Posted on 03/14/2003 5:35:36 PM PST by Pitchfork
In the March 11 New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar notes in passing, "Most Iraqi households own at least one gun." This comes as a shock to those of us who've been hearing for years from the gun lobby that widespread firearms ownership is necessary to prevent the United States from becoming a police state. Here, via the National Rifle Association's Web site, is Bill Pryor, attorney general of Alabama, decrying the "war on guns": "In a republic that promotes a free society, as opposed to a police state, one of the basic organizing principles is that individuals have a right of self-defense and a right to acquire the means for that defense." The basic Jeffersonian idea is that you never know when you'll need to organize a militia against your government. In director John Milius' camp Cold War classic Red Dawn, Russians and Nicaraguan commies take over the United States in part by throwing gun owners in jail. In one memorable scene, the camera pans from a bumper sticker that says "You'll Take My Gun Away When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Fingers" to a Russian soldier prying a gun from the car owner's … you get the idea.
The obvious question raised by MacFarquhar's piece is how Iraq got to be, and remains, one of the world's most repressive police states when just about everyone is packing heat. Chatterbox invites gun advocates (and Iraq experts) to e-mail (to chatterbox@slate.com) plausible reasons. The best of these will be examined in a follow-up item.
That's absolutely true. Look at the action in the Senate, where the minority tyrant party is livid about the appointment of judges that will only be fair, stick to what the legislature has passed and ground their rulings in reality. Their opposition to any Iraq action is based almost entirely on the probability of it's success and that the success was grounded in good old fashioned principle.
Get this straight, friend:
My rights are not subject to your cost-benefit analysis.
The day you actually have a chance to change this is the day you get to see exactly how horribly wrong you are in your assumptions about a bunch of common citizens taking on a modern army. I guess your insufferable "intellect" won't be troubled by the "coincidence" that a civil war had to be waged for you to finally get a clue.
Iraq has a vested interest in who has guns, and who does not.
If you know who has a gun, and you know who supports you, and who does not, you can confiscate the guns of those who do not support you.
Even if you do not know who supports you, and who does not, you can simply check the registry, and confiscate all guns that are registered. Why guess?
If you do NOT have a registry, you do not know who has guns and who does not, so you cannot confiscate them, and you are more leary of performing an action that oppresses your people.
Unregistered gun ownership is a good thing in a free society.
Washi
p.s. You are a troll
I missed this bit. Gunners don't want any data collection? That seems odd, since in the last 10 years the data has been the gunners friend. Yep, it suprised me too a bit. Sometimes one's intuition as to how things will play out is proven wrong. When that happens, some of us adjust our opinions. Others simply have too much cultural iconic baggage to allow data to influence their opinions. That is understandable, but in an honest debate, it should be acknowledged.
Later! ;-P
But those are the only ones you respond to. You have no arguments, only your gun control agenda.
Your an idiot, or a liar. British forces were already on American soil.
You have been asking for a cost benefit discussion; so here goes.
Cost Benefit Analysis - Personal to CC
| Cost | Benefit |
| Glock 29 - $600.00 Bullet - $.50 |
One dead criminal Breaking into my home. |
My anaysis comes out overwhelmingly in favor of individual gun ownership.
You asked to be enlightened... well, the Senate aswered your question, in the link I provided you in post 204... and the criminals are those in the BATF, by the Senate's own admission!!! Ready?
The mid-1970's saw rapid increases in sugar prices, and these in turn drove the bulk of the "moonshiners" out of business. Over 15,000 illegal distilleries had been raided in 1956; but by 1976 this had fallen to a mere 609. The BATF thus began to devote the bulk of its efforts to the area of firearms law enforcement.
Complaint regarding the techniques used by the Bureau in an effort to generate firearms cases led to hearings before the Subcommittee on Treasury, Post Office, and General Appropriations of the Senate Appropriations Committee in July 1979 and April 1980, and before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1980. At these hearings evidence was received from various citizens who had been charged by BATF, from experts who had studied the BATF, and from officials of the Bureau itself.
Based upon these hearings, it is apparent that enforcement tactics made possible by current federal firearms laws are constitutionally, legally, and practically reprehensible. Although Congress adopted the Gun Control Act with the primary object of limiting access of felons and high-risk groups to firearms, the overbreadth of the law has led to neglect of precisely this area of enforcement. For example the Subcommittee on the Constitution received correspondence from two members of the Illinois Judiciary, dated in 1980, indicating that they had been totally unable to persuade BATF to accept cases against felons who were in possession of firearms including sawed-off shotguns. The Bureau's own figures demonstrate that in recent years the percentage of its arrests devoted to felons in possession and persons knowingly selling to them have dropped from 14 percent down to 10 percent of their firearms cases. To be sure, genuine criminals are sometimes prosecuted under other sections of the law. Yet, subsequent to these hearings, BATF stated that 55 percent of its gun law prosecutions overall involve persons with no record of a felony conviction, and a third involve citizens with no prior police contact at all.
