The Straight Dope on the 2nd Amendment

[Little_Nemo]

They have no justification to “improve” a society. If a government can create or destroy rights by fiat, then whatever that government decides IS the extent of all possible civil rights and demanding anything more is utterly unjustified. Demanding civil rights when said civil rights are illegal is only legitimate if said rights exist regardless of whether or not they are illegal. If they only exist because of governmental position, then a government is 100% legitimate whenever it denies them.

It won’t work both ways.

I’ll admit I not really sure what your point is here. If I understand you correctly, you’re saying there are certain inherent rights all people are entitled to and a government is legitimate if it recognizes those rights and illegitimate if it does not. Am I understanding you correctly?

So what? Your problem is that you have the presupposition that something is a right merely because a law calls it a right. Thus, you have to admit a priori that there is a right to bear arms. It is possible for ALL of the following to be simultaneously true:

Rights exist independent of any law recognizing them.

There is a law (Constitutional, even), that says that there is a “right to bear arms”.

There is no right to bear arms.

No, my point is this; people create their own rights. The reason the American people have the right to bear arms is because they declared they had that right and then instructed their government to act thusly. The right didn’t exist until the people created it.

And if the right exists because the American people gave themselves that right, then the American people are also capable of revoking that right.

The counterargument is that the people don’t create their own rights. If that is true, where do their rights come from? If they are a gift from God, why does he give different rights to different people? If they are a product of nature, that question becomes even more unanswerable.

How can this be true? Well, it can’t if one believes in an omnipotent state that has the ability to create and destroy rights. But if rights exist INDEPENDENT of law, then all three of the above can be true. If a state cannot destroy rights, then the state also cannot create rights. Even if it passes a law claiming that a certain right exists, that does not mean the right exists. The law is in error, even if it is legal.

Now, I’m certain you are not so delusional as to believe that law cannot be in error. After all, it could be possible that a law be passed stating that the moon no longer exists. That doesn’t mean that the moon no longer exists, only that a false premise has been passed into law. Law and reality are only coincidentally related, much of the time.

One thing to remember is that in a democratic society, like the United States, the people are the government. You can’t abscribe seperate motives to them.

And I wrote above that some laws are good and some are bad. Distinguishing between them and eliminating the bad ones (and enacting the good ones) is the societal improvement I spoke of.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creartor with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Now, if “rights” are created by law, what law is it that has given us the “right” to our lives, our liberty, or our pursuit of happiness?

Certainly you are not suggesting that “We the People” owe our very “lives” to the benevolence of the almighty Federal Government, are you?

To repeat what I wrote above: No, the Federal Government doesn’t give us our rights. The Creator doesn’t give us our rights. The law doesn’t give us our rights. We the People give ourselves our rights.

[Razorsharp]

*Originally posted by Little Nemo *
**To repeat what I wrote above: No, the Federal Government doesn’t give us our rights. The Creator doesn’t give us our rights. The law doesn’t give us our rights. We the People give ourselves our rights. **

But, you wrote this:

What many people seem to be misunderstanding is that rights are not created by some external force of nature. A right is created by law;

Suppose that someone is stranded on a deserted island. Does that person not have the inalienable right to gather food?

[John_Harrison]

Quite the contrary, one could argue they prohibit their use, since firearms interfere with other people’s right to life.

Just a nitpick: Firearms cannot “interfere” with other people’s right to life. They are inanimate objects. Please assign blame for any unlawful action to the PERSON that deserves it.

[Czarcasm]

Only because that person is the only person on the island and thus “votes” her/himself the right to gather food. If there were others on the island who decided that this person didn’t have this right, and they had the ability to enforce their decisions, said right would be revoked.

[OliverH]

*Originally posted by John Harrison *
**Just a nitpick: Firearms cannot “interfere” with other people’s right to life. They are inanimate objects. Please assign blame for any unlawful action to the PERSON that deserves it. **

a)As the quote you cite clearly shows, I was referring to the USE of firearms.

b)As for unlawful action, if the right to life is truly inalienable, there is no way that the purposeful taking of a life should be lawful. Of course, much like the right to freedom, the right to life is seen as quite alienable under the right circumstances.

[OliverH]

*Originally posted by Razorsharp *
**
Suppose that someone is stranded on a deserted island. Does that person not have the inalienable right to gather food? **

The right to live is covered by the universal declaration of human rights. Sorry, but you won’t be able to make a point here. By the way, do you truly consider the right to life inalienable?

