Letters to the Editor
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I wasn't going to chime in here but then I read bjeremy....
Thanks for painting gun control advocates as irrational. I will try to do the same for you and other advocates of non-regulation.
I put myself in the classic-liberal camp, individual rights, free markets, anti-authoritarian, pro-constitution,etc. I grew up hunting, my father and brother are still both liberal hunters. I own a shotgun. Anyone who has grown up hunting cannot escape one central point: Guns are for killing. Yeah you can blast away at rocks and targets etc. but those are only surrogates for living things, really, when it comes down to it. Guns are for killing. It's dishonest to make any other claim.
Shooting is fun. And guns are kind of interesting little machines. But they do need to be regulated because they are extremely dangerous. We regulate many dangerous things, the notion of regulating such a thing is not foreign to us by any stretch. But some how for us we have made a gross exception for guns. Why? Is it the constitution?
If the second amendment guarantees an individual's right to bear arms, then it is unconstituional to limit that in any way. In other words IF that is true then individuals should have the right to bear any sort of arms they wish, from handguns to nuclear weapons (just to be extreme). But it doesn't say that.
"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 the second amendment. Where does it say that indiviuals have the right to bear arms? It doesn't. It says the People, as in the the people in common or the government that represents them. In fact this has more impact on international arms reduction agreements than it does on individuals. But we continue to willfully misinterpret that ammendment. Why? I don't know. Having lived in Australia I can tell you that gun control seems to have worked well there. There are plenty of farmers and hunters and target shooters with guns. Australians frequently win shooting medals in the Olympics. They still have a gun culture there. But the number one murder weapon is now a knife. One advantage to this is that you don't get "collateral damage." Young children in my neighborhood have died after being accidentally shot in drive by shootings. Also, it is much harder to murder 35 people--as in Port Arthur--with a knife than with an automatic or semi-automatic rifle. Cho Seung-hui would also have had a tough time of it. There are numerous logical, rational,and practical reasons to regulate gun ownership and production. It is more than obvious. Gunlovers like bjeremy let the love of their favorite toy interfere with a rational perspective on the repercusions of a society permeated with those dangerous toys.
So will Blacksburg VA be our Port Arthur? I doubt it. The gun lobby is raving and irrational. I'm not ever really sure what motivates them deep down, other than an infantile anger at someone trying to take their toy away. But look when your child is running with a pair of scissors in his hands what do you do? You take them away. That is sensible, practical, and rational.
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Anti-Authoritarian ...
... until you come across something you don't like, plainly, Ivanveen. Sure, there's a pragmatic case to be made for gun control. "There are numerous logical, rational,and practical reasons to regulate" free speech and publishing, too, to license reproduction, or to practice slavery. But we don't do that, because we value liberty. Liberty circumscribed by your personal whimsy or sense of convenience isn't liberty at all. It's just unambitious authoritarianism.
On the constitutional front, if "the People" in the Second Amendment means "the government," then "the People" means "the government" everywhere else in the Constitution, too, including in the First Amendment. Of course, the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to differentiate between the people and the state and to subjugate the latter to the former. One holds rights against another party; the state can't hold rights against itself.
One responsible citizen with guts and a gun could have ended the VT massacre quickly. In fact, at least one would-be schoolhouse bloodbath has been stopped in that very fashion in recent memory. Unless we're going to deputize half the population to police the other half, we're going to need active citizenship -- the only kind of citizenship compatible with liberty. The alternative is a police state. And, if today's political assassination in ungunned Japan is any indication, that isn't going to be very effective, either.
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What a silly question. What does "some" mean?
A few? One for each hand? One for the home, the car and the person?...oh and for the ladies that all important pocketbook accessory.
We are awash with guns in this country and we still have violent gun related crime. If more guns means less crime then the expected results are the inverse of reality.
I made what I thought was a "shut you up" argument the other day after some kook in Virginia wanted to sponsor a law REQUIRING (I kid you not) college students over 21 carry a gun at all times. So I said, well Europe doesn't permit guns except in very rare circumstances and their crime by gun rate is an faction of ours.
My opponent said, "Well the United States isn't Europe and has nothing to do with Europe".
To which I replied: "Well we shot most of native Americans, brought the black Americans here mostly at gunpoint, and the rest of us are Europoeans (mainly) now mixed with a substantial number of Hispanics who rarely carry firearms and Asians who have stricted gun laws than the Europeans....
all that in one sentence. i was so proud.
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To prevent a tyrranical government...
You need an educated population, not an armed one.
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Ah, the Second Amendment
Gunnutz want to slide past the first clause in the amendment because of the shadow of the phrase "well regulated militia". In the second clause, they tapdance past the absurdity of what the word "arms" means. In 1789, arms meant cannons and hand held firearms. There was no standing army, and no predisposition to have one. On the contrary, the Founders thought that a central government with a big army might tend toward oppression. Ya think? So, the notion that the citizenry (the People, in the constitutional sense) have to right to access to the whole panoply of modern weaponry is batpoop crazy. If one "loner" with a couple of handguns and a hand ful of clips can off 32 students by 9:30 in the morning, what might he have done with an Abrams tank, or a helicopter gunship? It's reducio ad absurdum time, gunnutz. Personal nukes? A bunker buster for your SUV? My God, how stupid can you actually be? Now, to Mr. Sugarman, pardon me for missing what seems to have been well disguised satire or sarcasm. It flew right by me. But Jamaican Jews: I have to give you props on that, brother. My son in law the cop is of 'Turkish descent, a lapsed Moslem, and would scare the bejeezus out of airport security. That olive complexion, those massive shoulders, that nose (which is not all that different than the stereotypical semitic nose, which is actually quite handsome). So, two of our grandkids are "breeds" if you will. the rest of us look like Aryan nation textbook white people, tall and blond (or bald in my case). I'm a Swede, for cryin' out loud. so of course I must be a socialist and love lutefisk. Never mind. but I'm dead serious about the 2A part as described above. we have the right to own guns. In the context of the intent of the Founders, that means very close to nothing at all. But those guns sure do kill efficiently, as the student body at virginia tech can attest. One guy. Two guns. And that's the freedom we're exporting to Iraq every single day, only far worse. dozens upon dozens of dead, all day evey day all week all year for four years and counting. Mission accomplished.