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Second Amendment Questioned
dheera writes "Attorneys in Washington, DC question the scope of the Second Amendment in the first case in nearly 70 years, citing that the right to bear arms only applies to 'a well regulated militia.' 'We interpret the Second Amendment in military terms,' said Todd Kim, the District's solicitor general."
Right, because your grand-daddy's rifle is really going to help against tanks and automatic weaponry. And most people can buy a gas mask, but not many do, which means that anyone wanting to subdue you non-violently just has to use some simple tear gas. The times when a group of civilians could contend with an equally numerous group of soldiers are long gone.
You haven't seen the news in the last couple of years, have you? (Iraq, Afghanistan)
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
The times when a group of civilians could contend with an equally numerous group of soldiers are long gone.
Absolutely. But combat-capable civilians outnumber soldiers and police in our country by at least fifty to one. That tends to even the odds a bit.
To quote (from memory) a German commander on the Easter front during WWII: "Each of our tanks could beat five of theirs. We kept meeting six."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
There's nothing magical or extraordinarily high tech about automatic weapons and rockets. If it really came down to a full on Civil War in the USA, I'm sure a few facilities could ramp up to produce the things under the radar. There are drug labs all over the place now, and look how efficient we've been at taking care of those.
Of course, all that may be unnecessarily complicated. There are plenty of international weapons manufacturers that would love to sell to the American public, and getting those products across the largely unprotected/unwatched US borders would probably be trivial.
In short, if it gets that bad, the weapons will show.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Throughout the Constitution, the wording is very specific. When referring to individual rights, the term "The People" is used. When referring to state rights, the term "The States" is used. Unless you believe the 2nd Amendment is the ONLY EXCEPTION to this rule, it is most definitely an individual right as it says "... the right of The People ..."
If the meaning of "The People" is changed to indicate a state right, ALL our rights will be lost. Suddenly, speech, religion, assembly, redress, etc, will be State rights and everything that makes this country worthwhile will go into the shitter.
If the government can abuse a law, eventually the government will abuse a law. Maybe not right away, but a few years down the road it will happen. A good example of this is the seizing of property without due process. At first they were seizing property of convicted drug dealers. Then they started seizing the property of unconvicted drug dealers. After getting away with this obvious violation of the Constitution, they started seizing property of people with the thinnest thread of a connection to drugs, e.g. a guy had his car seized because his passenger had a joint in his possession.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The thing is, the US Military is made up of, get this, Americans. Hopefully, a large portion of them would either refuse or even defend the civilian population. I remember something about Katrina and the national guard refusing to help enforce the gun confiscation ordered by the local police.
2. Shootings are only one part of the spectrum in domestic violence. Like point one, why should guns be any more regulated than say, hammers, in this regard?
3. Accidentally killing a person whom you suspected of breaking into your home is a tragedy. But really, how often does this happen? And on the other side of that coin: civilians shoot more bad guys with guns every year than cops. Plus, they're five times more likely to be correct about the good/bad status of the shot person.
I think you've presented the classic case of the Paternal Government, the one that defaults to being everyone's best protection against themselves. You are giving up your rights for the belief that you are more secure.
damaged by dogma
It should be no shock that D.C. is still one of the most violent cities in the U.S. (#2 or #3, the last I checked). The murder rate drops by a factor of 10 when you cross the Potomac River into Virginia (still in metropolitan Washington; it gets even lower further away) where there is no gun ban.
What are you trying to say?
It seems like you are trying to say that the crime rate would be lower if nobody had guns. If that is what you are trying to say, either you are intentionally putting forth a bad argument, or you're stupid.
We have two sets of data: Data when it was legal to own handguns on both sides of the river, and data when it was legal to own a gun on only the low-crime side of the river.
The high-crime side of the river had high crime in both circumstances. At best, with the data you're using in your argument, you can argue that taking away legal handguns didn't make a difference.
That's the big problem with the gun debate. There are very few people involved capable of a rational argument. They know what side they are on, and emotionally, irrationally argue in support of their position, summarily dismissing any information that does not help their cause, while seizing on any bit that seems to support it, no matter how flawed.
paintball
Yeah, and the other half is people like you who want to take away everyone else's *rights* because you're scared of what they might do with that right. As is usually the case, that fear is irrational. You have absolutely nothing to fear from 99.9999% of *legal* gun owners. Yet you're so afraid of what people who own guns *illegally* might do to you, you'd rather just ban guns altogether (as if that is a solution to the problem of people being able to obtain guns illegally), and you don't care if you destroy a Constitutional right in order to do it.
It's funny how the anti-gun crowd pretends that they're just trying to interpret the Constitution, and only wish to apply it the way it was meant to be applied. In reality, if you *really* want to know how the 2nd Amendment was intended, you don't have to look very far. Read some of the writings of the people who actually *wrote* the damn thing, and it's obvious. They state explicitly that *individuals* need to be able to own guns. But of course you don't really care how it was intended. That's just a show you put on so that people will think your argument is based on the Constitution, rather than trying to destroy the Constitution.
In reality, you don't give a rat's ass about the Constitution as a whole. You just want to cherry-pick the parts *you* think are important and discard the rest. And you're sick of hearing everyone heap praise and reverence on the "Founding Fathers" because you think you're smarter than they are, and besides times have changed, etc, etc. It's people like YOU that this country needs to guard against, because in your supreme arrogance, you're willing to destroy the very foundation of our freedom. (not that thousands of people just like you haven't already done so to a large degree. sigh.)
What really angers me about the 'need firearms to protect us from the government' people is that they don't understand what they are really saying. "We need guns so the government doesn't take away our rights" they say.