The Subcommittee received evidence that the BATF has primarily devoted its firearms enforcement efforts to the apprehension, upon technical malum prohibitum charges, of individuals who lack all criminal intent and knowledge. Agents anxious to generate an impressive arrest and gun confiscation quota have repeatedly enticed gun collectors into making a small number of sales — often as few as four — from their personal collections. Although each of the sales was completely legal under state and federal law, the agents then charged the collector with having "engaged in the business" of dealing in guns without the required license. Since existing law permits a felony conviction upon these charges even where the individual has no criminal knowledge or intent numerous collectors have been ruined by a felony record carrying a potential sentence of five years in federal prison. Even in cases where the collectors secured acquittal, or grand juries failed to indict, or prosecutors refused to file criminal charges, agents of the Bureau have generally confiscated the entire collection of the potential defendant upon the ground that he intended to use it in that violation of the law. In several cases, the agents have refused to return the collection even after acquittal by jury.
Good enough for ya?
ROFLMAO!!! Great Britain projected that power the entire world over and virtually conquered the planet!!! Remember the phrase, "The sun never sets on the British Empire"??? There's a REASON that phrase came about, and it was BECAUSE of their ability to project that power, and overcome numerical disadvantages! (Ever hear of India, Africa, or China?) LORD, you're sadly lacking in the fundamentals of history. You're getting spanked by a MATH teacher in history lessons!
I shouldn't even respond to posts like yours.
That's because you can't refute history, and you're having a hard time even recalling much of it.
It un-ambiguity is quite clear to most gun owners. - Thus, the USSC will decide it is an individual right, but they will ~try~ to claim it can be 'regulated' to the point of prohibition.
Regarding the NRA's jewel in the crown, the word "keep," some read "keep and bear" conjunctively, rather than disjuntively. Even if read disjunctively, Garry Wills in his book "A Necessary Evil," wrote thusly: "The private ownership schoold cotinues to think that plural "arms" means nothing but a singular "gun" for each individual, that every militiaman has his own gun, and that 'keep arms' would be restricted to storing the gun at home.
Idioic logic. I've never heard of such a "school". You admire this Gary Wills for writing this?
If the Congress had meant anything so outlandish, it could with greate verbal economy have said 'keep at home and bear ... .' But it would have collapsed with laughter at its own absurdity. The militias had common stores of arms - not only guns but bayonets, artillery, ammunition, flags, drums, and all the arma (equipage) of war."
Some colonial militas did, some didn't. Wills' ridicule is absurd as his 'facts'.
"History, philology, and logic furnish no solid basis for thinking the Second Amendment has anything to do with the private ownership of guns." The dirty little secret frankly, is that no one really knows what the 2nd Amendment text means exactly, or was meant to mean. Thus SCOTUS has wide latitude here. And there you have it. 134
- "Long legal tomes have been written", as you said. And the dirty little legal secret is, - they don't matter.
The USSC court will never willingly outright deny the individual RKBA's.
They, and all levels of government, will continue to pettifog the issue in hopes that the right can be regulated to death.
---- the Bill of Rights is more about restricting federal power than individual rights per se,
Belied by the words of the Bill themselves. This specious argument is just a way to assert that states can infringe upon the BOR's. Pitiful.
and one thing about the 2nd Amendment that is largely agreed is that it guaranteed the states the right to maintain armed militias. The anti-federalists were concerned about a standing federal army, and the compromise was to say OK, the states can keep their own armed militias as well, so that there is not a monopoly of power residing with the feds.
Directly contradicted by the 14th, which was in part ratified to restore the RKBA's to ex-slaves. The 1868 hearings clearly restate that the right is individual, and always was.
Your personal objection to the right is curious. Are you afraid of the armed citizen?
As long as the common man has the same basic weapon as the foot-soldier in the modern army, the private citizens can easily win. When asked about invading America, Admiral Yamamoto recognized the impossibility of the idea, saying "There is a marksman behind every blade of grass." Heck, look at it this way. I just today bought a beautiful .300 win mag rifle. There are 25 million others like me in America, with experience hunting 500 lb animals whose senses are far sharper than any foot-soldiers. At 25 million, we outnumber the militaries of China, America, and Russia... combined... by a 5-to-1 margin!! Now, since it's most likely that only ONE of those will be taking on these farmers and hunters, the advantage is really closer to 20-to-1, and few militaries in the world would ever try to overcome odds like that.
THAT is our security, and THAT is why you gun-grabbing nitwits will NEVER win here. We KNOW what you want, and we KNOW what it leads to... and we'll DIE before letting you do it. Got it? Now impute THAT into your cost-benefit analysis of my rights and see where the numbers wind up.
(By the way, will you also be running a similar analysis on reinstituting slavery? The NAACP would like to know if this cost-benefit subjugation of rights is going to catch on.)
That's what it always comes down to with liberals, isn't it? Agressively punish those you disagree with, even though they have committed no crime. Well, you should be happy to note that we already have that "aggressive enforcement", pal. Re-read the Senate's conclusions in post #231... and remember that it was written before Janet Reno barbecued 24 children over a $200 tax and before Lon Horiuchi assassinated a mother holding her infant because her husband may have had a gun that was 1/8 inch too short for some bureaucrat.
THAT is the "aggressive enforcement" we already have, and apparently it isn't even enough for you. Simply amazing! Just how far do you want them to go??
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