So any restriction on your "freedom" is bad?
I think your idea of freedom is actually unrestricted license and that is not a Constitutional guarantee.
As Belial pointed out when do we allow the general public to own "shoulder-held SAM launchers"?
Nevermind that these firearms can bring down an airliner.
Heh! We need our "freedoms"![translated unrestricted license]
I have a hard time attributing that as a Founding Father principle.
Here we go again. "Do you think we should all be able to own nukes? What about MOABs?" Sigh...
There's no rational person in the RKBA community that says we should be able to own NBC weapons, or shoulder-fired missiles. The purpose of the 2d Amendment is that the citizenry will always have the right to militia weapons, with which to resist any tyrannical government that comes down the pike. Militia weapons are individual arms, like the Brown Bess musket in 1775 (don't forget, today is Patriots' Day...228 years to the day saince Captain Parker and his militia fired the Shot Heard Round the World), and the M16 today. They are wepons with which the individual minuteman could stand a chance of defending his life, liberty and property from the schemes of a tyrant, and his army.
I would like to discuss with you my thoughts on how such a hypothetical revolutionary force would come into more advanced weapons such as air-to-air missiles and tanks, but that would be feeding the rabid anti-gun monster that has been prowling these threads for the last week. Suffice to say that we in the RKBA community recognize that the 2d Amendment doesn't give us the right to go duck hunting with a Stinger missile, or fishing with grenades.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Is this meant as a distraction? A diversion? Are you attempting to cloud this issue? SAM launchers? LOL! Get real......Again, we are talking about semi automatic rifles here. Not nuclear weapons and SAMS.
JEZZZZZZ.
Useing that SAM to shoot down an airliner, would be exercising unrestricted license, not merely owning the SAM. BTW shooting down an airliner can also be done by a good shot stationed near the end of the runway with a "varmit" gun, simply by shooting the pilot at a critical time, on takeoff or landing. A helicopter is even easier, because the move more slowly, thus are easier to hit, and are much less stable. Airliners have also been known to be brought down by 4 or 5 guys with boxcutters and a fake bomb belt. Of course if ordinary citizens had been armed on those planes, epecially the flight deck crew, the WTC would likely still be standing and 3000 of our fellow citizens would have been spared a horrible death. Government, in it's infinite wisdom, guaranteed there would be no one armed on that aircraft, except for the miniscule chance that there might be a Sky Marshal on board. That ban on armed flight crews is even younger than the machine gun "ban", in the 50s it was not all that unusual for the pilots to be armed, and the disarming was done by regulation, not by a change in the law, AFAIK.
Freedom is a somewhat nebulous term, but a violation a provision of the highest law of the land, designed to restrict what the government can do, is definitely a bad thing.