[AmbushBug]

*Originally posted by OliverH *
Who says they could have? You? How? Just by their presence? An armed civilian who tries to stop a mass murderer by use of arms more often than not is a dead civilian before he can have any impact. Because having a firearm and getting to use it are two very different things.

The 1991 Luby’s restaurant incident, in Texas, USA for one. More at cited website:

cite

Here is a story with an armed citizen and a mass murderer: In Erfurt, Germany, a former student ran into a High School, shooting randomly, including through doors into rooms that teachers had hastily locked. Police was immediately notified, and a police car was on the scene in no time. The two policemen got out and tried to assess the situation from outside the building. The shooter saw them from inside and shot one of the policemen in the head. The result of the presence of two trained armed citizens was one dead armed citizen. Period.

A bad example, since the policeman’s death had nothing to do with whether he was armed or not. Last time I checked, this issue was about “armed citizens” of which policemen may be a part, but armed policemen would likely be excluded from any weapons-carrying ban on “armed citizens”.

Who stopped the shooter? A former teacher of his who refused to show fear, faced him down and pushed him into a room and then locked it from the outside. Minutes later, the shooter claimed his last victim: Himself.

If armed, the former teacher would have faced less risk, as there was no defensive position for the teacher to take had this “facing down” failed.

**All that hogwash about armed citizens stopping mass murderers is nothing but testimony of the size the ego of some people gets blown up to when they have a firearm. Having a firearm doesn’t make you invulnerable. It doesn’t make you quicker. It doesn’t make you wiser. All it does is that it makes it very easy for you to kill people. So easy that you might kill people in an argument that might have ended with bruises otherwise. **

A major component of your teacher example is the “refusal to show fear”. For all you know, the teacher was carrying a concealed firearm which, though it never had to be used or displayed, enabled this state of mind. If this were so, is this an example of the beneficial USE of a firearm?

[ExTank]

BrainGlutton: in the broad strokes, #s 1) & 2) pretty well cover it, with the caveat that there’s much deeper reasoning behind them than your brief, but adequate summaries.

That doesn’t imply that private citizens can take the law into their own hands at-will; just that under certain circumstances, recognized and codified in law, that they may, self defense being the most obvious case of this. Rebellion against tyranny being another.

Of course, revolutions are only “legal” if they are successfull, and always after-the-fact. Being as the US gov’t (and most democracies/representative republics) derives its powers from the consent of the governed, it would take some fairly heinous abuses of civil liberties, across the board and not just specific to some ethno-political group, to engender mass-rebellion against the federal gov’t. Enough so that anyone approaching that point would probably be “out,” under impeachment articles or simple electoral process, to mitigate armed rebellion.

Probably.

As such, I am not willing to simply write off reason #2 as “impossible” or “outdated,” regardles of its improbability. Call it the Hobbes in my philosophical make-up.

Razorsharp has one fairly valid point that I cannot help but recall and remind others of: that, during the American Revolution, the actual number of Revolutionaries was quite small. The vast majority of colonials actually didn’t care much at all, and a small number (roughly equal to the Revolutionaries) were loyalists. Perhaps you might say that the American Revolution followed the “20% Rule.” Say about 10% were Revolutionaries, 10% were Loyalists, and the rest (80%) may have had feelings one-way-or-another, but rarely, if ever, acted upon them.

As such, one might arguably say that the Revolution was a tyranny of the minority perpetrated upon the rest of the colonies. The fact that a more just and representative government was enacted mitigates against this, notwithstanding the fact that, most likely, 80% of the population didn’t really care (the post-war fervor described in my history text says otherwise; but there is always a lot of johnny-come-latelys to a successfull endeavor).

As far as your points about Dr. King and non-violent resistance, your point is only valid up to a certain point. Essentially, non-violent resistance will work as long as the political authority that they are “rebelling” against is unwilling to exercise the force necessary to totally supress it. Where were the Martin Luther Kings in Iraq? Afghanistan? The Soviet Union? Prisons and gulags, at best. And mass uprisings against them were destroyed in their nascence.

If the powers that be are willing to murder, make disappear, etc., on a large scale, and have the full force of state security organs behind them, then a popular uprising has probably got a snowball’s chance in hell. But that’s if the uprising pits its puny strength directly against the state. Which, IMHO, is a stupid strategy. Which is why General Washington rarely tried it against the British, and usually on ground and circumstances of his choosing when he did.

