And the lord looked down on Adam and said eat thee not of the tree of good and Evil, but take instead this Glock 17 and hollow point ammo and waste that snake’s ass.
Freedom of thought is a FAR more universal right that free speech or any other freedom to do anything, I will admit that it will be endangered once governments figure out a reliable way to read minds, though.
Actually there’s plenty wrong with that. Gingrich stating that there is only One Way, The American Way, is pretty much guaranteed to antagonise his (supposed) target audience. We are not Americans, and we don’t aspire to be Americans. We don’t see America’s values as universal values. We don’t want to turn the country into a little pale copy of America, regardless of whether it would be better off or worse off as a result. If you want to live the American Way, then go ahead, knock yourselves out. Don’t, Mr Gingrich, tell us we need to be taking the same road.
His target audience was the NRA, specifically people who are gung ho enough about it to go to their big convention. I have no idea if the NRA exists outside the borders of the US, if there are non-American members there’s a good chance they would have adored his speech too. As to other non-Americans, he’s talking to the ones who imagine all they need is a gun and enough ammunition to free themselves.
You know, like the IRA, The Red Brigades, The PLO and Hamas. Maybe Newt is their newest hero.
How did mankind bear arms at the dawn of creation? Do sticks count?
Ha! The rest of the world would really like the US to keep their big problems to themselves, please. What’s next, Zimbabwe zealously exporting AIDS? (OK really, I know that’s silly, but they’re both massive problems that kill people, most other countries don’t want that stuff thanks.)
I just had to laugh out load when I read this. I’ll buy what I read here so often: that disarming the US at this point wouldn’t work because only criminals would have guns.* But pragmatically, the whole thing isn’t really working out very well. You can perform all sorts of double think to make weapons a Right, but in terms of casualties it doesn’t pay off. So no thanks. I’ll take not getting shot while buying skittles over any grand Right or Freedom I am currently so desperately lacking.
(*Actually, in the Netherlands the police often have weeks when people are allowed to hand over any illegal weapons without consequence. Many criminals hand over their weapons, usually because they realise it was stupid to acquire them in the first place and they regret it. Yup, our criminals willingly hand over their weapons to the police. Because people here don’t really want weapons.)
Honestly, while I think that the NRA and the whole ‘a creator given right to bear arms (and arm bears)’ is preposterous, I do advocate a universal right of self defense. Not because of the US constitution though. No, god no. That’s a terrible reason. And it’s not so we can defend our liberties from the state either. Hopefully we trust our various states enough not to need that.
However what we do need, from time to time, is the ability to defend ourselves and others from yet other people. On this side of the pond, there is almost literally nothing that you can legally carry to (for example) stop someone else killing someone. No tazers, no pepper spray, no sticks with nails in. Nothing. Essentially if you are put in the position of seeing a violent crime in progress then you either have to do nothing, or have to hurl yourself between the bad guys and the good guys. And we are advised never to do so by the way. Because that way, two people get killed.
Criminals carry knives and guns because they (shockingly) don’t obey the law, while law-abiding citizens are easy pickings. Now, of course, even in the US, you are almost certainly better advised to just comply with a mugging or similar rather than going for a gun. And when you are choosing between losing some cash, a phone and canceling your credit cards and dying, its not worth the risk of fighting, armed or not. And I’m not going to argue about that.
There are two places where being armed, and specifically armed with a gun, can make a difference.
- The assailant wants to kill you.
- You happen upon a crime in progress.
In the first case, where the only possible way to survive is to fight, guns get the job done. Even if you can’t hit the assailant, gun shots are loud and attract a LOT of attention very quickly, and even a miss tells the guy that continuing here might end up with his death too. So in that situation, a gun can save your life.
In the second case, every person is a potential life saver. Again, a gun shot (even one thats into the wall) attracts attention. And if that attention doesn’t make the assailant flee, then regardless of your size, gender or physical ability, you can force them to stop.
A friend of my friend was once mugged walking home, held up at knife point. Lucky for him a rather large gentleman in a reflective jacket (which looked like a police jacket) came along behind him, and the attacker fled. The surprise presence of what appeared to be a person with the training and tools to disarm the attacker was enough to save the situation. But what would have happened had his rescuer been wearing a regular jacket ? At best, two people get mugged. At worst, the attacker panics enough to kill one or both of them.
