If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
I think you mean pay people as much to do them. No matter how exciting and fulfilling a job is you still need to be able to afford food and shelter for you and your family at a bare minimum.
...but it is not remotely the same thing to have a cosmic ray event moving at C relative to the planet and a man-made event that is happening at our exact base velocity.
Actually, according to relativity (which is the most accurately tested theory which anyone has every come up with) they are exactly the same: the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. So whatever a cosmic ray produces in the upper atmosphere is exactly the same as the LHC will produce in the lab, the ONLY difference will be the speed of it relative to the Earth.
Just because you don't agree with something, doesn't make it fallacious. Give me a good argument why I'm wrong, or piss off.
I did - it is not my fault if you don't understand it but let me try to simplify it for you. Your argument is that there is still a danger because if we knew what was going to happen we would not do the experiment. My explanation is that, while we don't know EXACTLY what will happen (which is why we want to do the experiment) we DO KNOW that certain things cannot happen. For example we can rule out the creation of large pink elephants because large pink elephants are not created by cosmic rays. Likewise we DO KNOW that the LHC will not create Earth-destroying 'whatevers'.
There is no such thing as expresso. Yes, i am a Nazi about this.
Sorry - slip of the finger. But doesn't this make you more of an Italian fascist rather than a Nazi?:-)
I was not referring not to the current hype of the LHC but to several decades of Black hole sensationalism.
In an article about the LHC I hope I can be forgiven for assuming that you were!
Why is it that any scientist is surprised by the current media coverage, particularly the negative media coverage?
First I'm not so sure that it is entirely negative - anything that gets people interested in science can't be too bad (no publicity etc.). To be honest I'm not at all surprised that the question has been asked. The surprising thing is that the media continue to go on about it even after it has been explained to them why it cannot happen. It is a fair question to ask but once you've asked a question it would be nice if they listened to the answer!
It's fallacious because we've never done it ...but nature has done it for us. Neutron stars exist and would not if cosmic rays produced black holes.
We think we know what's going to happen, but if we really knew then we wouldn't bother doing the experiment.
Now that is a fallacious argument! What we are saying is that we know, with a good degree of certainty, that we cannot produce Earth destroying black holes because we would have seen evidence for that in the Universe. That does NOT mean that we know what we will see, just that whatever it is will not swallow the Earth.
The rest of the energy that forms the black hole comes from acceleration of those two particles to near light speed. It's about 99.9999999999999999999999999999999734 % of the total energy
Errr....no. Rest mass of proton is ~1GeV, centre of mass energy of LHC is 14TeV so, given that there are 2 protons involved the raction of rest mass energy is 1/7000 or 99.985%. So you might want to lighten up on the '9' key a bit. However what is more important is the electrons and protons interact VERY differently and radiate energy far less that electrons because their rest mass is a factor of 2,000 larger (you could not build the LHC using electrons) so it is important to get it right.
and it all entered the LHC in the form of regular old electrons passing along copper wires into the accelerating magnets, over the few minutes of the actual run.
Errr, again no! First magnets do not accelerate particles (in the sense of giving them energy) because the magnetic force always acts perpendicular to the direction of motion thus the speed remains constant. Instead microwave cavities, which use an electric field, are what accelerates the particles. Secondly the LHC will run in fill, accelerate and then collide mode. The runs last for hours but the acceleration phase only for a few seconds.
You have a net charge differential equal to being down a net 2 electrons for the whole thing, and you are applying that charge, not to just 2 protons, but to all the contents of the black hole.
You didn't do your homework did you? Had you actually calculated the ratio of gravitational to EM forces in an atom you would have got a roughly 30 ORDER OF MAGNITUDE difference. Even if we assume the entire centre-of-mass energy of the LHC goes into the black hole mass (which is very unlikely to happen - usually it is made of a couple of quarks from the protons) this is a (generous) factor 10,000 increase in mass...so only 26 more orders of magnitude to go and you'll be there!
In fact the only reason that it is postulated that we may see blackholes is by invoking extra space dimensions that are compactified (like a human hair appears 1D at a distance and has a 2D surface close up). This will mean that, at very short distances gravity becomes a lot stronger. However, since passing through matter the distances will be bigger than this, I continue to argue that the EM interaction will be greater than the gravitational.
I am Not a Lawyer. I am not a Gypsy Prince. I am not Komar, King of the Voins.
You are also very clearly not a physicist!
I can just see it now for all us non-US users...
