Posted on 02/07/2007 2:40:44 PM PST by Jim Robinson
What good will it do to win the war on terrorists only to lose the Republic to socialists here at home? That's a serious question. The war against terrorists only means something if we do NOT toss away our Constitution in the doing of it.
The Republic will survive...it will just change..as it always does....But hey, good luck finding someone who represents what you want and who can win. I'm looking forward to seeing who you come up with.
Nice NON-answer. But what I would expect from someone willing to trade liberty for the illusion of security.
I answered that question. Perhaps you cant read.
I'm sure you know that the most upstanding and law abiding citizen in your town could be forced to surrender his guns forever because 50 years ago he made a threatening gesture at a vindictive girlfriend during a heated argument and then plead guilty or nolo contender to a domestic violence misdemeanor just to avoid the expense and trouble of a trial. I don't know if I can ever forgive the Republican Congress which allowed the abomination known as the Lautenberg amendment to slip through into law.
It's worse than that!
I know people who can easily PROVE they were HOURS or several states AWAY, when they were alleged to have smacked an ex.
But they CANNOT get a hearing, or the "judge" refuses to look at the evidence, the allegation is all it took to deprive them of their rights.
I seem to recall a similar situation in the French "Reign of terror", to be accused is to be found guilty, with no appeal possible.
There's another thread running tonight on Rudy and the FRullianis are out in full force adoration. No doubt he was a plus in cess pool called NYC, but he has no clue about us down here in South Carolina. We don't want the entire country run like NYC. What worked there won't work here.
The line is not drawn between inanimate objects. The line is drawn between people who use them responsibly, and those who demonstrably will/do not.
Good points, and good thoughtful discussion from you both. There is another relevant aspect, however, to this whole "individual right to own WMDs" argument which clearly illustrates why the argument itself is a red-herring, which is employed solely to deflect the focus away from the essential issue of freedom.
Here on planet Earth, in the real world, the threat from "private" individuals trying to acquire their own personal WMD's is, while theoretically possible, statistically so vanishingly small that in actual practice it is essentially nonexistent. The truth is that the ONLY entities which actually pose a real threat via WMD's are sovereign nation-states, and terrorists who are either directly or indirectly acting as agents of those nation-states.
The reality is that private individuals simply don't have the resources to create and acquire WMD's, and I'm not just talking about money. There's also the scientific resources, including trained personnel and laboratory facilities. Plus, the requisite industrial and manufacturing capabilities, storage and testing and training facilities, and delivery systems. Finally, there's the diplomatic channels and resources so necessary to hiding the development and concealing the movement of such tightly-monitored materials. James Bond villain fantasies aside, even fabulously wealthy individuals such as Bill Gates could not manage all this without at some point utilizing the resources of or connections within governments. As chronicled in "The Black Book of Communism", the biggest murderers and killers of the greatest number of people in the Twentieth Century were sovereign governments. They are the source of any WMD threat - not private individuals.
The bottom line is, again, this whole argument is a fraud, a sham and a deliberate, dishonest distraction. Those who try to use it know full well that private citizens aren't going to try to get WMD's for their personal protection. In the real world, it simply isn't a genuine threat.
Their only purpose for attempting the argument is to try to foreclose and shut-down the debate. They believe that if they can establish some absurdly improbable theoretical point, just "for the sake of argument", as the saying goes, which has no relevance in the real world, then they can use that "point" they have scored to whittle-down their opponents "other arguments" which they cannot counter otherwise.
Thus, to the question "Do you understand the meaning of 'shall not be infringed'?" they reply, "Well, what about WMD's?" Once they're able to coax an admission from their opponent that "maybe WMD's aren't covered" there is no "logical" reason for them to deny the right of government to infringe how many cartridges their magazines can hold, how many and what type of guns they may own, etc., etc. ad nauseum.
The whole argument is nothing but an irrelevant, cheap "logic trap" derived from a ludicrous theoretical improbability. The correct response when someone tries to spring this scam and ask you if private individuals have the right to own nuclear weapons is to reply "Yes, but here on planet Earth IT'S NOT A PROBLEM, NEVER HAS BEEN, AND THERE'S NO EVIDENCE IT'S LIKELY TO EVER BECOME ONE. So why are you trying to talk about THEORETICAL IRRELEVANCIES instead of contributing to the discussion about the PRACTICAL WAYS you, and I, and our fellow citizens can best protect ourselves from the VERY REAL murderers, rapists and other criminals who do threaten us?"
