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Lebanon and the Second Amendment
self | 07/19/06 | self

Posted on 07/19/2006 2:05:00 PM PDT by tomzz

The world clearly needs more private ownership of firearms, and not less; in other words, the second amendment is an idea whose time has come all around the world, and not just in the United States.

Anybody to whom that proposition is not sufficiently obvious at this point should take a good look at the news coming out of Lebanon. You look at the situation the Lebanese have fallen into and ask yourself what could possibly have spared them from such an experience, and the only thing that comes to my mind at all is the possibility of ALL Lebanese being armed.

Then, starting from about ten or twenty years ago, had a hezbollah militia waltzed into the country with the avowed purpose of provoking Israel and the IAF into a major aerial onslaught against Lebanon's entire infrastructure, the Lebanese could have said something like:

"Hey, you know, you mother-****ers have 48 hours to be out of our country before about ten million of us start shooting at you with 308 ammunition and recoilless rifles and mortars....."

That would actually have worked. If anybody else has a solution wjhich would have worked for Lebanon starting from about 15 or 20 years ago, I'd like to hear it.


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1 posted on 07/19/2006 2:05:02 PM PDT by tomzz
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To: tomzz
Gun ownership is pointless when you're dealing with people who aren't responsible enough to use them, and aren't bright enough to know when to you them. In general, the more urbanized a nation becomes, the more people will tend to lose their sense of responsibility for themselves.

On a per-capita basis, Iraq is probably one of the most heavily-armed nations in the world -- and has a social order that is nearly incapable of enforcing any laws anyway even if guns were technically "illegal." That hasn't kept much of the country from descending into the kind of utter chaos that makes U.S. cities like Detroit and Washington D.C. look like havens of personal virtue and civic order.

2 posted on 07/19/2006 2:10:52 PM PDT by Alberta's Child (Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)
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To: Alberta's Child

Superb post. Thank you.


3 posted on 07/19/2006 2:15:38 PM PDT by jdm
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To: tomzz
Putting this issue in this form puts the cart before the horse.

The rights expressed in the Bill of Rights are rooted in the Bible. Those rights are *unalienable* and come from the Creator, not from any political statement or body of men. As citizens express their understanding of the rights the Creator gives them, that manifests itself in a social contract.

The founders did not want to set up a theocracy, yet they expected that people would express their understanding of God's will in how they voted and what issues they presented to their government.

The Second Amendment is worthless without a society that is committed to the principles that underlay all the other Amendments, but far more broadly with respect to how people generally expect to relate to their fellow citizens.

When the Second Amendment was written, most people not only had read the King James version of the Bible, most were very familiar with many of its passages. Today, only a fraction of citizens have read the Bible through, let alone can recall any of it from memory. Hence, the Bible's values are disappearing from our political discourse.

Having a Bill of Rights without understanding the values that vivified that document is like trying to understand the function of the top story of a building without having access to any of the lower floors.

Where a society does not appreciate the sanctity of life, it will not define murder as opposed to self defense. A firearm becomes a tool in the hands of anyone who bears it, a tool for good or for evil. We have a basic problem when one society defines good in terms of the destruction of an entire race of people. Such a society cannot understand the Second Amendment any more than it can understand that a people form a government to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", especially when the demands of the umma and sharia are considered more important than any Constitution.
4 posted on 07/19/2006 2:30:18 PM PDT by theBuckwheat
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