At the time I had an all night discussion with my then girlfriend about what we might have done in that situation. Not as the victim, but as the guy showing up. I like to think that I’d have had a shot at saving him anyway (and as I recall there was no real option to walk by on the other side). And with me being a big guy, and Dave being a big guy, between us it might have ended ok. What if my girlfriend had been the person arriving ? Not great odds.
But what if I had a .45 ? I’d feel a whole lot happier about playing good Samaritan. And if it was Lindsay with the gun ? Doesn’t change anything. It’s the gun that matters not the person.
Obviously legalizing guns (and hand guns particularly) has lots of associated problems in terms of registration and tracing them and so forth, as well as deciding what guns are and aren’t legal. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, thats a whole other discussion.
In law, we all have the right (and certainly the moral obligation) to defend ourselves and others from violence and theft and so forth. But without the tools to do that, the right to do that means nothing. Even against an unarmed man and especially one that is used to distributing violence, the majority of unarmed people would have problems doing anything. Women most certainly would, and even most men. And when you add to that a weapon, the odds drop further.
I was certainly brought up to defend weaker people, but given the risk involved in doing so in the real world, it would take an extreme situation (most likely one where I was already in danger myself) to make good on that without something to even up the odds.
While it sounds very much like NRA rhetoric to say this, I feel it is relevant here: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Guns are tools, purpose built such that any person can kill any other person. They allow weak people to stand up to strong people. When they are illegal, they allow criminals regardless of their size, strength or ability to victimize law abiding people.
Why shouldn’t any person, of any size or strength, be able to protect themselves in the same fashion ?
Before anyone asks, I am a libertarian. And that’s what all of this is about. The true meaning of libertarian is the idea that everyone has the right to have, possess and do whatever they want, as long as they don’t harm anyone. And that includes guns.
Personally, I am very tired of wishy washy center-left self-proclaimed liberals who think we deserve freedom, except the freedom to own guns, take drugs, smoke, drink or generally do anything they don’t agree with, no matter how little it effects them.
So both in principal AND in practice, I am in favor gun-emancipation. And everything else emancipation too. But thats another tale for another time.
So Newt is proposing a level of law above that of the Founding documents of a nation, in essence paving the way to one world government. He’s undermining our sovereignty.
(This is exactly the logic the far right uses to oppose the International Criminal Court.)
Clearly he’s the anti-Christ.
Newt’s the only one who doesn’t know that the Republican presidential nomination train has left the station, and he’s not on it. This “big idea” of his is too stoopid to comment on, other than to say that Skammer got it right.
If his comments about Fox News screwing his campaign are any indication, he does know - he even referred to his campaign in the past tense, if I remember correctly. He’s just to egotistical to take the next step and fuck off.
I cannot imagine what you’re thinking when you say humans don’t have the right to free thought. Do you think that there are governments out there installing chips in people’s brains, or something?
Ignoring the nonsense that starts your post, I was responding to a poster who equated the right to own arms with the rights to speak and think freely. If I were responding to a person who’d mentioned the rights of assembly and redress of greviances and due process and protection from search and seizure, I would point out that long human history has shown that the loss of those rights tends to have a high correlation with tyranny and mass misery, and thus those laws have a commonly-agreed-upon basis in the common good.
The right to own guns does not appear to be required to have a peaceable and relatively free state, so it cannot reasonably be argued for on that basis of comparison to the rights of assembly and redress of greviances and due process and protection from search and seizure.
I suspect that very few people recognize in advance that someone is going to kill them, or far enough in advance to have time to draw aim and fire a weapon. However, if you actually know there is someone stalking you who means to kill you, I wouldn’t argue against getting a gun and practicing with it a LOT.
And the other problem with both scenarios is that firing a weapon into an ongoing crime involving multiple people has some really bad possible outcomes, like missing the bad guy and hitting someone else. Or even hitting the bad guy, and having the bullet go through to hit someone else.
