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I'm serious. I'd like to hear your opinion.
Like you said, rhetorical.
I'm serious. I'd like to hear your opinion.
For one thing, keeping guns in the hands of citizens is a safeguard to government takeover. Now, granted, if the government WERE to take over today (and let's say that said government/military were all gung-ho about it, since this is a hypothetical), firearms wouldn't do much against tanks.
Which is why I'm all for citizenry possessing tanks and bazookas. Doubt that gets passed though...
Still, a gun is a strong deterrent against abuse of power by governments. One look at the increasing power of local police departments (no-knock raids, extra liberties given to police depts to fight the war on drugs, etc) shows that it might be good if their zeal was tempered by the realization that the local citizenry possessed firearms.
I'm military, and even I wouldn't trust us and only us to have the weapons.
And regarding your pro/con argument, I can find a lot of things that have visible cons without pros. Fatty foods. Cigarettes. And that's not even going into all the risky, yet fun stuff.
Where's the "pro" in deep-sea diving? How about para-sailing? The cons are pretty obvious with these (injury, death, expensive, etc etc) but the pros (fun, excitement) aren't very noticeable.
My guess "why you wouldn't" is because you've never lived in a remote area where access to police protection/government intervention is limited at best and people really do need to own a firearm to protect their lives, property and livestock.
Speaking of protecting your property, there are endless stories of guns protecting people's property. Here's a high profile example that didn't even take place in a remote, rural community: Hurricane Katrina. When police officers laid their badges down in the face of anarchy and the government did not bring aid, the people whose houses were not looted were the ones who were prepared to protect themselves.
Katrina was eye-opener for me as far as blindly trusting law enforcement or the government to protect me...and I don't even own a gun.
I agree 100%.
I am not trying to be rude or condescending here, but I think we can all agree that the media (ALL media) are in it for profit. It would seem, viewership is increased with controversial stories.
Kids dying, gang violence, crime in general, etc.
The news, especially local news, around the country I dont believe is very interested in law-abiding citizens doing law-abiding things. It doesnt create viewers, increase circulation (apparently, judging by their tendencies).
I believe armed citizens successfully avoiding and/or defending themselves, their property and their family happens rather often. Three members of my family have told me stories of them having to brandish weapons in order to avoid dire situations. Those situations, I guarantee, did not make the news for the consumption of everyday Americans.
Its just one small example of the right to bear arms, pardon the pun, bearing fruit. I keep a loaded 9mm in my nightstand, I am childless so there is no safety concern. My house was robbed a while back and admittedly the cir stances surrounding it are far from a typical B&E, but make no mistake, my wife enjoys the added safety.
IMO, especially in places like Michigan where the economy is literally circling the bowl, crime is getting more violent and more widespread. Read the Detroit News sometime. Murder is up, robbery is up, population is declining, there are entire swaths of the city the police wont even go and those facts have nothing to do with legal gun ownership, its illegal ownership.
The "bad areas" are spreading like wildfire, too. North and West, mostly.
All of this has nothing to do with government officials being the only ones with the right to firearms, of which I am diametrically opposed. I do not trust government because government does not trust me. Realistically, is an armed populace still at the mercy of the government? Of course, so long as the local police forces keep buying surplus military equipment for a civilican populace, this will always be true.
It would seem my instincts are far less trusting than yours and the sentiment gives me pause.
There in lies the problem. No one ever talks about the saved lives from the UT Tower shooting, because of all the citizens who had their rifles and fired back which kept whitman pinned down.
Thanks.
Nazi Germany. Though I myself do not own a gun, I do not want to live in a country where the only person between me, my house, bank account, possessions, work, church, etc... is the government pointing the gun.
the only people that think people shouldn't be trusted with guns are the people who've never owned one.
It doesn't matter. The cons ution gives us the right to bear arms. If you don't like it, change the cons ution instead of supporting activist judges. Supporting them means you are a traitor to the heart of America.
Interesting, I did not know about that.