"Please look at the webcam, place your finger on the scanner and make sure your computer has a network connection."
or worse:
I'm sorry but your username has been placed on the 'no-compute' list. Please try again after the current US administration has expired.
Any proof of the form, "If it were going to happen, it already would have happened" are intrinsically fallacious (Appeal to Probability)
Exactly why is this fallacious? This is how ALL science works. We measure things and then use statistics to determine how likely our result is given out current understanding of the universe. If we come out with a probability like 10^-6 then we have observed something new which we don't (yet) understand (assuming we correctly accounted for all known effects).
You, yourself, appeal to probability all the time in your everyday life. When you cross the road or drive a car you do this because you think the probability of being killed in an accident is low, when you fly somewhere you do so because you think that the probability of the plane crashing is low etc. etc.
So why is it fallacious to argue that given the evidence available to use the probability of the LHC destorying the Earth is incredibly low? We already run the risk of being wiped out by an extinction level asteroid impact everyday and we have considerable evidence that this has happened multiple times on the Earth's past. So if the maximum probability of the LHC wiping out the Earth is considerably lower (and in fact is probably zero) why do you regard that as a fallacious argument?
Perhaps, instead of the popular "think of the children" meme we should regard this type of inability to stop worrying about incredibly low probabilties as "think of the dinosaurs"?
minus the gravitational center of a bunch of electrons that are about to power the LHC
The LHC collides protons, not electrons.
Repulsion by solid matter isn't enough to stop it.
This depends on whether or not it is a charged black hole. In all likelihood it will be since it would have been produced by colliding two protons. Since EM interactions are many, many orders of magnitude above gravitational ones (calculate the difference in the gravitational vs. electric forces in an atom for an excellent illustration) I would expect a charged black hole to interact via EM far more strongly than by gravity.
"This coffee is awful"
You obviously haven't tasted CERN coffee - they have expresso machines and its generally very good. Much more likely is "This food is offal". I remember several times going to to the coop and the three dishes of the day were things like calf's head, tripe sausage and tongue...yummmm!
In my opinion, all the sensationalism surrounding the Black holes to start with was a ploy for funding.
There are two things wrong with this opinion. the first is factual: when the LHC was being funded the main funding argument was discovering the Higgs (or else figuring out how else the probability of two types of particles scattering did not exceed 100% around 1TeV in energy). The other main argument, which came along slightly later with the WMAP data, was figuring out where at least 23% of the energy of the universe is hiding i.e. dark matter.
The second problem is that it requires that physicists created the sensationalism. How exactly do we do that? It is the press that creates sensationalism, not physicists. Are you suggesting that scientists should not consider theories that the press may consider sensational? or, if we do, should we not tell anyone what we are doing in case the press find out and goes sensational on us?
While most of us, myself included, think that these black hole production theories are very unlikely, they cannot be ruled out and would explain some issues with current theories. As such they are legitimate avenues of research and not a 'ploy' to get research funding.
The LHC's collisions between two particle streams with equal and opposite momentum could create things that are more or less at rest with respect to the Earth
Correct, but this is why the article mentions neutron stars. These have the same density as an atomic nucleus (if not greater at the centre if strange QCD states form). Cosmic rays hitting these would also produce the same particles but, because the neutron star is so much denser than the Earth, these would be stopped in the star eventhough they would be created moving at speed. Since we see lots of old neutron stars we can conclude that if there is any danger from the LHC the process is so slow or rare that we do not need to worry about it.
I know what it means. However it is usually used to as a sarcastic argument to justify some crazy restriction on rights. Unusually here there is an action they could take which would in some sense be even more restrictive and yet make far more logic AND win more votes...and yet strangely they have not done it.
Using light to take pictures of light in motion?
Actually this is theoretically possible. You can make two photons interact but it is not a first order effect and in fact is very heavily suppressed at low energies. So it is possible but incredibly unlikely (and certainly not how they did it here).
It is much simpler to 'think of the children'
If they were really thinking of the children and believed these guys to be in danger of re-offending then, as the original poster says, they should never let them out of prison. Vigilante "justice" may eventually take care of the problem but in the meantime you have someone likely to molest children running around. So why not 'think of the children' and not let back out into society, especially if you are going to completely prevent any possibility of them reintegrating.
Seeing that I know fancy words like 'scalar field', it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that I know about the experiemnt and its consequences.
I do not think that it is at all unreasonable to assume that someone who thinks Newtonian gravity is a scalar field has not heard of the Michelson-Morley experiment. While you may know the words 'scalar field', your comments show that you do not understand what they actually mean. Likewise you may have heard of the Michelson-Morley experiment but I have my doubts that you fully understand its implications. The results showed that there was no medium through which light propagated.
My apologies if you think I am being particularly difficult or splitting hairs. However you are throwing around scientific words that have very precise and clear meanings in a manner that is not consistent with those meanings. If you are going to try to talk like a scientist don't complain when you get treated like one.
I always figured this would be how we kill ourselves off.
Hang on a minute! Anti-biotics were not invented until the 1930's. While I agree that abuse of them should certainly stop (especially including abuse by farmers feeding them to livestock needlessly) it will not be the end of the world. More people will die, live expectancy will drop but we are not going to end up in a post-apocalyptic world with only a handful of survivors.
Come to think of it, I haven't seen a photon either.
That's not what I asked - I asked if you had seen evidence. Clearly we have seen evidence for photons.
that may be what all particles are, at the end of the day: localised packets of waves in some sort of theorectical 'medium'.
Actually we know that is not the case for light. Michelson-Morley showed in 1896 (IIRC) that light is not a vibration of a medium because otherwise the interference fringes would shift as the motion of the Earth changed which they did not. You can try to explain it as dragging the medium with the Earth but then you would have to see some effect between the stationary medium away from the Earth and the dragged medium near the Earth. So actually the one this we can show is that light is not the vibration of a medium.
I meant a scalar field, since it is usual practise to think of the size of gravitation rather than the direction
Not in any physics course I've ever taught, taken or even heard of it isn't. I've never heard anyone EVER refer to gravity as a scalar field or even treat it that way. You can't - even if you confine yourself to 1D you still have to have it act up or down. I think you may be getting confused between constant and scalar. The two are definitely not the same.
Gravitons are like photons: simply distortions in the underlying field...
Are they? Ever seen evidence of one? Gravitons are a purely theoretical construction and, worse of all, one that does not work. While you can construct a quantum field theory of gravity it does not work to arbitrary energies. You have to impose a cut-off threshold and since there is no valid reason for doing so the theory is broken...hence all the theoretical activity trying to reconcile GR and Quantum mechanics.
The gravitational field as a scalar field surperposed on a flat space-time is just another way of describing gravitation
You mean a vector field since gravity has direction, rather than the Tensor field of GR.
f an employer said anything bad about you - no matter how true - they would be liable for claims of libel.
Not quite. They would be at risk of being sued for libel but if the claims were provably true then they case would fail and they would not be found liable. Of course most companies don't want to take the risk so the system is screwed up...but it is not quite as messed up as you suggest.
There is clearly already a solution since the various NASA robots have worked fine on Mars and although they are solar powered they will require batteries so they don't have to turn completely off during the night.
The way it is SUPPOSED TO work is: the government is given the privileges necessary to govern by the people. Rights, all rights, belong to people.
you are using two different words to refer to the same thing. You have no rights other than what the law says you have because, without the law, there is no such concept as a 'right'.
The privileges given to government ("given" is the proper word... if you and your ancestors didn't vote right, it's your own fault) do, however, come from exactly the same basis as our own rights do: the point of a gun.
Since you agree that governmental and individual rights come from the same place you must also logically agree that if governmental rights are given so are individual rights.
...the point you are missing is that is exactly why we have claimed and insisted on keeping the right to own guns! We have the right to overthrow an oppressive government, with force if need be.
Here you are confusing right with ability. Unless the law says you have a right to overthrow the government you don't, because outside the law, which is where you are most definitely heading with a rebellion, there are no rights. You are employing the 'might makes right' argument which dates back to caveman times.
And if enough people do it, there will not be very many Wacos or Ruby Ridges. Those two in themselves came near to starting a revolution, and I think the government knows that.
Oh come on - I don't know Ruby Ridge but Waco was a perfect example of why the general public should not be allowed access to powerful guns. Why on earth would the government dealing with a group of armed, mentally unstable maniacs be cause for rebellion? Nobody else seems to need to piles of high powered weapons lying around their houses in order to have a revolution, the French managed it and so did you guys. In the meantime having all these weapons around on the off chance that today might be a good day to rebel has meant that criminals, nutters and idiots have been able to get hold of them and cause untold numbers of deaths.
Actually, I'm an American citizen, and as such, have a -natural- right to possess guns.
It is not a natural right - it was dreamed up by the guys who wrote your constitution. To be 'natural' you'd have to be born with it and even in the US I don't see babies being born with guns in their hands.
I do not need a king to enforce my property rights. I have a gun to enforce my property rights
Right - so if say a foreign government invades to steal your land you and your gun will happily be able to see them off without any government help? No I didn't think so. You do need a government to enforce your property rights otherwise another government will come and take them away.
Thus, because I have a gun, I own my land, and the King (aka gov't), has no rights of its own at all.
The rights of your government come from exactly the same basis as all of your rights. They are written down in the law of the land. The same laws that give you a right to bear arms give the government the right to pass laws over you. To say that your government has no rights is to say that you have no rights.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean pay people as much to do them. No matter how exciting and fulfilling a job is you still need to be able to afford food and shelter for you and your family at a bare minimum.
...but it is not remotely the same thing to have a cosmic ray event moving at C relative to the planet and a man-made event that is happening at our exact base velocity.Actually, according to relativity (which is the most accurately tested theory which anyone has every come up with) they are exactly the same: the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. So whatever a cosmic ray produces in the upper atmosphere is exactly the same as the LHC will produce in the lab, the ONLY difference will be the speed of it relative to the Earth.
Just because you don't agree with something, doesn't make it fallacious. Give me a good argument why I'm wrong, or piss off.
I did - it is not my fault if you don't understand it but let me try to simplify it for you. Your argument is that there is still a danger because if we knew what was going to happen we would not do the experiment. My explanation is that, while we don't know EXACTLY what will happen (which is why we want to do the experiment) we DO KNOW that certain things cannot happen. For example we can rule out the creation of large pink elephants because large pink elephants are not created by cosmic rays. Likewise we DO KNOW that the LHC will not create Earth-destroying 'whatevers'.
Sorry - slip of the finger. But doesn't this make you more of an Italian fascist rather than a Nazi?
In an article about the LHC I hope I can be forgiven for assuming that you were!
Why is it that any scientist is surprised by the current media coverage, particularly the negative media coverage?
First I'm not so sure that it is entirely negative - anything that gets people interested in science can't be too bad (no publicity etc.). To be honest I'm not at all surprised that the question has been asked. The surprising thing is that the media continue to go on about it even after it has been explained to them why it cannot happen. It is a fair question to ask but once you've asked a question it would be nice if they listened to the answer!
We think we know what's going to happen, but if we really knew then we wouldn't bother doing the experiment.
Now that is a fallacious argument! What we are saying is that we know, with a good degree of certainty, that we cannot produce Earth destroying black holes because we would have seen evidence for that in the Universe. That does NOT mean that we know what we will see, just that whatever it is will not swallow the Earth.
Errr....no. Rest mass of proton is ~1GeV, centre of mass energy of LHC is 14TeV so, given that there are 2 protons involved the raction of rest mass energy is 1/7000 or 99.985%. So you might want to lighten up on the '9' key a bit. However what is more important is the electrons and protons interact VERY differently and radiate energy far less that electrons because their rest mass is a factor of 2,000 larger (you could not build the LHC using electrons) so it is important to get it right.
and it all entered the LHC in the form of regular old electrons passing along copper wires into the accelerating magnets, over the few minutes of the actual run.
Errr, again no! First magnets do not accelerate particles (in the sense of giving them energy) because the magnetic force always acts perpendicular to the direction of motion thus the speed remains constant. Instead microwave cavities, which use an electric field, are what accelerates the particles. Secondly the LHC will run in fill, accelerate and then collide mode. The runs last for hours but the acceleration phase only for a few seconds.
You have a net charge differential equal to being down a net 2 electrons for the whole thing, and you are applying that charge, not to just 2 protons, but to all the contents of the black hole.
You didn't do your homework did you? Had you actually calculated the ratio of gravitational to EM forces in an atom you would have got a roughly 30 ORDER OF MAGNITUDE difference. Even if we assume the entire centre-of-mass energy of the LHC goes into the black hole mass (which is very unlikely to happen - usually it is made of a couple of quarks from the protons) this is a (generous) factor 10,000 increase in mass...so only 26 more orders of magnitude to go and you'll be there!
In fact the only reason that it is postulated that we may see blackholes is by invoking extra space dimensions that are compactified (like a human hair appears 1D at a distance and has a 2D surface close up). This will mean that, at very short distances gravity becomes a lot stronger. However, since passing through matter the distances will be bigger than this, I continue to argue that the EM interaction will be greater than the gravitational.
