SubscribeOne could spend hours proving how it has relevance today, but there's no need to bother as your assertion, whether true or not, is utterly meaningless. We do not "outgrow" the United States Constitution. The rules therein remain the rules until the day they are repealed by other Constitutional amendments. Slavery would still be legal today if the 13th Amendment had not been enacted, even though we'd all be just as aware of how evil slavery is.
IMHO, the American gun lobby has the blood of countless thousands on its collective shoulders.
This is nothing but inflammatory rhetoric, and adds nothing to any logical debate.
I can understand, though, that a Texan would read "gun safety" as "gun confiscation". It's just a few letters different.
In·cre·men·tal·ism n. Social or political gradualism. The whole idea is to do it a little bit at a time. First gun safety locks. Then what that is "proven" not to reduce gun deaths, more stringent "safety" laws will be enacted. When those are shown not to have worked, more limitations. Etc. Until they finally get around to forcing national gun registration. And in every country that has instituted gun registration, those registration rolls were eventually used to to easily institute national gun confiscation. Except for Canada, anyway, and they're only just now starting the forced registrations. It'll be a few years yet in their case. (Many gun control groups admit that this is their general plan of action, though of course they don't go out of their way to publicize that fact.)
And if your constitution goes the wrong way on these issues, fix the damned constitution. If you can't fix it, defy it. It's a piece of paper that's supposed to reflect what is right, not a piece of paper that magically makes things right.
This is exactly why liberalism is so dangerous. Don't like the law, even the ones that form the most basic rules of our society? Don't think it fits your own personal desires on what ought to be? IGNORE IT! Taken to its logical conclusion, this is an argument for anarchy, or at least ochlocracy.
Personally i find that a terrifying statistic, that's 274 times the average of those 25 countries...
The number also includes gang members, kids selling illegal drugs, all sorts of inner-city violence by kids intent on committing violent acts, etc. ... all kids who, unfortunately, almost certainly would have been killed by some other means if a gun hadn't been handy at the time. And if the other industrialized countries have confiscated all their citizens guns and have taken away enough of their citizens' privacy rights to allow the police to rampage anywhere anytime looking for stuff they don't like, then the sample is bad and the stats meaningless. I mean, I'll bet the number of US women who die in car accidents is astronomically higher than the number of Afghani women that suffer the same fate. But that's because women in Afghanistan are barely allowed to leave their homes, and usually aren't allowed to drive anyway. (And, just to show you that every action has consequences, even though Afghan women no longer have to worry about auto accidents much since the Taliban came to power, more of them are dying now that ever because they're all so depressed they're committing suicide. Likewise, draconian gun control here would only mean more people would start being killed in other ways.)
I would think revolution would be one hell of an amendment, but will the revolutionaries be armed?
Exactly. You can forget about there ever being any revolution in the UK, unless somebody gets hold of a number of nuclear bombs, because the people have no means of fighting against those who do have guns, lots and lots and lots of guns: the government. No matter how tyrannical the UK may someday become, the citizens are screwed because they willing gave up all their weapons a long time ago. By the time any such real tyanny evolved, most UK citizens will have completely forgotten that they ever had such a right at any point in their history. Likewise, note well Tienanmen Square. No guns? Then no democracy for you, kids. ::insert sound of tank squashing student here::
Remember: There's no such thing as a gun-free society, only gun-free-except-for-the-rulers societies.
Is the King of England going to bust into your house and oppress you? No ... Folks, times have changed.
Yes. And they will change again. Which means there's zilch of a guarantee that the King of England will never ever again try to bust into your house and oppress you. Or, more likely, your own leaders. People laugh at the idea of guns as protection against tyranny, because they think the human race has somehow wiped that possibility off the face of the earth forever. Which, of course, is crap. It will come up again eventually, somehow, somewhere. And when it does, the only hope the citizens of that place will have to overthrow the corrupt government is mass gun ownership.
WRT United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875): Left out of the above is that the SC ruled the right to bear arms was not itself granted by the 2nd Amendment because the right to bear arms is an inalienable right, and thus the 2nd is only making it clear that Congress can't screw with that right. None of this matters much anyway since Cruikshank has only the faintest relevance to constitutional law these days; it's been supplanted by newer case law many many times over the years for a myriad of non-2nd-related reasons.
As for Miller, which is the only time the Court has ever really taken on the actual question of whether the 2nd prevents the Feds from regulating guns in any fashion: That case was a slam dunk for anti-gun judicial activism, because Miller and his codefendent had long since disappeared (many think they were already dead), and the Feds just shoved the case all the way up the line with ease because there was nobody playing defense. The Supremes thus just gave them what they wanted. However, those who live by judicial activism die by judicial activism, as liberals have seen in the last few years as they've lost power and more conservative judges have come on board. They created a monster, and now they're coming to regret it, since laws that exist only because of the courts can be taken away in an instant by a new decision. And, amusingly, Democrats are now, very slowly as always, investigating whether or not to drop judicial activism as their main political tool because it created such a house of cards that's about to fall down.
One last thing: As I brought up in another thread recently, 48% of those who voted in November personally own at least one gun. And a significant number of those people do treat gun control as the one issue they'll look at when deciding who to vote for. That's why that huge gun-control movement that sprang up after Columbine completely collapsed in the last few months of the campaign. Any politician who brings it up now is signing the death warrant on his political career. Further reductions of gun owners' rights in the United States is a dead concept for the foreseeable future. They finally pushed the gun owners too far.
posted by aaron at 11:48 PM on March 14, 2001
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I was wondering if you have ever read the entire text of the second amendment. If you haven't read it, please do. I would love to hear you explain, to me, how it has any relevance in today's society.
IMHO, the American gun lobby has the blood of countless thousands on its collective shoulders.
posted by saturn5 at 6:41 AM on March 14, 2001