@AndyPostOur gun laws are looser now than they were in the old West.
As they should be. I presume by the ‘Old West’ you mean California. California has never had a state-level constitutional right to bear arms, and unlike much of the Bill of Rights the Second Amendment has never been fully or properly incorporated. as such, the state of California had the right to restrict gun ownership. whereas Wisconsin’s constitution says this: “The people have the right to keep and bear arms for security, defense, hunting, recreation or any other lawful purpose.” the only states which can legally restrict the ownership of weapons, or at least could with impunity before DC vs Heller, are California, Iowa, Minnesota, Maryland, new Jersey and new York.
@DavidHI’m as libertarian as anybody when it comes to an individual’s choice of life-style but carrying a killing machine does not fit in that category for me…
Then you’re not a libertarian. I am sick of ‘I’m a libertarian, BUT..’ comments. Frankly, guns are of paramount importance in any debate over the role of government. they fundamentally define the relationship between the citizen and the state. If the government which you employ don’t ‘trust’ you with weapons, then they have inverted the system. the government is created by people, not the other way around. further, I can’t imagine looking at the history of the twentieth century and concluding that the citizens, not the state, needs to be disarmed/emasculated.
@KY_RedI’m English and live in the US and guns are an integral part of the culture here I’m afraid. they aren’t needed and they are dangerous but the right to bear arms apparently trumps everything else…
Yes. God forbid that a constitutional republic should obey its constitution.
@squirrelist[re: the Second Amendment] very careless drafting, seems to me.
Nothing of the sort. the Second Amendment was drafted very carefully by James Madison to ensure that the federal government respected a pre-existing and accepted right, one which was already entrenched either explicity in the state constitutions of the signatories or by existing British laws (i.e. the 1689 Bill of Rights) maintained in the new world, as new Jersey’s constitution stated: ‘the common law of England, as well as so much of the statute law, as have been heretofore practiced in this Colony, shall still remain in force’..
@Zed1207“The right to Bear Arms” is a phrase used in the Second Ammendment, which was written over 200 years ago. at that time the phrase did not mean the right to literally carry a weapon. in all contexts, and it’s been used in other documents, this “Right” means the right to join a local militia/enroll in the army. Words and phrases commonly shift in meaning over time.
No. You may fool the majority of people on here who desperately want to believe that, but not those who have studied this in detail.
Try reading Tench Coxe’s ‘Remarks on the first Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution’ which was such an accurate explanation of James Madison’s intent that he wrote him a letter thanking him and endorsing the work. it supported the Second Amendment as protecting from interference the people’s “right to keep and bear their private arms against civil rulers and military forces which might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens”, and built on his earlier article in the Federal Gazette, again endorsed and used by Madison when drafting the amendment: “swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American…the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of the Federal or state governments but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.’ These words prompted Madison to write Coxe a letter, commenting that the amendment process would ‘be greatly favored by explanatory strictures of a healing tendency, and is therefore already indebted to the co-operation of your pen.’ it seems unlikely that Madison would have, prior to its ratification, endorsed an opinion which misinterpreted an amendment he had written himself.
Wiggle out of that one.
mitty_wYou are more likely to be safe if you AND the criminal are unarmed.
Not that this is relevant because the Second Amendment does not rely on utilitarian fact – it’s a right – but at no point in the history of human civilisation has taking away weapons from law-abiding people effected a situation where both they, and the criminals, were unarmed.