I am Not a Lawyer. I am not a Gypsy Prince. I am not Komar, King of the Voins.
You are also very clearly not a physicist!
I can just see it now for all us non-US users...
"Please look at the webcam, place your finger on the scanner and make sure your computer has a network connection."
or worse:
I'm sorry but your username has been placed on the 'no-compute' list. Please try again after the current US administration has expired.
Exactly why is this fallacious? This is how ALL science works. We measure things and then use statistics to determine how likely our result is given out current understanding of the universe. If we come out with a probability like 10^-6 then we have observed something new which we don't (yet) understand (assuming we correctly accounted for all known effects).
You, yourself, appeal to probability all the time in your everyday life. When you cross the road or drive a car you do this because you think the probability of being killed in an accident is low, when you fly somewhere you do so because you think that the probability of the plane crashing is low etc. etc.
So why is it fallacious to argue that given the evidence available to use the probability of the LHC destorying the Earth is incredibly low? We already run the risk of being wiped out by an extinction level asteroid impact everyday and we have considerable evidence that this has happened multiple times on the Earth's past. So if the maximum probability of the LHC wiping out the Earth is considerably lower (and in fact is probably zero) why do you regard that as a fallacious argument?
Perhaps, instead of the popular "think of the children" meme we should regard this type of inability to stop worrying about incredibly low probabilties as "think of the dinosaurs"?
The LHC collides protons, not electrons.
Repulsion by solid matter isn't enough to stop it.
This depends on whether or not it is a charged black hole. In all likelihood it will be since it would have been produced by colliding two protons. Since EM interactions are many, many orders of magnitude above gravitational ones (calculate the difference in the gravitational vs. electric forces in an atom for an excellent illustration) I would expect a charged black hole to interact via EM far more strongly than by gravity.
You obviously haven't tasted CERN coffee - they have expresso machines and its generally very good. Much more likely is "This food is offal". I remember several times going to to the coop and the three dishes of the day were things like calf's head, tripe sausage and tongue...yummmm!
There are two things wrong with this opinion. the first is factual: when the LHC was being funded the main funding argument was discovering the Higgs (or else figuring out how else the probability of two types of particles scattering did not exceed 100% around 1TeV in energy). The other main argument, which came along slightly later with the WMAP data, was figuring out where at least 23% of the energy of the universe is hiding i.e. dark matter.
The second problem is that it requires that physicists created the sensationalism. How exactly do we do that? It is the press that creates sensationalism, not physicists. Are you suggesting that scientists should not consider theories that the press may consider sensational? or, if we do, should we not tell anyone what we are doing in case the press find out and goes sensational on us?
While most of us, myself included, think that these black hole production theories are very unlikely, they cannot be ruled out and would explain some issues with current theories. As such they are legitimate avenues of research and not a 'ploy' to get research funding.
Same thing when you say a car is stopped. It ceases to move in your frame of reference i.e. has zero velocity, zero speed etc.
Correct, but this is why the article mentions neutron stars. These have the same density as an atomic nucleus (if not greater at the centre if strange QCD states form). Cosmic rays hitting these would also produce the same particles but, because the neutron star is so much denser than the Earth, these would be stopped in the star eventhough they would be created moving at speed. Since we see lots of old neutron stars we can conclude that if there is any danger from the LHC the process is so slow or rare that we do not need to worry about it.
I know what it means. However it is usually used to as a sarcastic argument to justify some crazy restriction on rights. Unusually here there is an action they could take which would in some sense be even more restrictive and yet make far more logic AND win more votes...and yet strangely they have not done it.
Actually this is theoretically possible. You can make two photons interact but it is not a first order effect and in fact is very heavily suppressed at low energies. So it is possible but incredibly unlikely (and certainly not how they did it here).
If they were really thinking of the children and believed these guys to be in danger of re-offending then, as the original poster says, they should never let them out of prison. Vigilante "justice" may eventually take care of the problem but in the meantime you have someone likely to molest children running around. So why not 'think of the children' and not let back out into society, especially if you are going to completely prevent any possibility of them reintegrating.
I do not think that it is at all unreasonable to assume that someone who thinks Newtonian gravity is a scalar field has not heard of the Michelson-Morley experiment. While you may know the words 'scalar field', your comments show that you do not understand what they actually mean. Likewise you may have heard of the Michelson-Morley experiment but I have my doubts that you fully understand its implications. The results showed that there was no medium through which light propagated.
My apologies if you think I am being particularly difficult or splitting hairs. However you are throwing around scientific words that have very precise and clear meanings in a manner that is not consistent with those meanings. If you are going to try to talk like a scientist don't complain when you get treated like one.
Hang on a minute! Anti-biotics were not invented until the 1930's. While I agree that abuse of them should certainly stop (especially including abuse by farmers feeding them to livestock needlessly) it will not be the end of the world. More people will die, live expectancy will drop but we are not going to end up in a post-apocalyptic world with only a handful of survivors.
Sad but true, changing a creationist's mind is a surgical procedure.
That's not what I asked - I asked if you had seen evidence. Clearly we have seen evidence for photons.
that may be what all particles are, at the end of the day: localised packets of waves in some sort of theorectical 'medium'.
Actually we know that is not the case for light. Michelson-Morley showed in 1896 (IIRC) that light is not a vibration of a medium because otherwise the interference fringes would shift as the motion of the Earth changed which they did not. You can try to explain it as dragging the medium with the Earth but then you would have to see some effect between the stationary medium away from the Earth and the dragged medium near the Earth. So actually the one this we can show is that light is not the vibration of a medium.
I meant a scalar field, since it is usual practise to think of the size of gravitation rather than the direction
Not in any physics course I've ever taught, taken or even heard of it isn't. I've never heard anyone EVER refer to gravity as a scalar field or even treat it that way. You can't - even if you confine yourself to 1D you still have to have it act up or down. I think you may be getting confused between constant and scalar. The two are definitely not the same.
Are they? Ever seen evidence of one? Gravitons are a purely theoretical construction and, worse of all, one that does not work. While you can construct a quantum field theory of gravity it does not work to arbitrary energies. You have to impose a cut-off threshold and since there is no valid reason for doing so the theory is broken...hence all the theoretical activity trying to reconcile GR and Quantum mechanics.
The gravitational field as a scalar field surperposed on a flat space-time is just another way of describing gravitation
You mean a vector field since gravity has direction, rather than the Tensor field of GR.
Not quite. They would be at risk of being sued for libel but if the claims were provably true then they case would fail and they would not be found liable. Of course most companies don't want to take the risk so the system is screwed up...but it is not quite as messed up as you suggest.
There is clearly already a solution since the various NASA robots have worked fine on Mars and although they are solar powered they will require batteries so they don't have to turn completely off during the night.
you are using two different words to refer to the same thing. You have no rights other than what the law says you have because, without the law, there is no such concept as a 'right'.
The privileges given to government ("given" is the proper word... if you and your ancestors didn't vote right, it's your own fault) do, however, come from exactly the same basis as our own rights do: the point of a gun.
Since you agree that governmental and individual rights come from the same place you must also logically agree that if governmental rights are given so are individual rights.
...the point you are missing is that is exactly why we have claimed and insisted on keeping the right to own guns! We have the right to overthrow an oppressive government, with force if need be.Here you are confusing right with ability. Unless the law says you have a right to overthrow the government you don't, because outside the law, which is where you are most definitely heading with a rebellion, there are no rights. You are employing the 'might makes right' argument which dates back to caveman times.
And if enough people do it, there will not be very many Wacos or Ruby Ridges. Those two in themselves came near to starting a revolution, and I think the government knows that.
Oh come on - I don't know Ruby Ridge but Waco was a perfect example of why the general public should not be allowed access to powerful guns. Why on earth would the government dealing with a group of armed, mentally unstable maniacs be cause for rebellion? Nobody else seems to need to piles of high powered weapons lying around their houses in order to have a revolution, the French managed it and so did you guys. In the meantime having all these weapons around on the off chance that today might be a good day to rebel has meant that criminals, nutters and idiots have been able to get hold of them and cause untold numbers of deaths.
It is not a natural right - it was dreamed up by the guys who wrote your constitution. To be 'natural' you'd have to be born with it and even in the US I don't see babies being born with guns in their hands.
I do not need a king to enforce my property rights. I have a gun to enforce my property rights
Right - so if say a foreign government invades to steal your land you and your gun will happily be able to see them off without any government help? No I didn't think so. You do need a government to enforce your property rights otherwise another government will come and take them away.
Thus, because I have a gun, I own my land, and the King (aka gov't), has no rights of its own at all.
The rights of your government come from exactly the same basis as all of your rights. They are written down in the law of the land. The same laws that give you a right to bear arms give the government the right to pass laws over you. To say that your government has no rights is to say that you have no rights.