A lot of people weren’t aware of it, but there was an armed policeman at the mass shooting of Congresswoman Giffords. He never fired – he was professional enough not to take a shot, even a clear one (though honestly I don’t know if he ever had one), with so may innocents around.
To debate what this man says is giving him way too much respect. The sooner the primaries are officially over he is forgotten the better.
No, you have it backward. He wants to extend our sovereignty, preferably by invitation, but by conquest if necessary. All those other also-ran countries can become states.
That is certainly a fair concern, and I’m not going to pretend that it is under all circumstances wise to start shooting at whatever crime you see happening. Even in America a lot of the time if you shot someone while they were committing a crime you would end up being arrested, and it’s precisely because of this that gun owners need good training and generally be educated enough to know when they need to pull the trigger.
However, the principal is sound. And the idea here is not so much about the legislation and requirements to own a gun, its about the principal of if people should have that right at all.
And to make the point, I’m going to propose a completely unfair and unrealistic question: If you arrive on the scene of two men lynching another, and you don’t have a weapon, what do you do ? Would that situation be different if you had a gun ?
Yes, that’s totally unfair. Utterly and completely. But for anything more minor, it’s just a matter of degrees. What if instead of a lynching it was a man strangling a prostitute in an alley ? How about holding up with a knife ? What if he was beating someone up ?
For the majority of people, the answer in all of these in reality (not the idealized ninja form of ourselves that lives in our heads) is ‘Walk on by’. It’s not because we are bad people, its because we pragmatically realize the risk.
The point I was initially trying to make was that a gun allows (when combined with good judgement) any random passer by to take control of the situation, and save a life.
I said that right is not mentioned in the Constitution, and it isn’t. That’s all I was saying. I think that courts would support a right to free thought it if ever came up.
Are you thinking of another thread or something? You were responding to a post I made, and I didn’t draw any equivalence between those rights. I also didn’t say anything about a right to free thought. That was something you brought up.
And I would agree. That makes sense.
And I think that’s also a sensible argument that I would agree with.
If you suddenly come across two people fighting in an alley, you really can’t have much idea if either of them is justified in that they are doing – even if one is armed and one isn’t. For all you know, the person with the knife might have just taken it away from the person without a knife.
Me, I would make a whole lot of noise so they both knew there was a witness, and start talking to them.
BTW, I personally experienced almost this exact scenario some years ago when I stepped of an elevator and right into a hallway between two fighting people. They were both armed, kinda. One had a piece of wood about the size of a baseball bat, and one had taken a fire extinguisher off the wall and was swinging it like a club. The wood guy hit me (by accident, I’m pretty sure, he was in mid-swing) and then they both stopped, and I did too, as we were all pretty much in shock. And then I took the wood out of the one guy’s hands and took the fire extinguisher out of the other guys hands, because it seemed like a good idea and these guys both seemed to realize that things had gotten out of hand.
It turns out they were both boyfriends of the woman who lived down the hall from me, and one or both had just found out about the other. So they probably started with a lot of shouting and chest thumping, and I can only be grateful there wasn’t something more serious underlying it.
The most significant difference, though, between your scenario and what actually happened to me, is that in your scenario the third party has a chance to walk away. I don’t really know what I would have done given that chance. But I don’t think drawing a gun and threatening to kill the next one that moved would be a very good choice.
Still in Canada, buddy. Extend yours, crush ours.
Ah, okay, I missed that, partially because you only included it in the description afterward and not the initial flat assertion that we had no right to think - and partially because the contents of the constitution are a far-flung goalpost away from the universal rights I mistakenly thought we were talking about.
:smack: I missed that you were the poster both times, possibly because the first post seemed so reasonable, and the second post so disconnected therefrom.
And religion is about what you think. There are details regarding practice as well, but the an attempt to specifically abrogate freedom of religion is about punishing beliefs.
Yay! I’m sensible!
(I think that meets my quota of it for the month.)
I think you may have misunderstood the fact that I was describing his possible thought process, not endorsing it.
Religion is about what you think, but the Constitutional right is to the free exercise of religion. Since the law is fortunately not able to restrict thought in a democracy, it’s religious practice that is explicitly protected. I’m not sure religious believers would agree that the practice is just details.