Webb Denies He Gave Aide Gun That Led to Arrest [Again, I'm not going to comment......]

Full auto guns are protected by the 2nd Amendment..and have about a 100 year civilian production history in America - 1886-1986.

341 posted on 03/28/2007 7:22:29 PM PDT by 2harddrive (...House a TOTAL Loss.....)

"What do you people have against machine guns???"

I don't know who "you people" are, but my own view is that the problem with machine guns is that they fire a lot of rounds in rapid succession, allowing a single individual to inflict mass casualties to a far greater extent than semi-automatic weapons permit.

The problem with gun rights is trying to find the line between protecting the rights of people to defend themselves individually against marauders, while at the same time not allowing individuals to possess such tremendous firepower that, if they snap, they can become marauders in their own right, inflicting mass casualties in an instant.

Certainly with just semi-automatic weapons, there have been mass killings, as in Luby's or various McDonald's' at different times. But at least in the Luby's case the killer was stopped by another individual using his own private handgun for protection. Good on him.

There is no question that self-defense requires the right of individuals to possess modern sidearms, including concealable pistols, and the right to carry them. You can't go lower and require single shot weapons, or black powder weapons (a strict "original conditions" possibility). People need the ability to fire multiple rounds.

But what's the sane upper limit on this? At what point does a weapon in the hands of individuals become so powerful that the individual possessing it himself represents a too-great hazard to society.

Up thread, I've spoken of nuclear weapons. Obviously the right to keep and bear arms cannot go THAT far (well, I'd have thought that was obvious, but look at the reactions, so apparently I'm wrong).
Machine guns are on the cusp.
Currently they're illegal.
Should they be made legal?
What's the purpose, exactly? Who is going to be better protected with a machine gun versus a private pistol? To what extent is whatever slight benefit in self-defense given by possession of a machine gun outweighed by the greater risk to everyone else of someone cooking off on one of these rampages with a machine gun?

My view is that it's hard enough to win the fight to let people carry pistols. Spending political capital to try and reinstate the "right" of individuals to carry a mass-casualty weapon like a machine gun is simply a waste of capital and goodwill. You won't get the right back, but you'll have squandered goodwill fighting for an abstraction.

If you want people to be able to defend themselves best of all, forget the machine guns and focus on getting people the right to carry a personal pistol under most circumstances.

342 posted on 03/28/2007 7:35:27 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)

"Full auto guns are protected by the 2nd Amendment"

Congress says otherwise, and the Courts haven't struck down Congress, so no, full auto guns are not protected by the 2nd Amendment. Maybe you think they should be, but they aren't.

It's the wrong fight.
Focus on handguns and private carry rights. THAT'S where the protection of individuals is greatest, and it's a fight that can be won.

343 posted on 03/28/2007 7:37:14 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)

To: Vicomte13; muawiyah

50 caliber weapons were exceedingly common in the days of the Founders.

Not fully automatic ones.

Not quite fully automatic ones. It would take the introduction of percussion cap ignition for that to come about. But there were near antecedents.

In 1718 in London, lawyer James Puckle demonstrated his new invention, the Puckle Gun, a tripod-mounted, single-barreled flintlock weapon using a revolving cylinder. Using a standard flintlock weapon, a soldier could be expected to fire three times per minute; the Puckle gun could fire up to nine shots per minute. It was the first revolver cannon and one of the first guns to use some sort of rotary feed system.

Puckle developed two versions of the basic design. For Christian enemies, he felt that the standard round bullets would be the best ammunition. However, when facing Muslim Turks, he thought that square bullets (which would cause larger, more painful wounds, in his opinion) would be more suitable.

Mr. Puckle could not attract investors to his weapon, he never mass-produced it, nor did he manage to sell this weapon to the British military. The Puckle Gun did not seem to inspire any weapons, it would be nearly a century before multi-barrel handguns like Pepperbox pistols and Revolvers would become common. It shares little with the first manual machine guns (e.g. Gatling gun), whose chambers were mechanically reloaded from a hopper. It did forshadow the use of hand-cranks in manual machine guns, as well rotary chambers for ammo storage decades before they became common. It is also one of the few weapons to have been intended to fire square bullets, rather than round ones.

344 posted on 03/29/2007 6:09:15 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

I will bet you real money that Hillary does NOT carry a gun, and that Bill Clinton doesn't either.

I will bet you real money that their bodyguards do.

Not because either of them abhor guns, but because they both are realistic people who recognize that there's no threat to them.

Both realize that they face a more likely threat of death aboard a sabotoged aircraft. But others around them have most certainly died from gunfire, ranging from the Feb 1979 murder of UPI Little Rock Statehouse Bureau reporter Judy Danielak in 1979 to the July 1993 gunshot homicide of White House Deputy Council Vince Foster.

345 posted on 03/29/2007 6:22:36 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

Say: there is a personal right to possess nuclear weapons, because they are arms, and the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

You're 'stuck on nukes'. -- Your local hospital probably has enough nuclear material to make a fairly nasty 'dirty bomb'. -- I say: -- there is a personal right to possess such nuclear materials.

Or say the opposite, which is the rational position: there is a right to keep and bear arms, which can't be infringed, but that right doesn't mean nuclear weapons.

Damn near anything can can be made into a weapon. That's rational; - prohibitions on damn near anything are not rational.

