Slashdot Mirror
Assault Weapons Ban
An anonymous reader writes "With all the Constitutional arguments that appear on /., perhaps some readers might be interested in this BBC Article about the expiration of the Clinton assault weapons ban. Both presidential candidates have spoken in favor of it, but no one is willing to vote to keep it."
The reasoning behind granting everyone the unrestricted right to keep and bare arms was that a well armed populace is harder to oppress then an unarmed populous. I.e. he government should not have an excessive advantage over the populous in the amount of force at its disposal.
Carrying this to its logical conclusion, citizens should be allowed to posses all the weapons the government is allowed to; if they cannot, there is no way a popular revolt could succeed. The government, with its tanks and other large weapons, could easily roll over any revolt by citizens.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison,
"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of the government."
No, you do not need an assault weapon for hunting. But you do need it for personal defense against an oppressive government. That is the justification for allowing them to be possessed.
Aside from that, how am I going to kick the ass of a foreign army, marauding zombies, or invading aliens if I don't have a handy, insanely large supply of firepower?
________
Magnus frater spectat te
Why do you think we *have* the Second Amendment, crispyman?
It has nothing to do with sport weapons.
It is, very simply, to avoid oppressive regimes from ever dominating the citizenry by disarming them.
A gun that could only shoot non-humans would have absolutely nothing to do with the spirit of the Second Amendment. Gun rights were guaranteed specifically so that *people* could be shot as a last ditch resort.
I have no interest in ever owning a gun -- the benefits provided by the Second Amendment are present as long as enough citizenry own guns. However, I strongly support allowing citizenry access to assault weapons.
Note that guns simply guarantee Hobbsian "rough equality" between people and soldiers -- if soldiers have assault rifles, people also need assault rifles. I do *not* support allowing people to have weapons that allow massive amplification of killing power above that of a soldier as long as they strike first -- like bombs and the like. Assault weapons? Sure, I'd say that it's pretty much essential to allow people to have assault weapons.
Take a look at Switzerland -- they have almost no limitations on the weapons civilians can have. You want a howitzer, you can have one. And if you're a male and above a certain age, you *must* own a rifle -- you're considered part of the militia. As a result (even aside from the fact that Switzerland has never been invaded) Switzerland has a low gun crime rate, much lower than the United States. It's hard to glamorize a tool that everyone has (e.g. you could stick someone in the eye with a pen, but everyone has a pen and it isn't very exciting). Furthermore, it's a dissusasive factor to someone who might consider committing a crime if most people are walking around with weapons. Sure, maybe you can pull out your gun and hold up a bank, but you're nothing special -- it'd be like doing so with a knife when everyone else has knives. Or with your bare hands when everyone else has bare hands -- you're going to be hurt by similarly-armed people.
I could *maybe* even see gun laws banning handguns. But never assault rifles. Assault weapons are the core of the Second Amendment.
May we never see th
Perhaps you can explain away New Zealand or Switzerland. As Michael Moore figure out with Bowling for Columbine, it's not the guns.
The idea of citizens controlling the same weaponry as the military has several purposes.
Regardless of your personal opinion on what the law should be, the highest law of the land says we are a nation of gun owners. It is my belief that the original intent of the 2nd Amendment did not allow for all of the current laws and regulations concerning firearms. I personally have never submitted to a background check and refuse to participate in registration programs.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
SOrry, its not an either or thing. If you think weapons should be freely ownable, I should be able to own a nuclear bomb. The constitution doesn't forbid it, after all.
That's absurd. The Constitution was written in a time when nuclear bombs didn't *exist*. The game thory associated with the weapons of the times -- soldiers have rifles, citizens have rifles -- made guns a moderating influence. The game factors associated with nuclear bombs is *wildly* different from that associated with guns.
This is exactly the sort of thing reason that the judicial branch is allowed to interpret the Constitution -- to deal with technological advances.
For example, if the military gets the ability to run around with autonomous sniping helicopters and that becomes the main method of exerting military force, then civilians need to be able to have Stingers. That maintains the same balance as was present in the Constitution's authoring period.
Personally, I think civilians owning guns is not permitted by the constitution, and that militia means a state army. But I do think this is an area where compromises can be reached.
It's not a matter of compromise -- it can be *amended* if it's necessary to mean this. Please at least read and consider this -- the framers very clearly referred to an armed citizenry.
May we never see th
Second point is that its only been illigal to make new guns, not illigal to own or even sell an existing gun.
Yep.
I never really felt the need to own a gun. But, when both the house and senate passed this bill (1994) I went out and bougt a shitload of the subject material before it got signed into law.
I felt that as soon as my government started limiting guns was about the time I needed to get real interested in owning some.
So now... the only guns I own... are assault weapons, purchased as a direct result of this laws passage.
Go figure.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I always get annoyed when discussions about the Second Amendment come up and everybody immediately starts thinking about gunpowder. That's not what it's about.
The Second Amendment (Right to Bear Arms) is not a result of the wildly successful 1776 Sportsman's PAC. It wasn't meant to authorize individuals or groups to assassinate government officials in case they went insane. And it wasn't an attempt to ensure people could keep trading old flintlocks like so many Disco albums from the '70's.
It was an acknowledgement of a problem which faced the fledgling Colonies at the time, and is still quite relevant today.
You can pass a law making it illegal for people to keep and bear arms, but the people most dangerous to the survival of the Nation aren't going to listen. Because of this, we need to be sure this nation can survive even if we face an enemy that doesn't play by our rules. In this respect, outlawing guns works against us, in that it allows us to implement policies that, if the subjects had guns, we could never get away with. So instead we outlaw the practice of disarming the populace.
It's a way of saying to prospective government organizers: "if you want to run this place, you have to figure out how to make it work without taking away people's weapons. If you can't, you're not worthy of running this place. Period. Just like if you can't figure out how to run this place without favoring one religion over another, or shutting down the free press, or silencing your critics, or preventing peaceful assembly, or violating peoples privacy, or searching their homes, documents, things, or imprisoning people without charges or due process, or holding onto a suspect indefinitely without letting him see a lawyer, or torturing prisoners, or trying to make a Federal Law to ban powers reserved to the States, then just go away, because you're not up to the job. Sure, running the country is easy if you can do that stuff; but we have higher standards."
The rise of gun violence should not be seen as being caused by the availability of guns as much as it should be viewed as a failure of our society to remain violence free in the face of weapons availability. Don't curse the NRA, they're just the weather vane.
Should we read the Second Amendment to say that we should all be packing porta-nukes? For the safety of the Nation, of course. No. What it means is that we should strive to build a country that can survive even if our next door neighbor decides to pack a porta-nuke. Because, the reality of the world is (and will always be) that our next door neighbor just might be packing a porta-nuke.
In a world like this, the only possible way to be safe is to first make sure that nobody in their right mind would have a reason to light-up their porta-nuke, and second to understand that occasionally we will encounter a person or two who isn't in their right mind, who's going to kill a lot of people and cause a lot of damage (kinda like one of those Hurricanes) and that we better just be prepared for it to happen, and be prepared to deal with it when it does. An approch which says "we'll prevent a hurricane from ever happening here" can only be followed by "we don't need FEMA anymore, now do we", which shows clearly how backward such an approach is.
On September 11th, 2001, the U.S. saw an example of an attack which some claim represents a new kind of threat to this nation. But was also saw a flawless demonstration of the kind of defense against that threat which our Founding Fathers hoped we would deploy, and knew even then would be effective. On Flight 93, the attack failed, not because of some smart weapon posessed by the U.S. army, or because some airport screener matched-up two names on a No Fly list, but because of the democratic defense;
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.