Gun Control

[Arctic Daishi]

Your argument is underwhelming. If you want to change my views - which are still 'evolving' you'll have to support your position with assertions, evidence, deductions, inductions, and also offer refutations of many of the reasons in favor of supporting restricted access to firearms.

There are no reasons favoring restricted access to firearms. I just sent you a series of private messages that come from an 14 page essay I wrote on the subject a while back. It was too big to post on the forums, or send in a single private message, my apologies. It covers all of the bases, from Second Amendment case law to crime statistics from both the United States and other countries, both before and after draconian gun control laws were implemented.

 

[Arctic Daishi]

The problem is people will only be rehabilitated if they want to, so you cannot really blame the prison system. Yes it could do better, but if you really want to reduce crime then reduce the poverty level and the gap between rich and poor.

You will always have people who will continue to commit crimes no matter how hard you try to rehabilitate them; to give them easy access to guns is therefore simply illogical.

And as for giving access to all weapons, that would be fine if people did not abuse the privilage. The problem with the argument for unrestricted rights of any kind is that it ignores human nature.

Perhaps some form of compromise, such as a waiting period of X amount of years, before ex-convicts can own firearms again. Or perhaps only non-violent criminals?

 

[Formaldehyde]

The "draconian gun control" laws insisted upon by the likes of the NRA and Ronald Reagan, and even implemented by the founding fathers?

The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.

While the two sides disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment, they share a similar view of the right to bear arms: both see such a right as fundamentally inconsistent with gun control, and believe we must choose one or the other. Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service.

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.

THE PANTHERS’ METHODS provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.

INDISPUTABLY, FOR MUCH of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932 Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

A GROWING GROUP OF rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.

Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home. They also shared a profound mistrust of law enforcement. (For years, the NRA has demonized government agents, like those in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency that enforces gun laws, as “jack-booted government thugs.” Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.&#8221 For both the Panthers in 1967 and the new NRA after 1977, law-enforcement officers were too often representatives of an uncaring government bent on disarming ordinary citizens.

IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should

be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

 

[peter grimes]

There are no reasons favoring restricted access to firearms. I just sent you a series of private messages that come from an 14 page essay I wrote on the subject a while back. It was too big to post on the forums, or send in a single private message, my apologies. It covers all of the bases, from Second Amendment case law to crime statistics from both the United States and other countries, both before and after draconian gun control laws were implemented.

I see the PMs in my inbox, and I won't comment further on your posts until I've taken the time to read them thoroughly. Thanks for taking the time to split the essay into separate PMs - I know how annoying that can be

But please understand if I continue to comment on other posts in the meantime. I don't always have 30 minutes at a time to think about this forum

 

[Farm Boy]

Hai Arctic, I don't believe we've had the pleasure of conversing. I won't have 30 minutes to read a 14 page paper, but could you break out for me in the kiddy version why you think that weapons designed around squad based warfare, area level sustained supression fire, high powered explosives, tanks, and possibly even tactical weapons should be available for private rather than communal response? Privitized warlords counterbalancing or even overriding state and federal government will in open conflict is about the only thing that's springing to mind for me. Is that it or something else?

 

[Formaldehyde]

I'm dying to hear all about how draconian gun control measures implemented well over 200 years ago by our founding fathers, as well as those from the early and middle 20th Century largely in reaction to blacks getting access to firearms, have affected Second Amendment case law and crime. It should be quite interesting.

 

[MobBoss]

Having studied the data and case law in depth, I'm absolutely opposed to all forms of gun control.

Ya had me.....

The people should be able to buy all guns, including a M72 rocket launcher.

Then ya lost me.

An M72 Rocket launcher isn't a 'gun'. Sorry.

 

[Agent327]

I'm afraid we're in agreement, MB...

Combine this:

The people should be able to buy all guns, including a M72 rocket launcher.

with this:

There are no reasons favoring restricted access to firearms.

and I think you have a reason for gun control...

(And it still revolves around people simply being too stupid to be allowed unlimited gun access - something which, by the way, most countries think rather obvious. Not too mention, ofcourse, that despite all the yada yada concerning the 2nd Amendment, the US already have a tradition of implementing gun laws. Precedence, precdence.)

Someone actually made a good comparison: cars. In order to be able to legally drive a car, you need to pass both a theoretical and a practical exam (and ofcourse, if you mess up enough your license may be suspended or even revoked). But not guns. No such cautionary law exists for gun ownership. You'd think US citizens consider guns to be the adult equivalent of toys. It's easier to get a gun than a pack of smokes and enjoy it.

 

[Quackers]

I shall ignore this bit of hypocrisy from you and instead ask this:

Do YOU have any personal experience with taking anti-depressents or anti-psychotics? Well i do, not only that but i understand the reason why they are used and it's a sure sign that someone doesn't know what the hell they're talking about if they're putting forward the idea that either could cause someone to descend into a murdering rampage.