It means personal sidearms, which is to say guns. Reasonably limit the idea of arms to GUN RIGHTS, and we can quickly get on the same page,

You advocate prohibitions on machine guns. That takes you off the 'reasonable limits' page.

but it doesn't work to "hedge" on WMD. It's not infringing the right to keep and bear arms to prohibit people from having WMD; the right doesn't extend that far.

Machine guns are not "WMD". It's infringing the right to keep and bear arms to prohibit people from having 'automatic' weapons; the right extends that far.

So, the 2nd Amendment means that you can have nukes in your basement, it's your inalienable right.

No, the 2nd means you have the right to defend the rest of your freedoms to life, liberty, or property -- without prohibitions/infringements that violate due process.

There is not much more to say, really.
It doesn't say that. It doesn't mean that. And it isn't going to be allowed to mean that.

There you go. Bold 'authoritative' words from a majority rules position.

The latter is the most important point, because neither you nor I gets to define what the Constitution means. The authorities do that, the courts.

Dream on 'count'. -- We the people decided over 220 years ago that our right to arms shall not be infringed. -- The right cannot be 'defined' away by authorities.
In fact, they all make an oath to 'support & defend' that amendment. -- As an Annapolis man, you did too; correct?

The trend for years has been away from gun rights, not toward them, and the trend will continue too, if this is the sort of defense that defenders of the 2nd Amendment offer.

Yep, and the trend toward 'rational' infringements is being argued well by your sort of rhetoric. Fancy that.

You could defend gun rights pretty effectively with the assistance of friends like me.

Your sort have never been 'friends' of rights. Your own 'bold authoritarian words' just above tell the real tale.

But you won't back away from the insanity that the 2nd Amendment is not limited to guns, and insist that it means any sort of armaments at all, right up to WMD. You believe that, apparently passionately.

You irrationally believe that I support "WMD", -- apparently passionately.

I cannot support that. You've lost an ally.

Allies like you we don't need.

346 posted on 03/29/2007 7:53:53 AM PDT by tpaine (" My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk." -Scalia)

You wrote: "You're 'stuck on nukes'. -- Your local hospital probably has enough nuclear material to make a fairly nasty 'dirty bomb'. -- I say: -- there is a personal right to possess such nuclear materials."

They have the materials, for a specific use, and the materials are controlled and regulated.

What I am asking is whether or not they have the right, the constitutional right, to assemble them into a dirty bomb because they want one. Nuclear material in x-ray machines, et al, has a purpose. It's not weaponized. If the hospital crew takes apart the machines and starts assembling nuclear material for the purpose of weaponizing it into a bomb, they have committed a slew of serious crimes and, if detected, will be arrested for it.

What you are saying is that the 2nd Amendment means that people don't just have the right to have nuclear material in hospitals, fertilizer in their fields, and gasoline in their tanks (nobody disputes that they can, subject to regulation). You're saying that they have the right to take these materials which they have and assemble them into weapons of mass destruction, which they can keep if they want to, so long as they don't bother anybody.

That is not in fact the way that the 2nd Amendment is interpreted by the courts or Congress, but you and your ilk here are asserting that courts and Congress are breaking the Constitution, and people actually already HAVE the right, under the Constitution, to take the nuclear materials out of the x-ray machine and make a dirty bomb.

You will not back away from your purism on the 2nd Amendment issue. And others have chimed in in support of your position. Conversely, not one single defender of gun rights has stood up alongside of me and said "You're right, these guys are over the top". My impression, therefore, is that folks who support 2nd Amendment rights on the conservative right think like you do, and really think they have some sort of God-given right to nuclear weapons.

That is absolutely insane.

Now, as to this: "Damn near anything can can be made into a weapon. That's rational; - prohibitions on damn near anything are not rational."

You are eliding two things: materials which CAN be made into a weapon, and actually MAKING and HAVING a weapon. If you own a chunk of land in the Rocky Mountains, you've got plenty of Uranium right there, in the soil. If you're a radiology clinic, you've got plenty of radioactive material. If you have decorative castor bean plants in your garden, you have vegetable ricin, probably the deadliest natural poison around, in your backyard. It is you, not me, who is suggesting that I am saying all of these things have to be banned. That's ridiculous.
It is a very different thing to have castor beans and to cut the beans, slice them, squeeze out the juice, and repeatedly distill the sap to get ricin. The former, the bean, has the potential to be a weapon, but it's a plant. If you take the time, effort and methods to make it into a weapon, then it's a weapon, and it's purpose is to be a weapon. I say that there's no reason to even think about castor beans, but there is every reason to criminalize somebody actually making and possessing ricin from castor beans. What is the purpose of making and having ricin? To have a nasty poison, the discreet drop of which on a doorknob or in a coffee cup can kill somebody. Why does ANYBODY have the need to poison his neighbors? That's not self-defense. Just the fact of making and possessing ricin demonstrates a diseased mind and an unstable intent.

Same thing for the radiology lab. Having radioactive material IN THE MACHINES in order to take x-rays is a perfectly normal use. That's why it's there, for x-rays. For safety reasons, it's subject to the NRC, but we need x-ray machines, so of course that stuff is out there. Why shouldn't it be? It's a very different thing, though, if the doctor goes in at night, opens up the machine, pulls out the radioactive materials and starts assembling them with explosives into a dirty bomb. What's the purpose of THAT? To kill people. Lots and lots of people. To shut down a whole are of the city. Unlike a gun, which is a tool to use against an immediate violent threat, to repel a killer, to protect a family, what is the use of a nuclear bomb? Not to protect anything. It's to blow the hell out of city blocks and kill a lot of people. You cannot seem to distinguish between radioactive material sitting INSIDE OF an x-ray machine to take x-rays, and the very different purpose, and mentality, of pulling it out of the machine and assembling it into a bomb. It's not threatening in the machine, but it IS threatening when weaponized, and anybody who would weaponize it and keep it under his control is obviously no good. A nuclear bomb isn't something you can use for self-defense. It's a vehicle to take out the neighborhood.
Of course we don't prohibit x-ray machines.
Of course we make illegal any steps to take that radioactive material and do something else with it, something unauthorized, ESPECIALLY trying to assemble it into a WEAPON for Christ's sake! This should be obvious.