That's saying that you don't have to comply with the will over the democratically elected government. It's saying that if you don't like the law, yu're going to become a terrorist. That you would rather just become a terrorist than elect people who are going to protect your rights in the first place.
The people who scream bloody murder about the government taking away the guns they need to protect their rights from the government tend to the VERY SAME PEOPLE who ELECT OFFICIALS WHO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS!
How many times have you heard someone say "We need guns to protect our rights!" and then say "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear!"
How about instead of letting people say "Elect me, and I won't take away your guns!", you elect people who say "Elect me, and I'll repeal the Patriot Act!"
People who argue that they need guns to protect their rights from the government are just gun nuts. The 'protect us from the government' argument is a red herring. If their RIGHTS were really what is important to them, they'd vote for people who wanted to protect their rights instead of people who wanted to protect their guns.
But that's not what happens. Search you without a warrant? Listen in to your phone calls? Arrest and detain you, even if you're a US citizen, without access to courts or a lawyer? Torture people? Sure, we'll reelect that guy, as long as he promises we can keep our guns!
Using the right to bear arms to protect your rights is useless if you're willing to trade away all your other rights just to keep your gun. Then what are you protecting?
paintball
Nerds see themselves as being part of an enlightened and well established subculture. To ignore every discussion which transcends the traditionally geeky however, would be paramount to calling that subculture stupid, out of touch with the world that influences their lives, in a word, unenlightened.
It is obvious from the popularity of /. articles concerning rights, freedom, politics, and how we've been Bushywhacked for the last six years, implies that nerds care deeply about these issues. It is easy for the enlightened to see that we live in a dangerous world: from terrorism to oppression, from bi0 weapons to outsourcing IT to India, from global warming to bad presidents, surveillance to CowboyNeal's evil twin.
The point is this: Nerds are smart, and when thy looked up from their code and saw the desperation of the world's people, they saw a world that needed their comments on Slashdot.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
In my mind, this safety means:
1. Safety from fellow citizens, and
2. Safety from the government.
Neither of those are, at their heart, rights, nor are either of those the basis for a right. Both of those are still empirical questions, and nothing more. Does freedom of speech increase or decrease the incidence of spontaneous combustion? It doesn't matter, freedom of speech is a right.
The basis for the right to bear arms is the right to defend yourself. If you depend on the government for all of your safety, then the rest of your rights are meaningless. Consider this: if the government doesn't like you, and you depend on the government for your safety, all they have to do is stop making you safe from people that can harm you. They may release people from prison, or not put someone in prison that they should. Or they just might make it a well-known fact that they will not protect you, and wait for non-governmental citizens to have their way with you.
Think if you're a black person in the deep south a few decades ago. Perhaps everyone knows that the government won't arrest someone for hurting or stealing from black people. It's a form of passive punishment, and it's very real. It's happened in a million forms throughout history, and the founders knew that. It's a way of passing the buck saying "we didn't kill him" when they just didn't provide the protections necessary such that he wouldn't be killed.
You can't stop all forms of passive punishment by governments, but allowing citizens to defend themselves closes an important loophole.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
You would have discovered the following:
There are two types of militia, civil milita (unorganized civilians bearing own arms) and state milita (national guard, state troopers, standing forces, whatever is organized for and paid (and bearing arms owned) by the state).
Well regulated meant only one, and possibly two things. You are reading "regulated" as in today's "regulations".
Regulated, in the 1787 terminology, refers to only one thing. "Disciplined and officered." No joke, a militia with a set structure, even if self organized, is a "well regulated militia". The irony is that the term can also be read to mean "well equiped, trained and supplied."
The ratification misdeeds do not even enter into it.
What I find ironic, is that you are all begging for scraps from the tables of lords and masters with loyalties to anyone but you. Washington DC is a crime capital under a declared "state of crime emergency" since July or August of 2006 (don't remember the exact date). And it isn't just guns, some british guy got knifed and killed in his own driveway, which makes the "protect yourself by staying home" or "don't go into the dangerous parts of DC after dark" completely idiotic.
Since most of you are socialist "democrats" or so called "liberals" (my how that term stopped meaning what it used to mean in Jefferson's day), perhaps this example comes closest to your hearts. Some time ago, in their home in Germantown (rich part of Wash, DC) Theresa Heinz Kerry got ROBBED while outside of their home. Yep, John Kerry's wife... the ketchup girl. Humorously, the news barely touched on it, presumably for fear that the properties there would stop soaring in price, and also that the DC 30year gun ban would go bust if even the big antigunners are being robbed at screwdriver point (making the gunban worthless, what next, piece of rock and treebranch ban?)
(Frankly, I didn't know there were any "safe" zones in that DC, I've watched drug deals and "hot merchandise" deals, going on within plain sight of police squad cars (and the cops within them), and it wasn't a sting, nobody got busted AND there were no headlines or sirens/lights the whole day I was there. I left severely perturbed by that sight. I called the cops about it, and got the run around, they took my statement and basically blew me off. Guess if shots weren't fired, or blood spilled, it wasn't worth their time, though how would "shots be fired" in a gun ban city?)
However, you are correct, the "founders" were two separate camps which are mistaught in history class, one was the rich fascistic overlords known as the "federalists" (a hijacking of the term that has stuck) and the other, the unprepared, populist/agrarian/Jeffersonian group, lead by the very vocal Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, were the ANTI Federalists (of whom you may hear little or nothing in high school history and if you are fortunate, a tad smidgen from a libertarian professor in college, IF you are lucky). James Madison watered down the actual text, but the states all ratified the text THEY felt was necessary. Do some research while the National Archives are still available to the public. It might open everyone's eyes, especially since we're geeks, we're supposed to be libertarians at heart, seeking knowledge and truth, instead of being gimme gimme beggars and weaklings.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler