It's more complicated than that. The founders recognized that a nation is partially defined by how much control it has over its borders. This includes controlling what goes through the border. And in order to do that, it is necessary to be able to inspect anything. And in order to do that... well, you have to be able to do it without something exactly straddling an imaginary line. And now you're down into implementation details that have nothing to do with the constitution, SCOTUS or anyone else at that level.
Go write your congress critters that a border that is 100 miles wide makes a mockery of the spirit of the law, while still obeying the letter of the law. But that's the only way you're going to change that.
Ah.... I see what's going on. You're part of that group of people who feel that because they can no longer tell people what is right and what is wrong, they are now marginalized and persecuted. Let me guess - you are white and male, yes?
The point is that many of us don't want to live in a society where deviancy is the accepted norm. Legalizing animal porn takes that away from us.
Now it all falls nicely into place. Using animal porn (I assume you're actually referring to bestiality, instead of just images of horses fucking each other) as a fulcrum, you're arguing for deviancy to be forcefully removed from society. Except that you don't want to stop just with bestiality, as you clearly have issues with fat people, BDSM and quite a few other things. And not only do you have issues with quite a few things, your goal is to have a world without any content you object to. Now what would be necessary to achieve that? You having total control over everyone's life. In other words, a totalitarian state. I know, I know. It's all for the greater good - how could anyone object? And those who do object are deviants anyway who want to oppress you, so they can be expelled to some far off land. I hear Siberia is great for that. It's not like you're actually killing them. I mean, except for the truly dangerous deviants. Those deserve to be killed.
Yeah, I know your type. Thank god you don't have the charisma necessary to actually rally enough like-minded people around you and enough political skills to implement your ideas, because otherwise Europe might have to repay its WW2 debt to the US sooner rather than later.
Oh look, a straw man. Couldn't find something to argue against, so had to make something up.
In case you're lost, please point to where your quote comes from. Secondly, please coordinate your responses with respect to the generally defended standard of acts between consenting adults in a private room.
No, but enough anecdotes to be confident of the outcome of any study that would look into this. The exception would be homosexuality, which has been widely studied and found to be very normal - both in external behavior, as well as frequency across time, religions, social structures, genders and even species.
It seems like you've made a political decision here, which is that every behavior should be accepted.
No, the decision here is that behavior which has no visible impact on society at large should be accepted, and not be subject to random moral and religious whims.
Some of us want our kids to grow up in a world where only healthy behaviors exist.
Define healthy. Now compare and contrast that definition with the one from 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, 500, 1000, 5000 years ago. Considering we're still around, I'm pretty sure that your definition of "healthy" is irrelevant to the advancement of mankind and society. Finally, you want your kid to grow up surrounded by only healthy behavior? I suggest you kill off every other human being, because that's the only way your vision is going to come to pass.
We want people to go experiment elsewhere, and face the consequences of their experiments without dragging us down with them.
Sweet! That's what we all want. Oh, you mean that "elsewhere" does not include the privacy of ones bedroom? Or consensual acts between adults?
Wow, so you're actually not at all saying that you're ok with people experimenting elsewhere. You actually want to control what people do. Here's a thought (and keep in mind you're a significant minority regarding your particular definition of "healthy"): move to an island somewhere, and be a control group there. Leave the rest of us to live our lives, and stop butting into consensual acts taking place between adults in a place you have no access to.
n the article at the top of this discussion, the least restrictive (that is, the most permissive) license choice given was CC-BY. It - and indeed, all three licenses listed - require that attribution be preserved as a condition of reuse.
Thanks - I wasn't aware of that point.
For the purposes of disseminating and reusing scientific knowledge, it is far more constructive for papers to be gratis than libre.
Very nice summary. I think I'll re-use that under CC-BY-NC-ND.;)
Science researchers live and die by their publications. Their papers are their currency. To let someone completely modify it and not even attribute it back to them is near professional suicide, unless you're already so famous that you don't need additional papers. As a result, you're right, they don't care that much whether journals are open access or not. They really care about whether publishing their paper somewhere is going to help their career, or hurt it. The first license is at best not going to help, at worst going to hurt it. That leaves the other two, with the final one being the one that guarantees that your name will stay attached to it, and that it will stay as they wrote it.
Note that even the final license let's anyone view it, download it and pass it around. That's pretty damn good open access, and exactly what is needed. The rest is just what the scientists want to see happen to their paper.
Nonsense. Read up on what a republic is, what a democracy is, the Federalist Papers (and read all of them, not just the 2 lines your favorite site fed you) and something about the context of when the constitution was written.
The US is a constitutional republic. Congratulations, so is France, Germany, China, Russia, the ex-USSR, Egypt, and a whole host of others. There is nothing more common than a constitutional republic in the world of national governments. What is also true is that the US is a representative democracy, a smaller subset of the super set of republics. This can be distinguished from direct democracies (which are also republics, and can be constitutional), or binding representation, (which are also republics).
Again, there is absolutely NOTHING special about the US being a republic.
The Founders explicitly shied away from establishing a democracy for the simple reason that democracies do not scale beyond a small collection of city states.
And if you'd read the Federalist Papers instead of just parroting someone else, they are EXPRESSLY referring to a direct democracy not scaling. After the initial definition, they just refer to democracies, while implying "direct democracies".
Open government? Democracy? That's a recipe for totalitarianism -- because only the strongest consensus builder can assert control to get anything done and few, if any, checks and balances can be imposed or enforced.
Congratulations. You discovered the principal flaw of democracy. You're only about 300 years late to the party. Voltaire has a nice discussion around what makes a ruler legitimate. You might want to look into it. Once you do, you'll also realize that the US was subject to the same risk from the day it became a nation, because it operates on exactly the principles you decry: openness in operation, democratic election of legislators and executives, and a requirement for consensus-building to operate.
Yes, it's just semantics. But it bothers me because the trend seems to be define things in such a way until only a very small and very vocal minority is allowed to participate in government. Of course, they do it because they are the only ones who truly understand how the founding fathers wanted to run things, and they are the only ones who can save the nation. Now where have I heard that before....
Joining an opposing army automatically removes your citizenship. Any American who joins Al-Qaeda automatically ceases to be a US citizen. That's been standard practice since the US was created.
Technically, they're owned by the federal government, with certain public use requirements attached to it. But yes, they are an example of practical commons.
In his defense, there are plenty of instances across the world where while land was practically owned - i.e., it was obviously used by someone, and their use made anyone else's use of it difficult if not impossible - there was no legal documentation of ownership. Mexico explicitly ran into this issue in the mid 19th century, Germany had plenty of this in the middle ages, and Russia was the poster child of "you only own what you can defend". In short, the middle ages had plenty of declarations of ownership, but the only time those declarations actually mattered is when someone could defend their claim via arms.
Now, as for actual "commons" - that again was more a result of commonly agreed-upon practices than any legal documentation that a tract of land was explicitly not owned by anyone. The only place that I can think of where that is actually the case is Antarctica - and I expect that to stop as soon as anyone finds oil and gas there, or the place becomes inhabitable.
Wait wait wait - it's leftist BS to argue that drone killings are unconstitutional? You might want to inform Fox News and the entire set of commentators on there that they're now just one hair short of growing a Lenin mustache and singing The International.
I think it's worse than that... they actually think that these killings are the proper way to deal with terrorists.Quite frankly, at this point, the American public deserves the authoritarian government, because they're actually clamoring for it. The Fox News crowd is just disappointed that the wrong guy is being authoritarian, and the anti-war crowd is so tiny to be pretty much irrelevant.
Beat me to it. But yes, the rage over drone killings is nothing but rage against the wrong person wielding the power granted by Congress in the aftermath of 9/11.
This type of logic was a guaranteed end-game once we declared War on Terror. After all, in a war, no one asks courts whether the military can take out some high-level commanders, who the troops can shoot, or even what to do with anyone taken from a battle field. Seriously, this should not be a surprise.
The only thing that can change this if we ramp down our rhetoric, and turn the War on Terror into a basic police action against criminals. Then we can go to courts to ask for oversight, request due process for any type of action against any target, and complain that drones really are creepy tools to use.
So you have a choice: start writing to your congress critters and complain about the War on Terror. Tell your friends what the logical consequence of this kind of war is. Lobby right and left to have terrorism be treated as a criminal event, and to have the FBI go after it - not the CIA. Or, you can put up with things like drone-killings done without over sight. Your choice. Will you actually do something about this issue, or will you just complain on the Internet that the War on Terror isn't quite turning out to be as clean as you hoped?
E.g. if you go by sheer body count, the first thing that we should ban are cars that can drive faster than the maximum speed limit in the country.
Excellent example. We didn't ban cars. Instead, we have tons of regulations applied to cars, require a driver license and insurance to operate, and you can be cited for operating an improperly maintained vehicle. Where's similar legislation for guns? Are cars actually more deadly than guns? And don't go by body count, because utility is a factor there too - unless you want to argue that nukes are some of the least dangerous things out there.
So the efficacy of the measure for the intended purposes is, effectively, disproven by now.
I'd love to start with some proper funding to actually study the question. Unfortunately, thanks to some wonderful budget decisions by republicans, there's no money for studies, there's no money to even collect data, and because there's no money, all research would have to start from scratch if there were money to be found. In the meantime, we're left with shitty data from countries that barely resemble ours.
Erm. Get your definitions straight. We ARE a democracy. Look up the word in an dictionary, encyclopedia or even sociology or history book. A republic merely means that the government is a public affair, not a private, i.e., autocratic affair. Democracy is merely one way to implement a republic, and a pretty popular at that. After that, you can quibble about representative versus direct democracy, but those are still democracies Oh, and before you start talking about the Federalist papers - actually read them. They are explicit about referring to a direct democracy being unwieldy, not democracy in general.
There is a difference between a right and the ability to exercise that right.
Of course. But you're still missing the point. You need to be able to justify your right from a philosophical perspective before you can expect me to endorse it. Since you brought up Rosa Parks elsewhere: that black people should have the same rights as white people was, at some point, not self-evident. As a matter of fact, it took about 100 years of discussion and violence to make that seem self-evident in retrospect. You don't get to short-circuit the discussion about the right to bear arms with a "because we're born with it". Either you can support the notion, or you can keep shouting in the desert.
"it is already against the law to do X and people are ignoring the law and doing X anyway, so adding another law to make X illegal won't solve the problem"
It's easy to argue against a point neither I nor anyone else is making, isn't it? There are two ways to "add law" to a problem. You can make the penalties harsher, or you can make certain aspects of a problem illegal that are currently legal. Like, I don't know, making it illegal to sell a gun privately without a background check. Both add laws, but are certainly more nuanced then "it just makes x illegal again".
And yet every gun control advocate is wishing that the reality of guns would go away
Again, I think you might want to stop with the strawmen. It's really, really hard to take you seriously.
The guy who steals a gun and goes to a school to shoot the defenseless children there is already breaking more than one law, of both man and God.
The guy stole guns from his mother who kept them barely secured. Why are guns the only dangerous tool that people can just leave lying about? You can't leave TNT out on a front porch, and you can't leave uranium lying around. There are plenty of ways to make the problem of people illegally acquiring guns harder. What you're doing is to argue that because there is nothing that will fix the problem 100%, there's no point in even reducing the problem.
And, like I said, nobody is arguing in support of making it easy to kill a roomful of children.
Ok, fair enough. So I'd like two to see two things from you: 1) What is it about semi-automatic guns that is so important that mass-killings (which at this point are so frequent that I don't even blink an eye at them - then again, it might have to do with the fact that I live near Oakland) are a valid trade-off? 2) If not via gun-control, how do you propose to approach the problem of gun homicides?
Again you demonstrate a failure to understand rights.
No, I understand rights perfectly fine. You, on the other hand, don't seem to understand what it takes for rights to actually exist in a society. It's the basic difference between philosophy and politics. Furthermore, merely yelling "it doesn't MATTER WHY I NEED IT" does very little to advance your position. All that it tells me is that you think your philosophy should need no explanation, and should be implemented above all others. That's a dangerous road to go down - one which you seem to be blissfully unaware of.
The law was ignored. Two laws won't be less ignored. Ten laws won't be less ignored.
Very true. However, it also makes no sense to argue that because there are law-breakers, there's no point to laws. The idea is that there are different angles of a problem that can be covered by different laws. Example: Law 1) it's illegal to kill anyone. Law 2) it's illegal to shoot shells from a tank outside of military exercises or missions. Law 3) it's illegal to dump cyanide into a river.
You can start at Law 1, and realize that it's a lot easier to prevent deaths from occurring by reducing the occurrence of certain events. The reason that additional laws do work is because there's a cost to purely act after a catastrophic event has happened, and that that cost is generally much higher than a bit of prevention.
Nobody is talking about making it easy to kill a roomful of children, and it is hyperbole like yours that makes the discussion a waste of time.
Except that I'm talking about something that actually happened, and that that event was facilitated by the existence of semi-automatic weapons. You can't just wish reality to go away.
Interesting. However, if we go by the idea that the constitution enumerates specific powers of the federal government, and that all laws that cover topics that aren't explicitly listed in it are unconstitutional.... well, I think that ship sailed about 6 months after the signing of the constitution. Granted, there is an interesting concept in there of what kind of government you can have with that interpretation, but somehow, I think that is either a minority opinion in the US (just judging by what laws ARE being passed and supported by the population), or focuses that interpretation exclusively on the topic covered by the 2nd Amendment.
Opening your argument with something that is so wrong it either requires an active avoidance of facts or an active decision to distort the truth doesn't really encourage anyone to take you seriously. Once you make an argument that doesn't fall into either category, come back and we can have a discussion.
Wow - maybe all hope isn't lost. An actual point of discussion.
At the core, the reason is because these people are professionals. This implies background checks, tracking of their tools, and the ability to remove them from their position if they are not capable of performing their job. Furthermore, because they're government workers, it also implies a final oversight by the voters. Don't like the legislation covering the Secret Service? Vote out the legislators who did a bad job, and vote in those who will provide it.
Note that I don't mean that because carrying guns is their job, that they will never abuse them, or that because they're government employees, that they are somehow better than other employees. But instead, that there are processes and checks in place to minimize abuse, and that there is an express ability by every person in the country to influence how those jobs are carried out.
More generally, should non-military government personnel have access to weapons that are prohibited to civilians? Why?
The very short answer is no, they should not. The slightly longer answer is that if every civilian is subject to the same checks and regulations as the non-military government personnel, then every civilian should get the same level of access. Note that this implies that said access can be revoked in a similar fashion. Abuse your gun, lose your right to use it. There's an even longer response that would go into what constitutes proper regulation and checks, but that's too much for a post on a website. However, I'll leave you with this: why restrict your question to non-military personnel? Could you see a situation where any citizen could gain access to any type of military hardware?
I'm sorry that you're offended by that term. Do you also get offended every time someone calls you a liar when you're lying? Because that was the alternative. You're either willfully ignorant of the current terms of the debate, or you are actively lying about it. I thought I'd be charitable and assume that you're merely actively ignorant. But maybe I was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more complicated than that. The founders recognized that a nation is partially defined by how much control it has over its borders. This includes controlling what goes through the border. And in order to do that, it is necessary to be able to inspect anything. And in order to do that... well, you have to be able to do it without something exactly straddling an imaginary line. And now you're down into implementation details that have nothing to do with the constitution, SCOTUS or anyone else at that level.
Go write your congress critters that a border that is 100 miles wide makes a mockery of the spirit of the law, while still obeying the letter of the law. But that's the only way you're going to change that.
Ah.... I see what's going on. You're part of that group of people who feel that because they can no longer tell people what is right and what is wrong, they are now marginalized and persecuted. Let me guess - you are white and male, yes?
The point is that many of us don't want to live in a society where deviancy is the accepted norm. Legalizing animal porn takes that away from us.
Now it all falls nicely into place. Using animal porn (I assume you're actually referring to bestiality, instead of just images of horses fucking each other) as a fulcrum, you're arguing for deviancy to be forcefully removed from society. Except that you don't want to stop just with bestiality, as you clearly have issues with fat people, BDSM and quite a few other things. And not only do you have issues with quite a few things, your goal is to have a world without any content you object to. Now what would be necessary to achieve that? You having total control over everyone's life. In other words, a totalitarian state. I know, I know. It's all for the greater good - how could anyone object? And those who do object are deviants anyway who want to oppress you, so they can be expelled to some far off land. I hear Siberia is great for that. It's not like you're actually killing them. I mean, except for the truly dangerous deviants. Those deserve to be killed.
Yeah, I know your type. Thank god you don't have the charisma necessary to actually rally enough like-minded people around you and enough political skills to implement your ideas, because otherwise Europe might have to repay its WW2 debt to the US sooner rather than later.
Oh look, a straw man. Couldn't find something to argue against, so had to make something up.
In case you're lost, please point to where your quote comes from. Secondly, please coordinate your responses with respect to the generally defended standard of acts between consenting adults in a private room.
Do you have some science for that?
No, but enough anecdotes to be confident of the outcome of any study that would look into this. The exception would be homosexuality, which has been widely studied and found to be very normal - both in external behavior, as well as frequency across time, religions, social structures, genders and even species.
It seems like you've made a political decision here, which is that every behavior should be accepted.
No, the decision here is that behavior which has no visible impact on society at large should be accepted, and not be subject to random moral and religious whims.
Some of us want our kids to grow up in a world where only healthy behaviors exist.
Define healthy. Now compare and contrast that definition with the one from 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, 500, 1000, 5000 years ago. Considering we're still around, I'm pretty sure that your definition of "healthy" is irrelevant to the advancement of mankind and society. Finally, you want your kid to grow up surrounded by only healthy behavior? I suggest you kill off every other human being, because that's the only way your vision is going to come to pass.
We want people to go experiment elsewhere, and face the consequences of their experiments without dragging us down with them.
Sweet! That's what we all want. Oh, you mean that "elsewhere" does not include the privacy of ones bedroom? Or consensual acts between adults?
Wow, so you're actually not at all saying that you're ok with people experimenting elsewhere. You actually want to control what people do. Here's a thought (and keep in mind you're a significant minority regarding your particular definition of "healthy"): move to an island somewhere, and be a control group there. Leave the rest of us to live our lives, and stop butting into consensual acts taking place between adults in a place you have no access to.
n the article at the top of this discussion, the least restrictive (that is, the most permissive) license choice given was CC-BY. It - and indeed, all three licenses listed - require that attribution be preserved as a condition of reuse.
Thanks - I wasn't aware of that point.
For the purposes of disseminating and reusing scientific knowledge, it is far more constructive for papers to be gratis than libre.
Very nice summary. I think I'll re-use that under CC-BY-NC-ND. ;)
Science researchers live and die by their publications. Their papers are their currency. To let someone completely modify it and not even attribute it back to them is near professional suicide, unless you're already so famous that you don't need additional papers. As a result, you're right, they don't care that much whether journals are open access or not. They really care about whether publishing their paper somewhere is going to help their career, or hurt it. The first license is at best not going to help, at worst going to hurt it. That leaves the other two, with the final one being the one that guarantees that your name will stay attached to it, and that it will stay as they wrote it.
Note that even the final license let's anyone view it, download it and pass it around. That's pretty damn good open access, and exactly what is needed. The rest is just what the scientists want to see happen to their paper.
I use stock Dolphin browser, and haven't disabled cookie storage. However, I do get the pop-up every single time I view a story on slashdot.
Nonsense. Read up on what a republic is, what a democracy is, the Federalist Papers (and read all of them, not just the 2 lines your favorite site fed you) and something about the context of when the constitution was written.
The US is a constitutional republic. Congratulations, so is France, Germany, China, Russia, the ex-USSR, Egypt, and a whole host of others. There is nothing more common than a constitutional republic in the world of national governments. What is also true is that the US is a representative democracy, a smaller subset of the super set of republics. This can be distinguished from direct democracies (which are also republics, and can be constitutional), or binding representation, (which are also republics).
Again, there is absolutely NOTHING special about the US being a republic.
The Founders explicitly shied away from establishing a democracy for the simple reason that democracies do not scale beyond a small collection of city states.
And if you'd read the Federalist Papers instead of just parroting someone else, they are EXPRESSLY referring to a direct democracy not scaling. After the initial definition, they just refer to democracies, while implying "direct democracies".
Open government? Democracy? That's a recipe for totalitarianism -- because only the strongest consensus builder can assert control to get anything done and few, if any, checks and balances can be imposed or enforced.
Congratulations. You discovered the principal flaw of democracy. You're only about 300 years late to the party. Voltaire has a nice discussion around what makes a ruler legitimate. You might want to look into it. Once you do, you'll also realize that the US was subject to the same risk from the day it became a nation, because it operates on exactly the principles you decry: openness in operation, democratic election of legislators and executives, and a requirement for consensus-building to operate.
Yes, it's just semantics. But it bothers me because the trend seems to be define things in such a way until only a very small and very vocal minority is allowed to participate in government. Of course, they do it because they are the only ones who truly understand how the founding fathers wanted to run things, and they are the only ones who can save the nation. Now where have I heard that before....
Al-Qaeda isn't an army, it's a terrorist organization. They conduct terror, not warfare.
Then why are we at war with them? (Yes , it is a rhetorical question).
But you don't have to prove anything, right? I mean you just known once you see their Al-Qaeda membership card :)
Of course! It shows up on the drone video display. That's why we don't have any accidents bombing weddings and similar things. (Yes, it is sarcasm).
Joining an opposing army automatically removes your citizenship. Any American who joins Al-Qaeda automatically ceases to be a US citizen. That's been standard practice since the US was created.
Technically, they're owned by the federal government, with certain public use requirements attached to it. But yes, they are an example of practical commons.
In his defense, there are plenty of instances across the world where while land was practically owned - i .e., it was obviously used by someone, and their use made anyone else's use of it difficult if not impossible - there was no legal documentation of ownership. Mexico explicitly ran into this issue in the mid 19th century, Germany had plenty of this in the middle ages, and Russia was the poster child of "you only own what you can defend". In short, the middle ages had plenty of declarations of ownership, but the only time those declarations actually mattered is when someone could defend their claim via arms.
Now, as for actual "commons" - that again was more a result of commonly agreed-upon practices than any legal documentation that a tract of land was explicitly not owned by anyone. The only place that I can think of where that is actually the case is Antarctica - and I expect that to stop as soon as anyone finds oil and gas there, or the place becomes inhabitable.
Wait wait wait - it's leftist BS to argue that drone killings are unconstitutional? You might want to inform Fox News and the entire set of commentators on there that they're now just one hair short of growing a Lenin mustache and singing The International.
I think it's worse than that... they actually think that these killings are the proper way to deal with terrorists.Quite frankly, at this point, the American public deserves the authoritarian government, because they're actually clamoring for it. The Fox News crowd is just disappointed that the wrong guy is being authoritarian, and the anti-war crowd is so tiny to be pretty much irrelevant.