Eliding possession of things that could be weaponized into actually weaponizing them is not a legitimate step. It's the fact that it's a weapon that makes ricin dangerous, and the fact that it's NOT a weapon, and can't be used as a weapon without specific, intentional, methodical steps, that makes castor beans plants not dangerous. The mindset that WANTS ricin, which only has one use, and to keep that possession a secret from everybody else, is the mindset of a criminal. Nobody with good intent wants secret quantities of weaponized deadly toxins or nuclear weapons. It's obvious. The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and we do not have to pretend that there exist people who might just want to assemble a radioactive dirty bomb out of radioactive materials for some legitimate purpose. There IS NO legitimate purpose in private possession of a nuclear weapon. Whoever wants one, wants it precisely to be able to hold a whole community hostage and threaten the lives and property of a vast number of people. That's not true with guns. People can want guns to defend themselves against marauders, and most people who have guns DO want them for self-defense. It's a weapon, that's its purpose, the threat of crime is real, and the possession to deter that threat is legitimate. But a private nuclear weapon or a private cache of deadly neurotoxins? What is the legitimate purpose of THAT? What sort of self-defense does THAT provide? None. The former provides the ability to be a terrorist or a mass-murder suicide at one's own unfettered discretion. The 2nd Amendment doesn't empower people with the God-given right to be able to threaten the whole damned neighborhood. And ricin? Hidden, unregistered? What's that for? Not to keep the criminals out. No. It's only purpose is to be able to untraceably murder people. The Second Amendment does not give any right to do that either.

I am sorry. If you've really got to take the position, which you have, that the Second Amendment confers the right to possess ricin and nukes, then you are out of your gourd. More importantly, by publicly insisting on it (and by the silence of defenders of gun rights on the topic), you're damaging the cause of the LEGITIMATE 2nd Amendment reading, which is to allow individuals to defend themselves with GUNS. You don't have the right to defend yourself with ricin or a nuclear weapon. The 2nd Amendment doesn't say you do. The Courts don't. The Congress don't. The majority of the people don't. I don't. It's not a rational position. All rights are limited. Weapons rights are not the only exception. Come on, be reasonable here.

This whole nuclear weapons issue would go away if you'd just flatly say: "You're right, the 2nd Amendment does not protect the right to private nuclear weapons, or ricin, or weaponized anthrax." That you WON'T SAY THAT tells me you think it DOES. That not one other gun rights person will stand up and say "Come off it, that's nuts" alarms me.

Do you have the right to have a nuke in your basement?
Yes or no?
It is a simple question.

Then you wrote: "Dream on 'count'. -- We the people decided over 220 years ago that our right to arms shall not be infringed. -- The right cannot be 'defined' away by authorities.
In fact, they all make an oath to 'support & defend' that amendment. -- As an Annapolis man, you did too; correct?"

As to this, correct. And having taken the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the USA against all enemies, foreign and domestic, several times, I will say unequivocally that any person who breaks the laws against possession of nuclear, biological or chemical materials, or sensibly prohibited mass-casualty weapons like machine guns, is doing so because he's a domestic enemy of the Constitution, hellbent on maintaining in secret the power to kill his neighbors or tear down the constitutional order with weapons of great power which are not legitimate to self-defense. There is a residual right of rebellion against tyranny, and it is contained and protected by the Second Amendment. If the people, as a mass, like in the Revolution, feel tyrannized, they can rise up and their weapons, as a mass, as a militia, can drive out the oppressive authorities. But there is absolutely no INDIVIDUAL right of rebellion. No INDIVIDUAL has the right to decide, all on his own, that the government is oppressive and that HE is the guardian of the Constitution, that the authorities are tyrants and that everybody else, who won't rebel or band together, is a "sheeple", and that HE has the right, all on his lonesome, to start blowing away cops and taking out whole city blocks. That is called mass murder, insanity and terrorism. To try to possess a personal WMD, unregistered, unbeknownst to anybody, is to be a domestic enemy of the Constitution of the United States by law and by logic. It is precisely because I took that oath and have thought about this so much that I see, very, very clearly, that the Second Amendment is about COLLECTIVE capacity to recreate the revolution, and about individual self-defense using guns. Nobody has the right to, all by himself, decide to destroy the neighborhood. And nobody has the right to possess the weapons that gives him the capacity to do it. There is no such right in the Constitution, and attempting to possess such things is, in fact, attempting to SUBVERT the Constitution by possessing an individual override to the due process of law and legitimate powers of the authorities. There is no such right either in the Constitution or given by God. My oath requires me to oppose the nonsense that you are spouting about individual WMD rights.

And finally, as to this: "Allies like you we don't need."