It's funny that use of the 14th Amendment to incorporate rights to the states draws criticism as an activist result with respect to some rights but is the paragon of judicial restraint when it comes to other rights.
I think it's the right decision in this case. But it's also predictable that as the conversation broadened, someone would bring up judicial activism and illustrate again that activism depends almost entirely upon whether one agrees with the result and not with the rationale that leads to that result. It's truly a hollow term.
Good decision.
Good to see conservatives are now against states' rights.
At least Texas can secede if they don't like it...
Good salient point, minus the angle taken to get there.
It is odd how the size of gray areas in law are always expanding. This is certainly one instance (of probably many that one could imagine) where I think the Federal government got it right.
The same people who are usually concerned with the federal government having too much power are glad they just confirmed their power over the states in this issue.
I sincerely do not believe that a gun makes someone safer. I know that personally it would not make me feel safer.
tbh if you take every person's guns away, they are completely at the mercy of their government and local law enforcement. Besides this nanny state is the reason I can't just go out and totally become a liberal. That and the fact that they come off like whining pussies all the time.
"if you take every person's guns away, they are completely at the mercy of their government and local law enforcement. "
do you really think you and your 50 cal fully automatic machine gun can hold off the typical armored, militarized, airborne SWAT team?
You live in Canada?
This is a disputed quote, but it fits...
You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass. -Isoruko Yamamoto
http://openjurist.org/328/f3d/567/silveira-v-lockyer
KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc:
Judges know very well how to read the Cons ution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or ... the press" also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 138 L.Ed.2d 874 (1997), and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical cons utional phrases — or even the white spaces between lines of cons utional text. See, e.g., Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir.1996) (en banc), rev'd sub nom. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 117 S.Ct. 2258, 138 L.Ed.2d 772 (1997). But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular cons utional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.
It is wrong to use some cons utional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Cons ution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all cons utional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Cons ution; it's using our power as federal judges to cons utionalize our personal preferences.
The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have suc bed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 59 S.Ct. 816, 83 L.Ed. 1206 (1939), did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 586-587; see also Brannon P. Denning & Glenn H. Reynolds, Telling Miller's Tale: A Reply to David Yassky, 65 Law & Contemp. Probs. 113, 117-18 (2002). The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller's weapon — a sawed-off shotgun — was reasonably susceptible to militia use. See Miller, 307 U.S. at 178, 59 S.Ct. 816. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller's claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller's test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a cons utional provision.
The majority falls prey to the delusion — popular in some circles — that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks' homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341-42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the ins ution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they went"). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.
All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 578-579. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare cir stances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our cons utional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel's mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion — the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of cons utional text — refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it — and is just as likely to succeed.
exactly. it's not much of a safeguard.
I've heard that handguns are just gateway guns to the big stuff myself.Which is why I'm all for citizenry possessing tanks and bazookas. Doubt that gets passed though...
so you think it would be good to have police officers too scared to go ask for warrants?Still, a gun is a strong deterrent against abuse of power by governments. One look at the increasing power of local police departments (no-knock raids, extra liberties given to police depts to fight the war on drugs, etc) shows that it might be good if their zeal was tempered by the realization that the local citizenry possessed firearms.
it would be better if they are tempered by laws.
the military has had the nuclear weapons. Who else would you trust to have them?I'm military, and even I wouldn't trust us and only us to have the weapons.
If you try to throw some fatty foods or blow some cigarette smoke in my face, chances are, I'll survive those blasts.And regarding your pro/con argument, I can find a lot of things that have visible cons without pros. Fatty foods. Cigarettes. And that's not even going into all the risky, yet fun stuff.
Not so much with a bullet to the face.
You can't kill someone else directly with your deep sea diving. Other than a freak landing, same thing with para-sailing.Where's the "pro" in deep-sea diving? How about para-sailing? The cons are pretty obvious with these (injury, death, expensive, etc etc) but the pros (fun, excitement) aren't very noticeable.
I think I'd rather work at fixing the government failures such as Katrina, but those are some good points.
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