OliverH: actually, there have been several circumstances of armed citizens aborting the rampages of mass shooters; the reason it doesn’t happen more often is that because most [recent] mass shooting take place on school grounds. Which, under US Federal law, the carrying of firearms is prohibited by all except law enforcement personnel. Ergo, law abiding teachers and school administrators are unarmed, and in most cases, unlike your example in Erfurt, unwilling to confront an armed attacker unarmed themselves. If, like Texas, concealed carry were more universal, mass shooters probably look for someplace else where the majority of victims are almost assuredly unarmed. The mass shooting at the church in Ft. Worth a few years back is simply the most prominent example. Almost any American workplace other than a military installation or a police station also falls neatly into this category.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not advocating a universally armed, concealed-carry populace. Merely making the privelege available to those who have demonstrated to appropriate civil authorities that they can hadle the responsibility in a responsible fashion, and lifting certain “gun free zones” so that any incipient mass-shooter will know that, whatever venue they choose for their grisly debut, they run the very real possibility of being aborted by an armed defender, then I think that, in America at least, you will see an almost total cessation of mass shooting by all but the most suicidally deranged.

Of course, no plan is foolproof: regardless of the rate of concealed carry, or the amount of law enforcement coverage for a given area, there will be criminal activity. Even lethal criminal activity. Human nature, man.

As far as the Polizei who was killed: I’m sorry. I wish it wasn’t so. But that is one of the risks they take when they put on the uniform and badge. Whether its a deranged student or a member of the Badder-Meinhof gang being brought to justice, a neo-Nazi or or a pissed-off hausfrau, a bus with faulty brakes or some sheizekopf doing 300 kmh on the autobahn, police officers the world over run lethal risks on a daily basis.

It comes with the badge and gun.

One question about the Erfurt shooting: where did the student get the gun from? A gun store? His father? A friend?

I know that Germany has more restrictive gun control laws than the United States, so I am curious as to how the shooter got his weapon in the first place. It was a topic not covered in any news article I had seen about the shooting. The closest was a CNN article speculating about the influx of smuggled firearms coming from eastern Europe.

Czar: good rejoinder. The point that I feel is specifically important is

If there were others on the island who decided that this person didn’t have this right, and they had the ability to enforce their decisions, said right would be revoked.

Speaking for myself: Said ability [to discourage undesireable/socially unacceptable behavior] needn’t always devolve to naked force. The force of rational or moral persuasion, or mutual respect for the rule of law and peaceful coexistence. If our nominal group of castaways (A Three Hour Tour! A Three Hour Tour!) had a dying person on their hands, and had a very limited supply of food, water and/or medicines, then denying such to that dying castaway so that others may live can be seen as an exercise of extreme moraltiy under extreme conditions.

Otherwise, if said castaways simply decided that Gilligan was a putz who contributed nothing to their efforts of survival or rescue, and made him a castout, then they shouldn’t be surprised if Gilligan turns up with a crude spear or club to take, by force, what he feels is his shares of the supplies. Gilligan shouldn’t be surprised if The Skipper pulls out the .22 revolver and blows him away, or Mary Ann brains him with a coconut.

Criminal misuse of firearms is undesireable/socially unacceptable behavior. We (and most nations) have written laws to punish such behavior. Certain laws have been proposed to prohibit such behavior before the fact by restricting the availability of firearms. To a certain point, I can agree with such thinking. But such measures reach a point of diminishing returns, such that any additional laws of that nature are infringing upon the rights of peacefull, responsible citizens, and are quite possibly counterproductive.

I belive that, overall, we haven’t quite reached that point; certain jurisdictions notwithstanding. As I stated earlier, I believe that certain measures may also have a beneficial effect on further reducing criminal misuse of firearms. Only by going right up to the line between our right to keep and bear and naked infringement.

From there, it’s only a very small step to cross that line; a step that is all-too-easy to take in a heated moment of unclear thinking brought about by a sensational (though rare) event. And that such laws, once enacted, will be next to impossible to repeal.

No tome of laws, no codicil, can possibly cover the full range of human behavior after the fact. Trying to enact legislation to prohibit human [mis]behavior before the fact is an exercise in futility, at best. More like lunacy in my book.

Without a total control police state, there is simply no way humanly possible to disarm a population as diverse politically and culturally as that of the USA without resorting to some level of coercion sooner or later.

Too many people distrust the government, for various and not always paranoid-psycho reasons; or they mistrust the various police agency’s ability to protect them or respond to their calls for help in a timely manner when they need them; there are too many people (like me) who simply enjoy recreational [target] shooting, or hunting.