Yes, you do. This is a democracy. Numbers tell the tale here. If you want to lose the gun rights you have, then go ahead and be a nut and assert that you don't JUST have the right to guns to defend yourself (and, collectively, as a militia, to defend the neighborhood), but that you have the right to hold, in secret, weapons that would let you destroy the neighborhood all on your lonesome if you went nuts and felt like it.

The 2nd Amendment means guns. That's what it MEANT in 1787. It's what it still means, even though now there are a whole lot more sophisticated "arms" out there. If we can keep it focused on THAT, on the good things that private possession of firearms does like suppressing crime, and even argue passionately that for women to defend themselves, they should think about getting a gun - that's all sane, and it's all what the Constitution means.

But you just won't stay on the reservation of sanity. You, and others, just have to keep coming back here and asserting over and over that the Second Amendment MEANS that government can't restrict ANY weapons, at all, ever, no matter how deadly. Private nukes, hidden? Constitutional. Not only that, but anybody who says otherwise, like ME, is some sort of authoritarian. Is that REALLY what the staunch 2nd Amendment defenders mean? Of course I cannot stand by you in that case. Because if you don't see the necessary limits in law, for the safety of the Republic itself from lunatics, then you're not really on the side of the country, but on the side of some strange obsession with weapons. And that sort of thing is dangerous to the Constitutional order.

I believe that my oath requires me to protect the gun rights of individuals. I don't believe that there is any "right to bear mass casualty weapons" in the Constitution or intended by the Founders. Nor do I think that the "right to bear arms" ever meant that known dangers to the Republic were in possession of that right, just as "freedom of speech" never meant the freedom to slander, and "freedom of the press" never meant the freedom to publish child pornography. The freedoms and rights are themselves naturally and rationally limited, by custom, by law, by due process and by common sense. If you've got a private nuclear weapon in your basement, or a private stash of ricin, you have evil intent and you're an enemy of the Constitution, not exercising a right at all.
Machine guns are a separate case, because they could be a weapon of self-defense...if you're being assaulted by a regiment of criminals or something like that. It's not a REASONABLE assertion of the right. In our history, private machine guns were used extensively by organized crime to attack the constitutional order, not by individuals to defend themselves. We outlawed them and restricted them, and their lack of availability has been real and effective: when nutjobs go into Luby's and shoot up the place, they do so with semi-automatic weapons because they can't GET the machine guns that would render such incidents far, far bloodier than they already are.

I think we could have a rational argument about machine guns, and whether or not the ban on them infringes the rights under the Second Amendment. I am somewhat persuadable. I am persuadable that non-violent ex-felons perhaps should be permitted to regain their gun rights. Reasonable time, place and manner restrictions for the protection of the Republic by protecting the person of the President mean that guns can be, and must be, excluded from the place where the President is. This is common sense and does not violate the Constitution, in my opinion (and since it's my opinion that governs how I fulfill my Oath, it matters here).

But "the right to keep and bear arms" is not "infringed" by criminalizing WMD, because there is no right to keep or to bear WMD at all. Never was. And the 2nd Amendment shouldn't be stretched and deformed to say there is, because it damages the credibility of the arguments for gun rights. Talk about a slippery slope! Good God! If we accept that you have the right to carry a hidden pistol, we also have to accept that you have the right to keep a nuke in your basement? In for a penny, in for a pound? That's nuts.

347 posted on 03/29/2007 10:48:44 AM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)

"Not quite fully automatic ones. It would take the introduction of percussion cap ignition for that to come about. But there were near antecedents.
In 1718 in London"

Several points, all germane:
(1) 1718 is two decades after the Founders wrote the 2nd Amendment. There was no "Puckle Gun" equivalent in their frame of reference.
(2) The Puckle Gun was unique.
(3) London is not America.

Let me ask you this:
Suppose 50 years in the future, scientists working for the government devise a helmet. You place it on your head and, just by thinking about another person anywhere in the world, he pops into your head. If you then furrow your eyebrows and squeeze your forehead, it causes the person you are viewing to instantly experience a massive coronary throbosis and cerebral hemorrhaging, killing him dead. No trace of the remote viewing intervention is made, and it isn't possible to trace the remote killing once the helmet is removed. It's science fiction fantasy, but then, so were airplanes and atomic bombs and machine guns and Stinger missiles in 1789.

So, we're back to the "right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" business. Here, my theoretical helmet, which we can't envision today because we don't know anything about any of the principles that would make it work (much as the founders couldn't conceive of nuclear physics or airplanes), would clearly be a weapon, an "arm", and a deadly and untraceable one at that. It couldn't even be proven, definitively, that this deadly remote-killing weapon had been used to kill somebody: people DO have heart attacks and strokes quite naturally, after all.

So, could this be restricted, by law, from private hands, or would "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" mean that this, too, would be something that every individual would have the right to own, if he wanted to?

The answer to that has to be that it would be SEVERELY restricted, and individuals could not be permitted to own it. If we could kill people by mere thoughts, there would be a lot of dead people in all of our lives. In fact, each of US would be dead long ago, killed by someone pissed off at us.

But what's YOUR answer? Protected by the 2nd Amendment, or not?

It seems like a silly question, but it's no sillier than considering modern high-technology weapons with their vast killing power and retrojecting these "arms" back into the words "the right to keep and bear arms" in the minds of 18th Century men whose only experience with arms was with black-powder single-firing muskets, pistols, cannons and light naval rockets.

If we're going to be strict originalists, then everybody has the right to own and to carry single-shot black powder muskets, and if they want a smoothbore iron cannon that fires solid shot, they can have one.

