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jack8007 -> RE: What kind of Gun Regulation Makes Sense? (3/5/2011 10:57:27 AM)
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quote:
suggest you look at the National Firearms Act
so let me elaborate, JLF & anybody else.
Your constitutional right to bear arms is negligible - it's at the pleasure of the government, because it's always been and always will be subject to whatever regulation the government sees fit. The National Firearms Act was aimed at gangsters using precisely the sort of weapons the NRA is most excited about these days - assault rifles & other basically military equipment. Go to LA, and gangbangers will use whatever they can get, including zip guns, and of course the NRA is in the front of the fight for their constitutional right to neighborhood firefights.
Your right to self defense (using a nuke if that's available & appropriate) is common law, it's not constitutional. It is a defense to crime and a matter of state law.
Weapons are always going to be regulated, and Sharon Angle talking about "2nd amendment remedies" is plain ignorant - she clearly doesn't understand the implications of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, and she probably never heard of the business plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot and I know damn well she's never worked in a battalion aid station. Talk is cheap when you're a chickenhawk.
If the NRA really believed their line that 'guns don't kill, people do', don't you think that they'd ask for psych evals of every purchaser? Of course they would. But that would end up as a practical ban on guns, because the shrinks' notes would all be the same - "applicant argues that gun is same as knife or car or sheet of paper, obviously delusional, recommend application rejected".
So why exactly are people so insistent on their constitutional rights here? Is there really a threat that legal firearms will protect from? Or are we talking about cultural frustration with the complexity of a modern world? If you're scared you can't pay your mortgage, or that your daughter may go off and get an abortion, you always have your gun. (BTW, when do you suppose was the last time the average joe fam-fired it?)
My suggestion is that it's a cultural diversion. The NRA is a media creature. A few hundred dealers make a killing selling problematic equipment that is highly likely to wind up being used illegally, but the real issue in the 2nd amendment debate is that it provides a cultural focus for people who are frustrated and scared by an economy and world beyond their control, and will listen to Koch/GOP/Robertson/etc financed people rant about the UN coming to take their guns. Instead of listening to people trying to work out how to pay for their health care, they'd rather hug their guns. And who does that benefit? do you really think that people get to the top of the food chain without being able to see where the money comes from?
The UN already owns half your ass, and your gun is the last thing they want - that is to say, we can't avoid living in an international world, and your gun is irrelevant. So a couple hundred flaming jihadists band together, and make us their sock puppets, because we're stupid & easily scared, because we've been listening to the Jesus freaks.
Bin Laden's stated goal was to suck the US into foreign wars that would sap our strength. Just as he never expected the towers to actually collapse, he probably didn't realize that the US economy was so seriously leveraged as a result of the financial bubble, that the wars and the housing crisis would form a perfect storm to change the course of US history.
And of course, every Republican said, "who could have known?" Well, of course it turns out they actually DID know, and just ignored it, because they were making more money complaining about BJs in the Oval Office. And we don't have much choice but deal with them, because we've let them create the machine that we're enslaved to, and nobody except our rapists knows how to run it.
And yes, people persist in asking, "what gun regulation is reasonable?" instead of, "where is the best place to lynch a Republican investment banker? Should we do it in Central Park, on TV? Or should we just put them to sleep with the fishes?"
Yesterday some Republican stopped the House for 45 minutes complaining that the Democrats were dissing Jesus. Any bets on how many Americans died in that same 45 minutes because of government inability to move a sensible policy?
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