And, unfortunately, there are too many criminals with no regard for any law which restricts or inhibits their criminal enterprises or endeavors, and who will obtain instruments of force, by hook-or-by-crook, to enforce their criminal will upon their victims, against their criminal rivals, and even against the very law enforcement personnel set against them.

These people give fuck-all for any gun control laws, anywhere.

[Little_Nemo]

Razorsharp, I’m beginning to suspect you’re a master of irony. I find it hard to believe someone could really be as confused as you appear to be.

To repeat what I wrote above: No, the Federal Government doesn’t give us our rights. The Creator doesn’t give us our rights. The law doesn’t give us our rights. We the People give ourselves our rights.

What many people seem to be misunderstanding is that rights are not created by some external force of nature. A right is created by law;

Basically, I said the same thing twice. Here’s the process: the people decide they have a right; the people instruct the government to codify that right in a law. So while it’s possible to say a law creates a right, that’s just a shortcut for saying the people elect congessional representatives who write a law which creates a right. It all comes back to the people.

[Razorsharp]

The problem here is that you, evidently, don’t know what an inalienable right is. Certainly, there are “rights” created by legislative fiat, but these are not considered “inalienable”.

An inalienable right is one’s right to gather food while stranded on that deserted island.

Yes, others could come along and prevent the one from gathering food, but this is not revoking a right, this is a “rights violation”

While inalienable rights, like civil rights, can be violated, they do not exist at the whim of others.

[Razorsharp]

*Originally posted by OliverH *
**…do you truly consider the right to life inalienable? **

Well, the Founding Fathers listed three inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. They were, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The answer is yes.

[zwaldd]

*Originally posted by Razorsharp *
An inalienable right is one’s right to gather food while stranded on that deserted island.

What if the island isn’t deserted and the food belongs to someone else. Do you still have the right to gather food? Does the person whose food it is have the right to infringe on your right to gather food?

[OliverH]

*Originally posted by ExTank *
**

Razorsharp has one fairly valid point that I cannot help but recall and remind others of: that, during the American Revolution, the actual number of Revolutionaries was quite small. The vast majority of colonials actually didn’t care much at all, and a small number (roughly equal to the Revolutionaries) were loyalists. Perhaps you might say that the American Revolution followed the “20% Rule.” Say about 10% were Revolutionaries, 10% were Loyalists, and the rest (80%) may have had feelings one-way-or-another, but rarely, if ever, acted upon them.
**

I just don’t see any relation to the issue at hand.

**OliverH actually, there have been several circumstances of armed citizens aborting the rampages of mass shooters;
**

Which is at best anecdotal evidence.

**
the reason it doesn’t happen more often is that because most [recent] mass shooting take place on school grounds. Which, under US Federal law, the carrying of firearms is prohibited by all except law enforcement personnel. Ergo, law abiding teachers and school administrators are unarmed, and in most cases, unlike your example in Erfurt, unwilling to confront an armed attacker unarmed themselves.
**

In other words, they define their and his strength through their ability or lack thereof to shoot, not through the probability of such happening, which could be seen as a direct consequence of the prevalence of firearms. In the Erfurt case, the teacher realised that the student was compensating for the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness after being kicked out of school by invoking power through fear through his use of firearms. As soon as the teacher faced him down stating ‘I am not afraid of you’, it was over.

**
If, like Texas, concealed carry were more universal, mass shooters probably look for someplace else where the majority of victims are almost assuredly unarmed. The mass shooting at the church in Ft. Worth a few years back is simply the most prominent example. Almost any American workplace other than a military installation or a police station also falls neatly into this category.
**

A common thought that I think follows out of the misconception that correlation implies a causative relationship. Neither in the Erfurt case nor in Columbine, nor in the Boston workplace shooting a while ago was the fact that the people at the location were unarmed the key factor for its choice. The key factor was the personal relationship the shooters had with the location. It was where the student in Erfurt felt powerless, so it was where he wanted to feel powerful.

**
Don’t misunderstand: I’m not advocating a universally armed, concealed-carry populace. Merely making the privelege available to those who have demonstrated to appropriate civil authorities that they can hadle the responsibility in a responsible fashion, and lifting certain “gun free zones” so that any incipient mass-shooter will know that, whatever venue they choose for their grisly debut, they run the very real possibility of being aborted by an armed defender, then I think that, in America at least, you will see an almost total cessation of mass shooting by all but the most suicidally deranged. **

Which, coincidentally, is one of the most important types of mass shooters. Criminals usually either don’t expect to get caught or are fully counting on getting into a firefight. In the case of mass shooters, many EXPECT to go down with a bang.