Even semi-automatic handguns would be high-tech and outside of the protection of the Amendment.

Now, I myself don't go that far. I think that the intent of the Amendment is clear enough: people had guns back then for protection. People still need protection, so they can have guns today too, it's a right. But it's a limited right. It's not "infringing" the right to say "No nukes. No machine guns", because the effect of letting everyone have those things would be awful, and the Founders never envisioned those things when they wrote the word "arms".

348 posted on 03/29/2007 2:09:30 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)

Obviously, you can not substantiate your claims (see my Post #336).

As for your claim that "neither you nor I gets to define what the Constitution means. The authorities do that, the courts" - I suggest that you read some of the better know works of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others...

Good luck, and Godspeed...

349 posted on 03/29/2007 2:41:42 PM PDT by Who is John Galt? ("Just don't call me Geraldo...")

Say: there is a personal right to possess nuclear weapons, because they are arms, and the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

You're 'stuck on nukes'. -- Your local hospital probably has enough nuclear material to make a fairly nasty 'dirty bomb'. -- I say: -- there is a personal right to possess such nuclear materials.

Or say the opposite, which is the rational position: there is a right to keep and bear arms, which can't be infringed, but that right doesn't mean nuclear weapons.

Damn near anything can can be made into a weapon. That's rational; - prohibitions on damn near anything are not rational.

What you are saying is that the 2nd Amendment means that people don't just have the right to have nuclear material in hospitals, fertilizer in their fields, and gasoline in their tanks (nobody disputes that they can, subject to regulation). You're saying that they have the right to take these materials which they have and assemble them into weapons of mass destruction

It is you, not me, who is suggesting that people possessing these materials might assemble them into weapons of mass destruction. -- Thus -- they must be "subject to regulation".
I've never written anything like that, and you know it.
-- You're trying to hide your 'straw man' rhetoric in line after line of 'baffle em with BS' verbosity. Get a grip.

You are eliding two things: materials which CAN be made into a weapon, and actually MAKING and HAVING a weapon. If you're a radiology clinic, you've got plenty of radioactive material. If you have decorative castor bean plants in your garden, you have vegetable ricin, probably the deadliest natural poison around, in your backyard.
It is you, not me, who is suggesting that I am saying all of these things have to be banned. That's ridiculous.

Sure is - seeing you, in effect, took that position just above.

I am sorry. If you've really got to take the position, which you have, that the Second Amendment confers the right to possess ricin and nukes, then you are out of your gourd.

The 'gourd' is of your own 'outing'. You're simply denying our right to own various types of dangerous property without being "subject to regulations". -- Castor bean permits anyone?

You don't have the right to defend yourself with ricin or a nuclear weapon. The 2nd Amendment doesn't say you do. The Courts don't. The Congress don't. The majority of the people don't.

We don't live by 'majority rule'.

It means personal sidearms, which is to say guns. Reasonably limit the idea of arms to GUN RIGHTS, and we can quickly get on the same page,

You advocate prohibitions on machine guns. That takes you off the 'reasonable limits' page.

So, the 2nd Amendment means that you can have nukes in your basement, it's your inalienable right.

No, the 2nd means you have the right to defend the rest of your freedoms to life, liberty, or property -- without prohibitions/infringements that violate due process.

There is not much more to say, really. It doesn't say that. It doesn't mean that. And it isn't going to be allowed to mean that.

There you go. Bold 'authoritative' words from a majority rules position.

The latter is the most important point, because neither you nor I gets to define what the Constitution means. The authorities do that, the courts.

Dream on 'count'. -- We the people decided over 220 years ago that our right to arms shall not be infringed. -- The right cannot be 'defined' away by authorities.

In fact, they all make an oath to 'support & defend' that amendment. -- As an Annapolis man, you did too; correct?

As to this, correct. And having taken the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the USA against all enemies, foreign and domestic, several times, I will say unequivocally that he is doing so because he's a domestic enemy of the Constitution, hellbent on maintaining in secret the power to kill his neighbors or tear down the constitutional order with weapons of great power which are not legitimate to self-defense.

Well, there you go again, showing us your true stripe. "-- any person who breaks the laws against possession of --- sensibly prohibited mass-casualty weapons like machine guns, --" is an enemy of the state. - Gottcha.

Amazingly enough, just a hundred or so words later you reverse yourself:

I think we could have a rational argument about machine guns, and whether or not the ban on them infringes the rights under the Second Amendment. I am somewhat persuadable.

Yea, sure. -- I think your little rant about a machine gun owner being a "-- domestic enemy of the Constitution, hellbent on maintaining in secret the power to kill his neighbors --"; is more of the truth.

The trend for years has been away from gun rights, not toward them, and the trend will continue too, if this is the sort of defense that defenders of the 2nd Amendment offer.

Yep, and the trend toward 'rational' infringements is being argued well by your sort of rhetoric. Fancy that.

You could defend gun rights pretty effectively with the assistance of friends like me.

Your sort have never been 'friends' of rights. Your own 'bold authoritarian words' just above tell the real tale.

You've lost an ally.

Allies like you we don't need.

Yes, you do. This is a democracy.

You wish. We're a Republic.

Numbers tell the tale here.

The majority does not 'rule' in a Constitutional Republic.

If you want to lose the gun rights you have, then go ahead and be a nut and assert that you don't JUST have the right to guns to defend yourself (and, collectively, as a militia, to defend the neighborhood), but that you have the right to hold, in secret, weapons that would let you destroy the neighborhood all on your lonesome if you went nuts and felt like it.

Thanks for your input 'count'13.. And keep digging that hole.

350 posted on 03/29/2007 6:34:41 PM PDT by tpaine (" My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk." -Scalia)

Several points, all germane:
(1) 1718 is two decades after the Founders wrote the 2nd Amendment.

Germaine, maybe; factual, no. The U.S. Constitution was not adopted in its original form until September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, six decades after the public patent of the Puckle Gun [interesting tongue-twister, that!]

There was no "Puckle Gun" equivalent in their frame of reference.

There was indeed the earlier Puckle which Boston artillerist Henry Knox would certainly have been familiar with by or after the beginning of the American Revolution, as would have George Washington while he was in the service of the British Army during the French and Indian War, circa 1753-54, being involved in the equipment and establishment of fortifications in the then-wild Ohio country and Virginia. And by the late 1770s there was the more recent Fergeson breechloading rifle, designed circa 1770 and used in the Colonies at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania, 09/11/1777, a victory for the British that enabled them to capture the city of Philadelphia.

(2) The Puckle Gun was unique.

Hardly. There were also *harmonica* multi-chamber weapons and multi-barrel designs, including *duckfoot* flintlock pistols. In addition to Ferguson's breech-loading *assault* rifle, there was also a predecessor breechloader design by gunsmith John Warsop, and at least three contemporary Swiss experimental designs. Ferguson's screw-breech patent #1139 was granted in the seminal year of 1776, a decade before the first copy of the Constitution was drafted.

The Annual Register,recorded for June 1, 1776 reads: "Some experiments were tried at Woolwich...with a rifle gun upon a new construction by Captain Ferguson of the 70th Regiment, when that gentleman, under the disadvantages of a heavy rain and a high wind, performed … things, none of which have ever before been accomplished with any other small arms..."

(3) London is not America.

Far from it, though I'm more fond of Blackpool. But though at least some of the Tories who had supported the British cause during the American Revolution may have relocated to the London regions, it does not seem to have influenced their outlook sufficiently for them to remain a great nation. Maybe we should send them some more.

351 posted on 03/30/2007 7:28:33 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

It seems like a silly question, but it's no sillier than considering modern high-technology weapons with their vast killing power and retrojecting these "arms" back into the words "the right to keep and bear arms" in the minds of 18th Century men whose only experience with arms was with black-powder single-firing muskets, pistols, cannons and light naval rockets.

And, uh, Smallpox and other biological agents used to infect blankets provided to the Indians, poisons [and bodies] used to intentionally polute waterholes, and noxious gasses used during sieges: writings of the Mohist sect in China dating from the 4th century BC, describe the use of bellows to pump smoke from burning balls of mustard and other toxic vegetables into tunnels being dug by a besieging army; older Chinese writings dating back to about 1000 BC contain hundreds of recipes for the production of poisonous or irritating smokes for use in war along with numerous accounts of their use. From these accounts we know of the arsenic-containing "soul-hunting fog", and the use of finely divided lime dispersed into the air to suppress a peasant revolt in AD 178.

The earliest recorded use of gas warfare in the West dates back to the 5th century BC, during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta when Spartan forces besieging an Athenian city placed a lighted mixture of wood, pitch, and sulfur under the walls hoping that the noxious smoke would incapacitate the Athenians, so that they would not be able to resist the assault that followed. Sparta wasn't alone in its use of unconventional tactics during these wars: Solon of Athens is said to have used hellebore roots to poison the water in an aqueduct leading from the Pleistrus River around 590 BC during the siege of Cirrha.

Chemical weapons were known and used in ancient and medieval China. Polish chronicler Jan Długosz mentions usage of posionous gas by Mongol army in 1241 in Battle of Legnica.

So, you figure that since such weapons of mass destruction weren't forbidden under the Constitution and being in uses far predating that document, you've got no problem with my fixing up a couple of thousand kilograms of Nitrogen Mustard? It's easy to do, and Thiodiglycol is easily available and inexpensive.

352 posted on 03/30/2007 7:40:32 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

If we're going to be strict originalists, then everybody has the right to own and to carry single-shot black powder muskets, and if they want a smoothbore iron cannon that fires solid shot, they can have one.

Even semi-automatic handguns would be high-tech and outside of the protection of the Amendment.

Well, then that sort of interpretation has to apply equally throughout the constitution to include the First Amendment not applying to broadcast media or the Internet, which would make you either a hypocrite or a Luddite. [And I bet you draw a LOT of criticism when Dred Scott comes back around for your re-review]

But if so interpreted, than the forces of the government must also be similarly limited, since ours is reportedly a governmental system based on equality of law, and any cop who uses a modern Glock pistol or M16 against a fellow citizen is thereby committing an act of war against the United States itself. And that would constitute an act of Treason for which hanging is the punishment prescribed by both Constitution and law.

Now, I myself don't go that far. I think that the intent of the Amendment is clear enough: people had guns back then for protection. People still need protection, so they can have guns today too, it's a right. But it's a limited right. It's not "infringing" the right to say "No nukes. No machine guns", because the effect of letting everyone have those things would be awful, and the Founders never envisioned those things when they wrote the word "arms".

