I'm not going to sit here & spew anything at you about the 2nd amendment and what it was designed to protect. I'm going to appeal to you logic, to you common sense. A gun first and formost is a tool, it is a means to an end. I know that modern politics have made it an end. There are many people who don't own guns, who still fight for the right to own them. The reason why every man has a right to own a gun isn't just for self protection its for freedom of opression.
It is for the protection of a free state, the moment you allow your weapons of war to be taken from you is the moment you accept oppression. Slowly but surely we have allowed laws to be passed against guns of a certain caliber, firing speed, range or killing power. At this point I'm not even certain there is a point in battling for the few rights we have left. We could eliminate guns and take a step closer towards being a police state, as Great Britan already has. We can reap the same lower violent crime rate that they have and honestly we already at the same disadvantage as they are. We are utterly incapable of defeating our military if the need arose.
Disarming criminals is a laudable goal, but it is too mired in the lofty enterprise of disarming law-abiding citizens. Gun control, as a philosophy and as a political mechanism, is a flimsy sham. It has become a smoke screen behind which its proponents hide two simple facts: 1) they are more interested in controlling the public than reducing crime, and 2) they are incompetent when it comes to reducing crime.
Police officials and politicians who discourage citizens from fighting back should think about different employment. MacDonald’s is hiring, somewhere. Law-abiding citizens not only have a right, but perhaps a duty, to defend themselves and others. If a career criminal gets killed in the process, he called the play, not his intended victim.
As a life long democrat and conservative, I find it disconcerting that many are so adamantly against private firearm ownership in America. A lot of these posters cite wrong or inaccurate facts and studies to prove their point. Many folks don't appear to have a clear idea on many of the issues are being discussed, and get upset when gun owners call the ignorant or tell them to go formularize themselves with firearms. We say this because it is impossible to draw an accurate picture from skewed or wrong information, It takes many years to become truly familiar with firearms and their complexities and without this knowledge anyone arguing a point regarding firearms is at a disadvantage compared with someone with a healthy working knowledge of firearms.
The government has placed many gun control laws, but some of the laws were made to make the general public feel safer. For instance the government banned a handful of assault riffles when they are not even used for most gun related crimes. This country was founded on the people of the country owning guns to protect what they think is right. The constitution gives the people the right to bare arms and protect themselves. Any law against guns should be unconstitutional but the laws were made because it is what some people want.
Here's why Gun Control doesn't work:
Gun control only disarms the honest, since criminals don't obey laws in the first place. Even if it disarmed criminals too, though, they are generally stronger and tougher than most people, so Gun control leaves the honest as "easy pickin's" for the criminals. This in turn means not only that Gun control doesn't reduce crime, but worse yet, Gun control increases crime, by providing easy targets and practically eliminating the "victim administered" penalty. If gun control reduced crime, New York City and Washington DC would be the safest places on the planet. Instead, they are among the least safe!
Gun control doesn't make it harder for criminals to get guns, since they rarely get them through legal channels in the first place. Purchase restrictions only hinder the honest, who of course are not the problem (and in fact are part of the solution). Even more so, is already illegal for most criminals to have guns. The Gun Control Act of 1968 made it a federal felony for anyone previously convicted of a felony (or ajudged insane by a court of law) to so much as hold a gun, or even a single round of ammunition and most violent crime is committed by repeat offenders.
Guns do not cause crime. If they did, Switzerland would be a bloodbath -- most households there contain a genuine assault rifle (i.e., something that, as the hoplophobes say, "sprays bullets") and plenty of ammo, and most of the rest also contain at least one gun. Instead, it's one of the safest places in the world!
Only approximately 1 in every 500 guns is ever used in a crime. Even for handguns, it's only about 1 in 250. There are about 250 million guns owned by civilians in the USA. Roughly half of all American households contain at least one gun. Yet violent criminals are a tiny minority.
If robbed or assaulted, your best chance of not being killed or seriously injured is to resist with a gun. That's about a 17% chance of death or injury. If you give the perp everything he wants, your chances are still almost 50-50. If you resist with any other weapon, the results are between the two. If you resist unarmed, including passively, or yell for help or try to escape, you are very likely to be seriously injured or killed.
The so-called "assault weapon ban" (actually a manufacturing freeze) is based on nothing but cosmetics. The "banned" guns are functionally absolutely identical to perfectly ordinary hunting or target guns. They are not machine guns, which have been under very heavy federal restriction since 1934. Nor do they use unusually deadly cartridges; in fact, their ammo is usually less powerful than typical hunting ammo.