Beat me to it. But yes, the rage over drone killings is nothing but rage against the wrong person wielding the power granted by Congress in the aftermath of 9/11.
This type of logic was a guaranteed end-game once we declared War on Terror. After all, in a war, no one asks courts whether the military can take out some high-level commanders, who the troops can shoot, or even what to do with anyone taken from a battle field. Seriously, this should not be a surprise.
The only thing that can change this if we ramp down our rhetoric, and turn the War on Terror into a basic police action against criminals. Then we can go to courts to ask for oversight, request due process for any type of action against any target, and complain that drones really are creepy tools to use.
So you have a choice: start writing to your congress critters and complain about the War on Terror. Tell your friends what the logical consequence of this kind of war is. Lobby right and left to have terrorism be treated as a criminal event, and to have the FBI go after it - not the CIA. Or, you can put up with things like drone-killings done without over sight. Your choice. Will you actually do something about this issue, or will you just complain on the Internet that the War on Terror isn't quite turning out to be as clean as you hoped?
E.g. if you go by sheer body count, the first thing that we should ban are cars that can drive faster than the maximum speed limit in the country.
Excellent example. We didn't ban cars. Instead, we have tons of regulations applied to cars, require a driver license and insurance to operate, and you can be cited for operating an improperly maintained vehicle. Where's similar legislation for guns? Are cars actually more deadly than guns? And don't go by body count, because utility is a factor there too - unless you want to argue that nukes are some of the least dangerous things out there.
So the efficacy of the measure for the intended purposes is, effectively, disproven by now.
I'd love to start with some proper funding to actually study the question. Unfortunately, thanks to some wonderful budget decisions by republicans, there's no money for studies, there's no money to even collect data, and because there's no money, all research would have to start from scratch if there were money to be found. In the meantime, we're left with shitty data from countries that barely resemble ours.
Erm. Get your definitions straight. We ARE a democracy. Look up the word in an dictionary, encyclopedia or even sociology or history book. A republic merely means that the government is a public affair, not a private, i.e., autocratic affair. Democracy is merely one way to implement a republic, and a pretty popular at that. After that, you can quibble about representative versus direct democracy, but those are still democracies
Oh, and before you start talking about the Federalist papers - actually read them. They are explicit about referring to a direct democracy being unwieldy, not democracy in general.
There is a difference between a right and the ability to exercise that right.
Of course. But you're still missing the point. You need to be able to justify your right from a philosophical perspective before you can expect me to endorse it. Since you brought up Rosa Parks elsewhere: that black people should have the same rights as white people was, at some point, not self-evident. As a matter of fact, it took about 100 years of discussion and violence to make that seem self-evident in retrospect. You don't get to short-circuit the discussion about the right to bear arms with a "because we're born with it". Either you can support the notion, or you can keep shouting in the desert.
"it is already against the law to do X and people are ignoring the law and doing X anyway, so adding another law to make X illegal won't solve the problem"
It's easy to argue against a point neither I nor anyone else is making, isn't it? There are two ways to "add law" to a problem. You can make the penalties harsher, or you can make certain aspects of a problem illegal that are currently legal. Like, I don't know, making it illegal to sell a gun privately without a background check. Both add laws, but are certainly more nuanced then "it just makes x illegal again".
And yet every gun control advocate is wishing that the reality of guns would go away
Again, I think you might want to stop with the strawmen. It's really, really hard to take you seriously.
The guy who steals a gun and goes to a school to shoot the defenseless children there is already breaking more than one law, of both man and God.
The guy stole guns from his mother who kept them barely secured. Why are guns the only dangerous tool that people can just leave lying about? You can't leave TNT out on a front porch, and you can't leave uranium lying around. There are plenty of ways to make the problem of people illegally acquiring guns harder. What you're doing is to argue that because there is nothing that will fix the problem 100%, there's no point in even reducing the problem.
And, like I said, nobody is arguing in support of making it easy to kill a roomful of children.