Of course they did, and they expected individuals would have such terrible things. They were needed for the vessels equipped as privateers under Constitutional letters of marque for attacks on hostile shipping during hostilities. I'm not aware of any attempt by Andy Jackson to refuse the assistance of Jean Lafitte's 3000 cannoneers at the 1812 Battle of New Orleans on grounds that that privately-owned artillery was illicit, though Lafitte was probably far beyond the line between *privateer* and *pirate* and certainly was in his later post-Louisiana periiod.

353 posted on 03/30/2007 7:58:03 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

Even semi-automatic handguns would be high-tech and outside of the protection of the Amendment.

Now, I myself don't go that far.

Good. It saves you from being jailed, or in really harsh times, bayonetted or hanged.

354 posted on 03/30/2007 8:00:10 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

Cannons were big guns. They were not weapons of mass destruction.

Are you really seriously arguing with me that you have the right to a private nuclear weapon or your very own anthrax bombs?

Do you really believe that's what the Second Amendment means?

355 posted on 03/30/2007 8:04:48 AM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)

I did not argue that the 2nd Amendment means only black powder weapons. I said that if one is a strict originalist, it does.

What I said was that the 2nd Amendment's drafters did not foresee weapons of mass destruction technology. They were writing about guns. Guns reasonably includes modern personal firearms.

It doesn't reasonably include weapons of mass destruction.
Machine guns are the frontier between the two, and a reasonable basis for a debate, but WMD are beyond the pale.

I am trying to find reasonable 2nd Amendment supporters who will just say unequivocally that the 2nd Amendment does not grant a personal right to weapons of mass destruction. If I see sanity, then we can sanely discuss machine guns and gun laws.

What I see is this notion that the right to keep and bear arms is the single sole solitary totally unlimited personal right in our whole constitutional system. That is not true. It's never been true. There are no unlimited rights, and there never were.

Nor is there any requirement in the Constitution that the army be limited somehow to arms which the civilian population has. It's not in there. In 1789, weapons were simple and there wasn't anything out of reach of people, except by expense. There also wasn't the ability to take out a city in a fit of pique.

You mentioned the privateers. Yes, IF they had a letter of marque and reprisal, they could go out and attack enemy ships during war time. If they DIDN'T and they went out and attacked ships, they were pirates and subject to hanging. Jackson didn't refuse Jean Lafitte's help, that's true, but five years earlier or later he would have hanged Lafitte and his whole crew as pirates.

There's a very strange mentality about the second amendment flying around here. You seem to really believe that you posssess a personal right of rebellion, and a personal right to have unlimited firepower so as to be able to take on the US Army itself. And you think this right is enshrined in the Constitution. It isn't, and nobody who wrote the Constitution thought there was any such right, and nobody who has made or interpreted law since thinks there is either.

But I see the same thing over and over, a strange personal interpretation of what the 2nd Amendment means, pronounced boldly as though that interpretation "IS" the Constitution, and an abandonment of any sense of proportion. I have tried, here and elsewhere, to talk folks in from the ledge.

That isn't what the Constitution says or means. It's not the law. It shouldn't BE the law either, because there are too many crazy people out there in this world who cook off all the time to allow WMD to be legally accessible and easily available (and if it's a RIGHT, how can that ease of access be restricted).

What you are saying is that Muslim terrorists in the United States have the right to amass weapons of mass destruction with complete impunity and non-interference, and can only be stopped or punished after the fact, if they use them, unless you're lucky enough to intercept them on the way to using them. It's just plain nuts. It's not the law. I don't know why you think it IS the law, or certainly why you think it SHOULD BE the law, but it isn't. It can't be. It would be suicidal.

The 2nd Amendment is properly limited to guns. In the field of guns for personal protection, there is a whole lot of advance that could be made by championing the constitutional right, because it IS a constitutional right. The trouble is that wingnuts start talking about rebellion against the government, and won't back down from this notion that some guy has the right to keep an arsenal in his apartment that can take out ten city blocks, just in case the government becomes tyrannical, the "sheeple" do nothing, so HE PERSONALLY has to lead the crusade alone. There is no right to personal rebellion. Re-read Jefferson's comments on the right of revolution in the Declaration of Independence. There's nothing in there about individuals being able to shoot officers of the Crown, even for substantial wrongs. He says that wrongs must be suffered for as long as bearable, and that governments are not to be overthrown for light and transient causes. When he speaks of the right and the duty to overthrow tyranny, he speaks of the right of the PEOPLE, plural, collectively, not just to overthrow it, but to seek NEW forms of government. The Declaration of Independence NEVER asserts that individuals have the right to live WITHOUT government, and not one person who wrote the Constitution believed that an individual all alone had the right to set himself up outside the law, or as a law unto himself. But that's what you folks are on about when you will not back away clearly from the proposition that people as individuals have the right to mass casualty weapons.

No, they don't.
People have the right to guns to defend themselves. And if the government gets oppressive enough, and a big enough portion of the people AGREE that it is oppressive enough, then collectively those guns are sufficient to throw off the tyranny. There is no idea that private armies are permitted to challenge the government, and nothing in the Constitution suggests that the individual citizen has the right to have weapons that allow him to stand up to whole battalion of the Army, nor does anything in it suggest that the Army has to LIMIT its power so that the people can overthrow it. Those are all fantasies.

You have the right to have guns, to defend yourself. That's what the 2nd Amendment is about. That has been eroded, and should be defended. But you're not going to defend it - you're going to set gun rights BACK - if you cannot bring yourself to speak of the reasonable LIMITS on the right to keep and bear arms that MUST be there. If, instead, you've got to suggest that folks who say what I do are somehow traitors to freedom, or ignorant of what the 2nd Amendment means, you end up damaging the argument for gun rights. Gun rights are not unlimited rights.