However, ease of getting a CC permit says nothing about the actual prevalence of guns on the street. Lastly, the ‘armed defender’, rather than ‘preventing something worse’ as he might intend, can provoke the shooter into a firefight in a location where much more people can be killed by stray bullets, and he might actually CAUSE dead that might have possibly prevented in cases where a hostage situation develops that could be peacefully resolved by proper negotiation.

Lastly, the fact that someone has herethereto shown himself to be a responsible individual says nothing about how he will act given a specific set of circumstances. Many people have a point at which they can break. If that is reached, and they have a firearm in their possession, the damage is much, much greater.

**
As far as the Polizei who was killed: I’m sorry. I wish it wasn’t so. But that is one of the risks they take when they put on the uniform and badge. Whether its a deranged student or a member of the Badder-Meinhof gang being brought to justice, a neo-Nazi or or a pissed-off hausfrau, a bus with faulty brakes or some sheizekopf doing 300 kmh on the autobahn, police officers the world over run lethal risks on a daily basis.

It comes with the badge and gun.
**

You are arguing from a US point of view. The situation in Germany is quite different. As an example, whereas in the US, you should keep your hands on the wheel when your car is pulled out, such behavior might cost you precious sympathy in Germany. The cop in Germany is not expecting you to pull a gun on him. He knows that the likelihood is infinitesimally small. He is more concerned with the very real danger of you suddenly taking off while he is standing dangerously close to your car, something that DOES happen frequently with people who have something to hide, and has led to the death of quite a policeman. Thus, he’d like to keep the time he is standing next to you small, and you still having to fiddle for your papers while he is standing there is nothing he appreciates.

**
One question about the Erfurt shooting: where did the student get the gun from? A gun store? His father? A friend?

I know that Germany has more restrictive gun control laws than the United States, so I am curious as to how the shooter got his weapon in the first place. It was a topic not covered in any news article I had seen about the shooting. The closest was a CNN article speculating about the influx of smuggled firearms coming from eastern Europe.
**

Such reports were merely attempts to cater to the thought among gun advocates that criminals will always get a gun. No such thing was the case. He was in the final year of high school. He was adult. He was a member of a gun club. The handgun (which he used) and the pumpgun (which he only carried with him and luckily did not use) he had with him in the school were his legal private property. He was, until then, a law abiding citizen.

A subsequent tightening of gun restrictions lifted the age for personal possession of firearms to 21. People under that age can still use firearms in gun clubs, but have to use club-owned guns which have to be left on the premises. Of course, they could still try and steal them.

**
Criminal misuse of firearms is undesireable/socially unacceptable behavior. We (and most nations) have written laws to punish such behavior. Certain laws have been proposed to prohibit such behavior before the fact by restricting the availability of firearms. To a certain point, I can agree with such thinking. But such measures reach a point of diminishing returns, such that any additional laws of that nature are infringing upon the rights of peacefull, responsible citizens, and are quite possibly counterproductive.
**

That would only be possible if these rights would extend to that point. But the rights of one peaceful responsible citizen end where they threaten the rights of another peaceful responsible citizen.

One thing you also miss is that we are NOT just talking about the use of firearms deliberately planned in exercise of another crime. We’re also talking about incidental use of firearms out of an unforeseen situation. Incidental use of firearms, as a matter of sheer statistics, will increase with availability of firearms. We’re not just talking about deliberate, meticulously planned homicide. We’re talking about people getting into an argument out of what should be a non-issue, and one of them suddenly pulling a gun on the other.

**
No tome of laws, no codicil, can possibly cover the full range of human behavior after the fact. Trying to enact legislation to prohibit human [mis]behavior before the fact is an exercise in futility, at best. More like lunacy in my book.
**

The problem is that your assumption of futility is disproven by the success in numerous nations. Unless you postulate a radical psychological difference between, say, Americans, and people elsewhere in the world.

**
Without a total control police state, there is simply no way humanly possible to disarm a population as diverse politically and culturally as that of the USA without resorting to some level of coercion sooner or later.
**

That does not bode well for the current efforts of the US to do precisely that in Iraq, but that just as an aside. However, Switzerland recently seriously tightened their gun laws. I think it is misleading to speak of disarmament in respect to gun legislation.