In my opinion, that's just about all the answer that question deserves.
Two points here:
1. Chemical nerve agents are very cheap and easy to make. I will not go into just how, but most anyone could do it with only modest effort.
2. Remember not too many years back that Japanese cult that unleashed chemical weapons in the Tokyo subway?
Point is, your argument is only ALMOST on solid ground. Sure, sophisticated chemicals and biologicals are not easy to make but nerve agents ARE... and they are pretty awful things. There's more to be said, but duty calls and so does my nice warm bed. Work is beckoning in the morning.
Amen!
you either vote for rudy and comprimise your principles, or you dont vote at all and totally abandon those principles. your call. this assumes that rudy and hill are the candidates, of course.
nazis and communists? come on. you're over-dramatizing this. it's an election. one choice leaves a bad taste in your mouth. the other choice gives you food poisoning. but if you dont eat, you starve. your call.
How could you possibly know this?
Think Afganistan & the USSR or Viet Nam and the USA before you dismiss the individual right to keep and bear arms as helpless in the face of the modern state.
Actually if Koresh had a couple of 50mm PAK 37's (sold mail order until 1968) He might have fared a lot better (Which is of course why they were made illegal - the foresight of Kongress in protecting the government is amazing sometimes)
So is mustard gas, BUT suppose you're in your garage terrorist WMD facility, and you're down to the last step of making diisopropylflurophosphate or something like that. You're wearing gloves and a mask. You go ahead and make the final step and now you have a big container of nerve gas.
What happens next? You die unpleasantly. It takes very little of these agents to kill you they have enough vapor pressure to do the job, and you don't just have to inhale them. So unless you're in an expensive containment facility, making any war gas is more likely to kill you than do anything else. Same is true for mustard gas - pretty easy to make, but them what? You're in a closed room with a lethal gas where even a slight exposue can cause permanent damage. Making these things for most people would just be a complicated form of suicide.
Point is, your argument is only ALMOST on solid ground. Sure, sophisticated chemicals and biologicals are not easy to make but nerve agents ARE... and they are pretty awful things. There's more to be said, but duty calls and so does my nice warm bed. Work is beckoning in the morning.
Points 1. and 2. you mention above are "true", however, neither has anything to do with the subject under discussion, which is the right of people to own guns, or other arms (including WMD's) for self-protection from dangerous criminals and/or tyrannical governments.
For point 1., chemical nerve agents are not only relatively easy to make, you can buy them over the counter in any Wal-Mart in the insecticide and household cleaner departments. BUT, and it's a very big BUT, in the "real world" people don't try to use them for personal protection, although a woman spraying a would-be rapist in the face with a can of Raid would be perfectly okay. For point 2., the release of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway by the AUM Shinriko cult was a terrorist attack, not an act of self-defense. Their "crime" was murder, no matter what tool they used to do it, and it's happened just once. By your logic, since San Francisco was once destroyed by an earthquake, and we know theoretically that another could occur at any time, then we should just evacuate and abandon the city. After all, the risk is "real".
The bottom line is you seem to have completely missed my "point" from my original post, and ironically, your points actually supported and illustrated mine perfectly. The examples you gave are theoretically are infinitely remote, they simply are not a problem in "the real world".
As I pointed out in my previous post, the only people who are actively trying to acquire WMD's are those wqho are already embarked upon far more murderous missions: terrorism, and in the case of governments, acts of war and aggression. There are far more relevant laws under which to pursue these people than through gun regulations.
Trying to tie these types of actions and crimes to the issue of gun control is simply dishonest sophistry, and those who advocate these types of arguments reveal themselves clearly. They're not concerned about the rights and lives of their fellow human beings - they're only interested in controlling them, and any pretext, however specious or absurd, will do.
i'll take the one who will appoint scalia-type judges and believes in states rights against the one who would pilfer exxon's profits, thank you very much.
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