These drugs are meant to help and i find it incredibly bizarre that you think anti-psychotics, which are meant to help people with condition such as schizophrenia, could cause such a massacre.

Everytime you hear of a mass shooting 9 times out of 10 the perpetrator is taking some type of medicine for a mental health condition. You hear about the shooting, you hear about the capture of the criminal and than a week later it comes out he was taking X, Y + Z for some of these conditions.

This type of thing should be investigated by scientists rather than you shouting at Ghostwriter in some hysterial tiff.

 

[Borachio]

You need to read up on Feudal England. Sounds like your type of dream-world.

Ha! I thought under feudalism all land is owned by the crown, and the use of it arbitrarily granted (and retracted on whim) to those in favour, who in turn assign it to others, and so on down the line to the final producer.

Rather than being the dream of private property it was the statist's utopia.

Or so it seems to me.

The lord holds the fief and grants it to the vassal. With the king as the supreme head of the chain.

Of course, the system never actually existed quite like that anywhere.

 

[El_Machinae]

In fairness, our mental health system is a mess and it's drastically underfunded. The current medications are square pegs being jammed into all kinds of holes. Now, imo, mental illness probably correlates with gun-related hysterical media reports pretty strongly, but I think it's our weakness in dealing with mental illness that's the main issue.

The NRA should start a research-funding wing.

 

[Arctic Daishi]

The "draconian gun control" laws insisted upon by the likes of the NRA and Ronald Reagan, and even implemented by the founding fathers?

Reagan went back and forth on the issue, though I don't really care, I'm not much of a Reaganite. The Founding Fathers disarmed British loyalists who they were actively engaged in a military conflict with; we do the same thing today when we disarm Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. The NRA during the time you mentioned was a professional competition shooting organization, not a grassroots populist gun rights organization. As you said yourself, the organization changed over the years, rebranding itself from an organization that represents elite competition shooters, to an organization that represents your average American gun owner.

I see the PMs in my inbox, and I won't comment further on your posts until I've taken the time to read them thoroughly. Thanks for taking the time to split the essay into separate PMs - I know how annoying that can be

But please understand if I continue to comment on other posts in the meantime. I don't always have 30 minutes at a time to think about this forum

You don't have to read it if you don't want to, it was just something I wrote up a long time ago to be an "end all, be all" to claims made by the gun control lobby. Luckily it wasn't too annoying, as I managed to fit it into two private messages and the waiting time on these boards isn't very long (20 seconds?).

Hai Arctic, I don't believe we've had the pleasure of conversing. I won't have 30 minutes to read a 14 page paper, but could you break out for me in the kiddy version why you think that weapons designed around squad based warfare, area level sustained supression fire, high powered explosives, tanks, and possibly even tactical weapons should be available for private rather than communal response? Privitized warlords counterbalancing or even overriding state and federal government will in open conflict is about the only thing that's springing to mind for me. Is that it or something else?

Well for starters, the guns you're referring to have been heavily regulated since the 1930s and were effectively banned (with few exceptions) in the 1980s. The guns that the gun control lobby are trying to ban now are not fully automatic, nor military weapons. They are civilian semi-automatic and bolt-action rifles, and the gun control lobby openly admits they are trying to deceive the public by calling them "assault weapons" and using phrases like "a hundred rounds a second" and "VRRM VRRM VRRM," and "war weapons." I'm not saying that you're referring to those particular civilian semi-automatics and bolt-action rifles, I'm merely pointing out the difference so that other people who happen to read this can understand the difference.

To answer your question, I believe the people have the right to own such weapons, for the very reason the Founding Fathers supported the right of the people to own such weapons, defense against government. The Second Amendment isn't about hunting, self-defense or target shooting; the Second Amendment is about defense against tyranny. The people should be every bit as well armed, and as well trained, as the government.

I'm dying to hear all about how draconian gun control measures implemented well over 200 years ago by our founding fathers, as well as those from the early and middle 20th Century largely in reaction to blacks getting access to firearms, have affected Second Amendment case law and crime. It should be quite interesting.

As I stated above, the Founding Fathers supported disarming the British loyalists, whom they were actively engaged in a war against. It should be noted that the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government in the early and mid 19th century. It wasn't until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 that the Bill of Rights applied to state and local governments.

The issue of Democrats disarming blacks was one of the main reasons the Fourteenth Amendment was created to begin with, so that the blacks would be able to exercise their right to bear arms, which was being infringed upon by white Democrats. Unfortunately for the civil rights movement, however, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank ruled in 1876 that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to the federal government, not to state and local governments. This allowed southern Democrats to continue their policies of limiting the freedom of speech, right to assembly and right to bear arms of newly freed African Americans. Over the years, the United States v. Cruikshank ruling was largely ignored by both lower courts and the Supreme Court and the ruling was never enforced. United States v. Cruikshank was formally overruled by McDonald v. Chicago.

An M72 Rocket launcher isn't a 'gun'. Sorry.