Attempts to outlaw so-called Saturday Night Specials or Junk Guns on the basis of "product safety" are a transparent sham. Such proposed laws always exempt police. Why would you want the police, of all people, to have guns of inferior quality?
The idea of so-called "cop-killer" bullets is a total fabrication. The bullets often so labelled are in fact worse at penetrating body armor than normal ones, were developed for use by police, and were never offered for sale to the public.
And so is the Gun Show Loophole. The exact same laws apply whether you buy your guns at a show, at a dealer's own store, or anywhere else.
The problem is not repeating firearms but repeating offenders. Repeating firearms are nothing new, they have been around since the 1700's. Even machine guns and semiautomatic pistols have been around since the late 1800's. They have never been a problem. What changed? Many social factors, such as Prohibition II (aka the War on Drugs, with exactly the same results as the first Prohibition), but mainly the rise of bleeding-heart liberalism. Now we coddle even the most vicious of violent criminals, and let them go after a mere slap on the wrist,often to repeat their crimes.
Most people who die by gunshot would die anyway without guns. That's because most (about 56%) of them are suicide. Study after study shows that if someone wants to kill themselves, they will find a way. A near-total gun ban doesn't stop Japan from having a much higher suicide rate than ours!
Guns save more innocent lives than they take. American civilians use guns to stop a crime approximately two and a half million times a year!
The police cannot protect you. The only two people guaranteed to be at the scene of a personal violent crime are the perp and the victim. At best, the police might arrive in time, if you can manage to contact them. Furthermore, the police are under no obligation to protect you, only society as a whole, according to multiple Supreme Court decisions.
Don't get me wrong, the police do the best they can, but they can't be everywhere. There's a name for places where they can -- a police state! That brings us to, though crime seems to be the anti-gunners' main point:
Guns are the last-ditch protector of democracy. Sure, we have votes, but only the ever-prevent possibility of armed revolt can ensure that the government obeys the vote. As the saying goes, "Five boxes protect our freedom: soap, ballot, jury, witness, and cartridge. Use in that order."
The Second Amendment is not about "sporting purposes". If you read the letters, debate notes, etc. that the Founding Fathers wrote about the right to keep and bear arms, you see over and over, almost exclusively, these reasons, in this order of importance:
The Second Amendment does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to government-run militias. The "militia clause" is grammatically a dependent clause, and thus an explanation, not a limit. "Well-regulated" does not mean "under government control", but "smoothly and efficiently functioning". Besides, almost all men, and many women also, are "the militia", to wit, the Unorganized Militia of the United States; see U.S. Code, Title 10, Section 311. (Link coming, if I ever find an online source.)
Translated into clear modern English, the Second Amendment would read:
Since smoothly functioning militias are necessary to the security of a free nation, the right of all citizens to own and carry weapons shall not be limited.
(The connection from armed populace to militia is that a militiaman is expected to supply his own weaponry, and already be proficient with it, or at least with arms in general. This, of course, is far easier if the populace is explicitly allowed (or encouraged!) to be armed, and utterly impossible if the populace is disarmed!)
The ultimate downside to gun control is not merely crime, nor even tyranny, but genocide. There have been seven major genocides in the 20th century, each preceded by disarming the victims. The disarming was frequently done by a previous, more benign government.
2 comments:
Something not mentioned here is that there is some line that Second Amendment advocates don't cross, atomic weapons.
Does the Second Amendment give us the right to own atomic weapons, anti-aircraft missiles, tanks? What do you think would happen if you tried to manufacture your own atomic device? What should happen?
Your argument is based on the idea that individual ownership of weapons of war should be allowed. If the hypothetical oppressive government isn't going to come after you with hand guns and even the assault rifles that you want to own won't do much good when your home is attacked by armed helicopters.
My point is that we in fact do have legal restrictions for weapons of war. Many of the tools used by the military are restricted by law from being sold to individuals. The line that has been drawn is just as arbitrary as the assault weapons ban.
The idea that we are freer because of the weapons we own is a strange one to me, I would be surprised if British describe themselves as less free than Americans. There are other aspects of our system that are much more important to my sense of freedom from government oppression: free press, separation of powers, the tradition of civilian leadership of the military (many oppressive regimes started as military coups), legal due process and independence of the judiciary (voting is way down the list for me).
As a practical matter, outlawing handguns is unworkable and so unpopular in most of the country that it would be impossible. Do I feel freer for it, no. Do I feel less safe for it, yes. I would not allow my children to be in a house where they had access to handguns and I feel it necessary to make sure they know that they should never touch one if they see one.
Gun control will never gain traction in Georgia, even Atlanta.
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