, not that it was designed as their cover.
(And WTH do you mean, anyway, “Southern Hemisphere”? Where, relative to the Equator, are/were China, Iran, the former USSR + satellites, Central America, Cuba, Haiti, Trujillo’s Santo Domingo, most of the Middle East, the WW2 Axis Powers, 1936-75 Spain and Portugal, Talib Afghanistan? There were plenty enough Northern Hemisphere dictators and warlords to deal with 
)
Human rights and equality are mentioned in the preamble to the UN’s charter. (1945)
The Declaration a few years later was an attempt, I think, to define those rights.
Were the writers of the Charter lefties? Who knows for sure, But I’ll bet they reflected a world tired of war. Most of them, anyway.
BTW; the link takes you to the entire charter, if anyone’s interested.
Thanks RexDart, for fleshing out the problem with this silly thread premise, and moving the debate to something actually worth talking about: whether guaranteeing positive rights, such China claims to, is really a good idea.
Neurotik
My point is that it’s meaningless to talk of a debt without there being a debtor. What does it mean that he has a right to $100,000 if no one owes it to him?
And you seem to not understand what I mean by a right. A right is something which it is morally wrong to take away. So to say that someone has the right to free speech means that it is morally wrong to take free speech away from him. And morality does not depend on government decree; it does not become moral to do something simply because the government declares it to be so. This is a well established point of view. I am not simply “inventing” a new meaning.
Pochacco
There are two issues here: the content of the right (what speech is free, to what housing does one have a right) and the nature of the right. While the former is ambiguous for both, the latter is ambiguous only for the right to housing. Even if we could decide what level of housing a person has a right to, the issues that I brought up would still be unresolved. For instance, if one has a right to 500 square feet, what does that mean? Does it mean that the government is obligated to provide 500 square feet of housing for free? Does it mean that landowners may not charge rent for the first 500 square feet? On the other hand, if we were to agree that one has the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater, it would be clear what that means: it is immoral for anyone to use force to prevent one from doing so.
That is hardly a clearly settled issue. And not taking taxes from churches is a policy decision; AFAIK the SCOTUS has not said that it is required by the First Amendment. As for your last sentence, I simply don’t understand that attitude. If it were 150 earlier, would you say “If you think its better for society to be deprived of free labor from slaves, then debate the pros and cons of the policy directly. But don’t try to use an abstract discussion of rights as a smokescreen.”? Do you really think that morality is irrelevant to policy decisions? And how is discussing rights a smokescreen in a thread about rights?
Mangeorge:
The First Amendment certainly protects your right to hold odd opinions, but I really don’t see how you might think that simply stating that a word doesn’t mean what it obviously means is going to convince anyone. Does the term “armed robbery” not include those that use no weapon but a knife? “Arm” means “weapon”. I don’t see how anyone could dispute that. Are you next going to claim that “bear” means “own”?
What the heck does all that have to go with the Second Amendment? I went back to some of the old gun debates to refresh my memory and I think I may have formed an idea what’s going on here. You guys (gun advocates) see even the slightist limitation, no matter how tiny, to the 2nd as an attack, and a poteneial chipping away of the rights therein.
All I’m saying is that it’s obvious that the writers of the amendment wrote it with the intention of preventing the govt. from taking peoples (mens) guns away from them. Something to do with a militia, it says, and the security of the state. Read it. Read about it and the times in which it was written. They were not thinking about sticks and/or poleaxes. “Arm”, in general, does indeed mean weapon. Never said it didn’t. But in the context of the second it clearly meant (and means) gun.
Of course robbing with a knife is armed robbery. The second doesn’t address robery, does it.
I still have no idea what you’re going on about, mangeorge.
Even if we arbitrarily declare arms to mean firearms, what’s the implication? Are you defending stick and knife bans? What’s your purpose in this discussion?
No, I understand exactly what you mean by a right. What I am challenging is your assumption that this definition is the only correct definition of right. It is not. Your entire OP stems from you assuming that your narrow definition of a right is the only correct one. It is not. A right is just as properly defined as something that someone has a claim to, such as, free housing or healthcare should that society deem those to be rights.
So to sum up, do positive rights fit your definition of rights? No. Do they fit another definition of rights? Yes.
This isn’t a hard concept to get.
mangeorge
That’s ridiculous, and simply an ad hominem attack. I don’t have a problem with there being limitations on gun ownership. What I have a problem with is people trying to claim that the Second Amendment doesn’t say what it clearly says.
How is that clear? The closest I can glean from your post as far as an argument why this is clear is “The phrase ‘state militia’ appears in the Second Amendment, therefore it only applies to arms held by state militias. State militias didn’t have any arms other than firearms, so it only applies to firearms”. If this is your argument, you’re wrong on both counts. The first is simply nonsensical, and the second is factually incorrect. State militias had a wide range of arms, including sabers, bayonets, and yes, sharp pointy sticks.
The point is that in situations other than the Second Amendment, “arm” means “weapon”. So why is the Second Amendment a special case in which words have special meanings?
Neurotik
First of all, as I explained earlier, it is not an assumption, it is an assertion presented for debate. Secondly, I don’t see how simply declaring that you’re conception of rights is the correct one is much of a challenge.
No, because such a definition doesn’t make sense, as I have previously explained.
That should be “Secondly, I don’t see how simply declaring that your conception of rights is the correct one is much of a challenge.”
I didn’t say it was THE correct one. I said it was A correct one. See the difference? You are claiming the former. You have yet to prove that assertion.
I do not dispute that negative rights are a form of human right. I am still waiting for you to prove that they are the only form of human right.
Whether you feel it makes sense or not, it’s still a correct definition. See watch - from Mirriam-Webster:
See? It’s a correct definition of the word. Prove to me that positive rights are still not rights. Please. I’m begging you. Prove me wrong. Prove to me that the definition of rights as something that someone has a claim to is not a correct definition of a “right.”
The Ryan;
Special meanings??? The Constitution is rife with words that have special meanings.
Check this out;
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.
If not for special meanings, the Second amendment would mean that the govt. couldn’t stop you from having a gun to form a militia (well regulated) in case the free state’s security is threatened.
It doesn’t say you can’t use those arms for other things, but it doesn’t say you can, either. Unless SCOTUS says that certain words have special meanings.
Today I asked seven guys at work “What right does the 2nd protect”. Each of them said “To bear arms”. I asked “Arms?”. “Yeah”, they said, “Guns”.
“How 'bout poleaxes” I ventured. Five said “That ain’t no gun”, and two asked “What’s your point?”
My point is that the Second Amendment isn’t concerned with sticks. Ask anybody who cares what they are worried about losing should the 2nd be messed with.
And I didn’t say anything about limitations on gun ownership, I was addressing the idea of limitations to the 2nd.
That’s not the same, is it?