It's the right to bear arms, not the right to bear guns.

Rather than trying to score political points over semantics, perhaps you should try engaging in an actual discussion?

 

[peter grimes]

Ha! I thought under feudalism all land is owned by the crown, and the use of it arbitrarily granted (and retracted on whim) to those in favour, who in turn assign it to others, and so on down the line to the final producer.

Rather than being the dream of private property it was the statist's utopia.

Or so it seems to me.

The lord holds the fief and grants it to the vassal. With the king as the supreme head of the chain.

Of course, the system never actually existed quite like that anywhere.

"King, eh? well I didn't vote for you!"

I don't recognize the crown as a valid government - I consider all royal holdings to be private property.

Of course, I'm totally talking out my butt here

 

[peter grimes]

To answer your question, I believe the people have the right to own such weapons, for the very reason the Founding Fathers supported the right of the people to own such weapons, defense against government. The Second Amendment isn't about hunting, self-defense or target shooting; the Second Amendment is about defense against tyranny. The people should be every bit as well armed, and as well trained, as the government.

*cough* Well-regulated *cough*

 

[Farm Boy]

Well for starters, the guns you're referring to have been heavily regulated since the 1930s and were effectively banned (with few exceptions) in the 1980s. The guns that the gun control lobby are trying to ban now are not fully automatic, nor military weapons. They are civilian semi-automatic and bolt-action rifles, and the gun control lobby openly admits they are trying to deceive the public by calling them "assault weapons" and using phrases like "a hundred rounds a second" and "VRRM VRRM VRRM," and "war weapons." I'm not saying that you're referring to those particular civilian semi-automatics and bolt-action rifles, I'm merely pointing out the difference so that other people who happen to read this can understand the difference.

To answer your question, I believe the people have the right to own such weapons, for the very reason the Founding Fathers supported the right of the people to own such weapons, defense against government. The Second Amendment isn't about hunting, self-defense or target shooting; the Second Amendment is about defense against tyranny. The people should be every bit as well armed, and as well trained, as the government.

I'm not a gun nut, but yes, I'm generally conversant in different types of weaponry. I do mix up terminology when I'm not careful but generally you aren't going to have to get too into detail for me on what a semi-automatic, a military issue, or a converted military issue gun is for me unless you want to. Info never hurts.

To get back to the main point though - your argument would indeed say that strategic nuclear missiles should be legal to be privately owned by US citizens? I'm just trying to make sure that I'm actually understanding that correctly.

 

[Arctic Daishi]

So this argument would indeed say that strategic nuclear missiles should be legal to be privately owned by US citizens?

Sure, why not?

 

[Farm Boy]

Sure, why not?

I don't actually know where to start, would a conversation regarding nuclear proliferation be grossly out of place?

 

[Arctic Daishi]

*cough* Well-regulated *cough*

Which had always referred to requiring every citizen to undergo mandatory military training, which was the case until 1903. To quote United States v. Miller:

These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense

 

[peter grimes]

Which had always referred to requiring every citizen to undergo mandatory military training, which was the case until 1903. To quote United States v. Miller:

So... mandatory military service for all women and men?

 

[Agent327]

Reagan went back and forth on the issue, though I don't really care, I'm not much of a Reaganite. The Founding Fathers disarmed British loyalists who they were actively engaged in a military conflict with; we do the same thing today when we disarm Taliban and al-Qaeda forces.

Bit of confusion here: those British loyalist were actually fellow colonists who didn't agree with the independence movement. (The comparison with al Qaeda and Taliban forces falls a bit through here.)

Well for starters, the guns you're referring to have been heavily regulated since the 1930s and were effectively banned (with few exceptions) in the 1980s. The guns that the gun control lobby are trying to ban now are not fully automatic, nor military weapons. They are civilian semi-automatic and bolt-action rifles, and the gun control lobby openly admits they are trying to deceive the public by calling them "assault weapons" and using phrases like "a hundred rounds a second" and "VRRM VRRM VRRM," and "war weapons." I'm not saying that you're referring to those particular civilian semi-automatics and bolt-action rifles, I'm merely pointing out the difference so that other people who happen to read this can understand the difference.

For starters, gun regulation starts with the 2nd Amendment, obviously. (Seeing as the 13 colonies were effectively without an army, all they could put together was militia - which they were anxious to keep regulated, for obvious reasons.)

To answer your question, I believe the people have the right to own such weapons, for the very reason the Founding Fathers supported the right of the people to own such weapons, defense against government. The Second Amendment isn't about hunting, self-defense or target shooting; the Second Amendment is about defense against tyranny. The people should be every bit as well armed, and as well trained, as the government.

Seriously? The tyranny in question was the British government, I'm sure you are aware.

It's the right to bear arms, not the right to bear guns.

Your interpretation is a bit far-fetched, I'm sure you know, having studied carious cases.

Rather than trying to score political points over semantics, perhaps you should try engaging in an actual discussion?

Indeed.