**
Too many people distrust the government, for various and not always paranoid-psycho reasons; or they mistrust the various police agency’s ability to protect them or respond to their calls for help in a timely manner when they need them; there are too many people (like me) who simply enjoy recreational [target] shooting, or hunting.
**

None of which is a valid argument against gun legislation, since all can be and are addressed in most countries with tight gun laws, up to and including defense of the country by militia structures.

**
And, unfortunately, there are too many criminals with no regard for any law which restricts or inhibits their criminal enterprises or endeavors, and who will obtain instruments of force, by hook-or-by-crook, to enforce their criminal will upon their victims, against their criminal rivals, and even against the very law enforcement personnel set against them.

These people give fuck-all for any gun control laws, anywhere. **

Two things to that frequent point:

a)They might ignore gun control laws, but they can’t control the law of supply and demand. Low prevalence of guns means high prices. Which means that the risk/benefit analyis gets even worse, given that they might be arrested on possession of the gun even before they have scored a benefit, but after they put down a lot of money for the gun. Consequentially, they’ll go without the gun if they feel safe in doing so.

b)If what you say is true, how come the frequent use of replica and toy guns in robberies in Germany, despite the fact that an AK-47 from the Balkans is not that hard to come by?

[OliverH]

*Originally posted by Razorsharp *
**Well, the Founding Fathers listed three inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. They were, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The answer is yes. **

That would mean you consider the death penalty as intenable, since it violates the rights spelled out as inalienable in the DoI?

[Razorsharp]

*Originally posted by OliverH *
**That would mean you consider the death penalty as intenable, since it violates the rights spelled out as inalienable in the DoI? **

“…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;”
– Fifth Amendment –

So, according to you (and many others), because a “right” can be denied, supressed, revoked, "voted away’. or if all else fails, the holder of said “right” can be killed, then, in reality, there is no such thing as an inalienable right.

Is that the gist of it?

Hell, evidently we don’t really have any rights.

[Razorsharp]

*Originally posted by zwaldd *
**What if the island isn’t deserted and the food belongs to someone else. Do you still have the right to gather food? Does the person whose food it is have the right to infringe on your right to gather food? **

“What if”??

“What if” ain’t got nuthin’ to do with the analogy.

If someone is stealing someone else’s property, then the property owner’s rights are being violated.

I suppose a thief has the inalienable right to apply his craft, but he certainly does not have the right to not suffer retribution.

[OliverH]

*Originally posted by Razorsharp *
**"…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;"
– Fifth Amendment –

So, according to you (and many others), because a “right” can be denied, supressed, revoked, "voted away’. or if all else fails, the holder of said “right” can be killed, then, in reality, there is no such thing as an inalienable right.

Is that the gist of it?

Hell, evidently we don’t really have any rights. **

All I am saying that if a right can be lost or revoked, it obviously isn’t inalienable, but rather very much alienable. But that’s just a side issue, anyway, since inalienable rights have pretty much zero to do with the second amendment.

[zwaldd]

*Originally posted by Razorsharp *
**I suppose a thief has the inalienable right to apply his craft, but he certainly does not have the right to not suffer retribution. **

I’m not asking about a thief. You are stranded on an island and the food there belongs to someone else. Do you have the right to gather that food?

[Little_Nemo]

Well, the Founding Fathers listed three inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. They were, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The answer is yes.

“…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;”
– Fifth Amendment –

So the rights to life and liberty are inalienable rights unless they’re taken away. Once again, I think you’re mistaken on what the word ‘inalienable’ actually means.

So, according to you (and many others), because a “right” can be denied, supressed, revoked, "voted away’. or if all else fails, the holder of said “right” can be killed, then, in reality, there is no such thing as an inalienable right.

Is that the gist of it?

Hell, evidently we don’t really have any rights.

Why do you fail to see that you can have a right without it being inalienable?

You have rights. Specifically, you have the rights that the American people have set in law. Someday, the people may change those laws and you may have more rights. Or maybe they’ll change them and you’ll have less rights. But the fact that they are subject to change, doesn’t mean they don’t exist now.

[John_Harrison]

*Originally posted by OliverH *
**Incidental use of firearms, as a matter of sheer statistics, will increase with availability of firearms. We’re not just talking about deliberate, meticulously planned homicide. We’re talking about people getting into an argument out of what should be a non-issue, and one of them suddenly pulling a gun on the other.
**

That’s an interesting point. Do you have any evidence to support this? I ask because it has been shown many times (in previous threads) that despite the growing gun supply in the US, homicide, suicide and accidental deaths have continued to decrease.