356 posted on 03/30/2007 8:26:38 AM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)

Cannons were big guns. They were not weapons of mass destruction.

Just so. Those who led the American Revolution were familiar with both.

Are you really seriously arguing with me that you have the right to a private nuclear weapon or your very own anthrax bombs?

I don't have to. Patrick Henry already did it for me:

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitabley ruined."

--Patrick Henry, Virginia's U.S. Constitution ratification convention, June 5,1788

Do you really believe that's what the Second Amendment means?

I really believe I know why it says it:

"Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."

--Tench Coxe, Federal Gazette, June 18,1789, writing in support of the Madison's first draft of the Bill of Rights

357 posted on 03/30/2007 8:57:09 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

There's a very strange mentality about the second amendment flying around here. You seem to really believe that you posssess a personal right of rebellion, and a personal right to have unlimited firepower so as to be able to take on the US Army itself. And you think this right is enshrined in the Constitution. It isn't, and nobody who wrote the Constitution thought there was any such right, and nobody who has made or interpreted law since thinks there is either.

John Adams:

"To suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self-defense, or by partial orders of towns, countries or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government. The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws."
--John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States 3:475 (1787-1788)

James Madison, considered to be the Father of the Constitution, and the primary author of the Bill of Rights:

"The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for the common liberties and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.
--James Madison, Federalist No. 46, 1788

Patrick Henry:

"My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights or of waging war against tyrants."
--Patrick Henry, Virginia's U.S. Constitution ratification convention, June 5,1788

Thomas Jefferson

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms. . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774-1776

The Federalst Papers:

"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
Publius, Federalst Papers No. 51 Feb.8, 1788

Tenche Cox [supporting Madison's Bill of Rights]

"Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."
--Tench Coxe, Federal Gazette, June 18,1789, writing in support of the Madison's first draft of the Bill of Rights

358 posted on 03/30/2007 9:12:19 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

"So, you figure that since such weapons of mass destruction weren't forbidden under the Constitution and being in uses far predating that document, you've got no problem with my fixing up a couple of thousand kilograms of Nitrogen Mustard? It's easy to do, and Thiodiglycol is easily available and inexpensive."

No, I figure that "the right to keep and bear arms" always meant "the right to have guns", then and now, and never meant the right to have germ bombs and worse. The smallpox blankets were used by the army, but INDIVIDUALS with smallpox were forcibly quarantined.

I keep circling back to this critical point. The right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited. No right is, was or can be. Speech was never unlimited, and those limitations didn't infringe "freedom of speech", because "Freedom of Speech" is a term of art referring to the freedom of political and responsible public speech. There never was a freedom to speak fraud, and state and federal laws against Fraud do not violate the Constitution. Likewise, the right to keep and bear arms meant guns (and swords). It didn't mean the right to have the ability to infect everybody with smallpox. It didn't mean the right to have a private army. There never was any right to maintain private armies. It doesn't today mean the right to have mass casualty weapons.

The right is not infringed by stating that things that are not encompassed within the right are not in it.

This is the fault line where all discussion breaks down, I guess. You are just going to keep on asserting, I guess, that because some generals sent smallpox to the Indians that YOU have the uninfringable right to have an anthrax bomb in your basement if you want to. You do not. If you have one in your basement, you're a criminal. People who have guns want them for defense. Nobody has WMD for defense. They have them because they are terrorists with evil intent, by definition. The right to keep and bear arms does not mean the right to amass the tools of terrorism until the very moment that you use them. Tim McVeigh and company had the right to have guns. They had the right to have fertilizer. There is no right in the Second Amendment to take vast quantities of fertilizer, load it into a U-Haul, and make of it a rolling bomb. None. It was illegal to form the plan to do it, illegal to amass the material to do it. Illegal to make it. And, of course, illegal to use it. The treason was not simply detonating the bomb. It was having the first meeting where it was discussed how to get the materials to strike at the government, and making the first purchase of the first bag of fertilizer. You have the right to have fertilizer. You're a conspirator in treason, unprotected by the Second Amendment, if you and a buddy bought that fertilizer in order to make a bomb to go attack the government. You do not have the right to do that, nor to take the steps to do it.

This should be obvious. But amazingly, you think you DO have the right to have a fertilizer bomb so long as you don't use it. You won't back away from the proposition. You assert that the 2nd Amendment means that.
No, it doesn't.
Not now.
Not in 1789.
Not at any point in between.
When one takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, including the 2nd Amendment, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, one is taking an oath to root out and destroy anybody who is building WMD in his basement. They're terrorists, domestic enemies of the USA. Seeking weapons like that isn't PROTECTED by the Constitution, it's de facto treason, seeking to make war against the United States.

359 posted on 03/30/2007 9:17:09 AM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)

If, instead, you've got to suggest that folks who say what I do are somehow traitors to freedom, or ignorant of what the 2nd Amendment means, you end up damaging the argument for gun rights.

Per above: "Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitabley ruined."
--Patrick Henry, Virginia's U.S. Constitution ratification convention, June 5,1788

Gun rights are not unlimited rights.

The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people."
--Fisher Ames, Letter to F.R. Minoe, June 12, 1789

inherent; involved in the constitution or essential character of something : belonging by nature or habit : INTRINSIC

360 posted on 03/30/2007 9:20:21 AM PDT by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])

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