Ok, fair enough. So I'd like two to see two things from you:
1) What is it about semi-automatic guns that is so important that mass-killings (which at this point are so frequent that I don't even blink an eye at them - then again, it might have to do with the fact that I live near Oakland) are a valid trade-off?
2) If not via gun-control, how do you propose to approach the problem of gun homicides?
Again you demonstrate a failure to understand rights.
No, I understand rights perfectly fine. You, on the other hand, don't seem to understand what it takes for rights to actually exist in a society. It's the basic difference between philosophy and politics. Furthermore, merely yelling "it doesn't MATTER WHY I NEED IT" does very little to advance your position. All that it tells me is that you think your philosophy should need no explanation, and should be implemented above all others. That's a dangerous road to go down - one which you seem to be blissfully unaware of.
The law was ignored. Two laws won't be less ignored. Ten laws won't be less ignored.
Very true. However, it also makes no sense to argue that because there are law-breakers, there's no point to laws. The idea is that there are different angles of a problem that can be covered by different laws. Example:
Law 1) it's illegal to kill anyone.
Law 2) it's illegal to shoot shells from a tank outside of military exercises or missions.
Law 3) it's illegal to dump cyanide into a river.
You can start at Law 1, and realize that it's a lot easier to prevent deaths from occurring by reducing the occurrence of certain events. The reason that additional laws do work is because there's a cost to purely act after a catastrophic event has happened, and that that cost is generally much higher than a bit of prevention.
Nobody is talking about making it easy to kill a roomful of children, and it is hyperbole like yours that makes the discussion a waste of time.
Except that I'm talking about something that actually happened, and that that event was facilitated by the existence of semi-automatic weapons. You can't just wish reality to go away.
Interesting. However, if we go by the idea that the constitution enumerates specific powers of the federal government, and that all laws that cover topics that aren't explicitly listed in it are unconstitutional.... well, I think that ship sailed about 6 months after the signing of the constitution. Granted, there is an interesting concept in there of what kind of government you can have with that interpretation, but somehow, I think that is either a minority opinion in the US (just judging by what laws ARE being passed and supported by the population), or focuses that interpretation exclusively on the topic covered by the 2nd Amendment.
Opening your argument with something that is so wrong it either requires an active avoidance of facts or an active decision to distort the truth doesn't really encourage anyone to take you seriously. Once you make an argument that doesn't fall into either category, come back and we can have a discussion.
You haven't been paying attention in history class. Nor to the things like the shooting of a prosecutor in Texas.
Wow - maybe all hope isn't lost. An actual point of discussion.
At the core, the reason is because these people are professionals. This implies background checks, tracking of their tools, and the ability to remove them from their position if they are not capable of performing their job. Furthermore, because they're government workers, it also implies a final oversight by the voters. Don't like the legislation covering the Secret Service? Vote out the legislators who did a bad job, and vote in those who will provide it.
Note that I don't mean that because carrying guns is their job, that they will never abuse them, or that because they're government employees, that they are somehow better than other employees. But instead, that there are processes and checks in place to minimize abuse, and that there is an express ability by every person in the country to influence how those jobs are carried out.
More generally, should non-military government personnel have access to weapons that are prohibited to civilians? Why?
The very short answer is no, they should not. The slightly longer answer is that if every civilian is subject to the same checks and regulations as the non-military government personnel, then every civilian should get the same level of access. Note that this implies that said access can be revoked in a similar fashion. Abuse your gun, lose your right to use it. There's an even longer response that would go into what constitutes proper regulation and checks, but that's too much for a post on a website. However, I'll leave you with this: why restrict your question to non-military personnel? Could you see a situation where any citizen could gain access to any type of military hardware?
I'm sorry that you're offended by that term. Do you also get offended every time someone calls you a liar when you're lying? Because that was the alternative. You're either willfully ignorant of the current terms of the debate, or you are actively lying about it. I thought I'd be charitable and assume that you're merely actively ignorant. But maybe I was wrong.