Surely you have stats to back up your position? Like, guns cause a polite society, right? Polls should show that. Let’s see them. Or maybe guns in house will prevent home invasions or whatever, right? Fucking guns are awesome, should show right the fuck up in the data, right?
“Why do so many Americans feel they need tools for killing people?”
I’m sure Americans realize they don’t strictly need tools for killing people. They’ve watched enough 80s’ action movies to know about hand-to-hand combat.
It’s just that guns make it much less effort to kill people without having to get up from the couch and risk both spilling the nachos and missing the field goal.
I kid, I kid Americans, I kid them! Love you guys from up here.
I think, Dave, you are losing sight of the tyranny angle. Most of us in the rest of the world who don’t have extensive armouries are not noticeably oppressed — if we are in various ways, such as the assault on the welfare state, or having our soldiers used to kill people pointlessly, or trade unionism being eliminated > all good reasons for gun owners to be alarmed, these are not likely to be solved by armed uprising.
Therefore one has to go to the heart of what tyranny is. For the Gun Nut Americanus, Tyranny can be defined as the state in which he has no guns. Nothing else counts, 'Let them conduct the nation as they may, so long as I can sit here and stroke my own barrel’. Therefore, having guns removed is the very tyranny having guns is meant to protect one from. There is no greater meaning.
Plus, bagels are no use for sticking up a gas-station.
So are you going to answer his question?
I see no misspelt words in his post:
Nm…
bathe, not bath.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary of American English © 2015
bath (bath, bäth),
n., pl. baths (baᵺz, bäᵺz, baths, bäths),
v.
v.t., v.i.
to wash or soak in a bath
Bully for you. What is the first definition given there? Bath is primarily used as a noun. Let’s take a look at some other sources, mkay?
Dictionary.com does not list any usage as a verb.
Merriam Webster does not list any usage as a verb.
The Free Dictionary has multiple listings for the word. It is not listed as a verb in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, but in the 4th entry, it is listed as a verb, coming in at #7 within the listing.
Cambridge Dictionary does show usage as a verb, but identifies it as “old fashioned”, and that it is a UK usage.
Shall I continue? Perhaps we should look up the use of the word bathe. I wonder what the very first definition of that spelling will be.
Cambridge dictionary lists it as the first definition.
The Free dictionary lists it as the first definition.
Merriam Webster lists it first.
Dictionary.com lists it first.
You both need to just relax and breath.
Well played.
The idea was more that the people, through the mechanism of the States, needed to retain their capacity to be armed, as a potential counterbalance to some sort of centralized tyrannical government. This was more or less an extension of the English experience in the English Civil War, and the standing army prohibitions in the British Bill of Rights.
Colonial-era militiamen were expected to provide their own arms as well.
So it seems to me that the 2nd Amendment was more of a way to guarantee that this system would be constitutionally protected, and give the States control over most of the nation’s armed forces. You couldn’t very well have a self-armed militia if its members were prohibited from owning their own rifles, you know.
Of course, things have changed since then- the militia has gone from being self-provisioned to being supplied and armed by the various governments, and is, at least in peacetime, under State control.
The 2nd Amendment wasn’t ever really challenged seriously until very recently- there just weren’t any movements toward gun prohibition prior- guns were too useful for too many people as defense and hunting weapons. So the amendment has soldiered on, and now is kind of a bit anachronistic, but it still sort of accomplishes its purpose, in that if there ever was some sort of real tyranny from Washington, there would be an armed populace who could do guerilla style fighting armed with their own weaponry, albeit at almost certainly grievous cost.
The fact that it allows civil weaponry is more of a “feature” (in computing terms)- there wasn’t a distinction drawn in the 18th century when the amendment was written, so the amendment covers “arms”, instead of “military weapons” or something like that.
This may come as a shock to you, but I have a handgun that I have owned for 40+ years now. And during that time, it has never once crawled out of its holster and threatened anyone in my family. Or anyone else for that matter.
People have actually conducted experiments about this. Here is the result of one such experiment.
bump, an excellent post! I’d add a couple more things:
The Second Amendment came about because of bitter controversy over the new Constitution giving the federal government co-authority with the states over the militia. Since the training standard was left up to the fed, it was worried that the fed could simply say “stand down and turn in your arms- forever”. So the 2nd was intended primarily to prevent the federal government from “regulating” the militia into helplessness.
It’s also worth remembering that the states were actively forbidden from having standing professional armies, and civil police forces hadn’t been invented yet. Calling up armed citizens was the state’s only recourse, and if by some legalism the citizenry were forbidden to possess arms, the states would have no power to enforce law and order.