Yes, that is true. Only one however holds a negative consequence for society as a whole.
That argument can be made about any right, from free speech to religion to privacy.
The greater negative consequence would be the loss of the exercise of that right, everywhere.
The plain sense of it to outsiders is that it refers to a military force or police, not individuals. So it IS debateable.
It's debatable only to the ignorant and the obtuse. If "the people" means part of the government, then the U.S. Bill of Rights doesn't protect anything for the citizens, it's all about the government. The people having a right of protection against arbitrary search and seizure really means the government has it, then, and so on.
"Militia" does not mean something attached to government -- that's just basic language. "The people" does not mean "the government" -- that's even more basic language. All one has to do to understand it is grasp the English language and read at a high school level.
This is actually quite an offensive comment. Firstly, the US bled no more, and in a few cases much less than others in the fight for freedom. And secondly, you only got involved in the most influential, after you came under attack yourselves, so don't make out that it was like the US were fighting primarily for anything but your own security.
The US bled before it was the US. Then it had to wait many decades before others were seriously willing to follow its example.
I was referring to the first article posted from New Science. You have responded on the basis of the additional articles which i did not read. There was no mention of violence in the home or gun deaths (just shootings) in the article which i responded to. So its quite difficult now to make sense of any point here.
The New Science article is a joke. The "study" could be debunked by any first-term statistics student with a passing grade: it didn't study the right population to be making claims of how often people will be killed by firearms on the basis of whether they had a firearm in the house. That would require studying the entire population of people with firearms, not the population of people who died.
OK, this is new information. So although there are guns in the US widely accessible to the public, none of them are of lethal capability? If this is the case, i see no reason for there to be such a debate about it. However, i was under the assumption that a firearm was needed for self defence in order to be of sufficient means to protect yourself, and that if your life is under threat, you would require a weapon to stave off such a threat, and that if your attacker had a gun, shooting him with a non lethal weapon is surely not going to do as intended?
Can you provide a little more clarity on this. It could be the key to changing my opinion, you never know.
A firearm for self-defense must be sufficient to stop the threat. But anyone who chooses their weapon and ammunition in an aim to kill will go to prison or pay heavy civil damages. In some of the "Castle Doctrine" states (a very civilized notion we inherited from the British), that may not be true, but it hasn't yet been tested. Even so, any firearms instructor teaching a self-defense course will emphasize that you do not "shoot to kill", you shoot to stop the threat. The NRA instructors I've had make a point that it's better the guy goes to trial.
But the other point is that you don't get fancy trying to preserve the guy's life. If you're a citizen, and he's attacking you, he has thereby given you permission to take his life if that's what happens when you act to stop the threat. If he has threatened your life, or given you cause to believe that your life is threatened, he has breached the contract of respect for rights, and you are free to act according to the new contract he has put forth, namely, that lives aren't that important, just objectives. And if by pursuing my objective of stopping the threat he poses to me he ends up dead, that was the invitation he issued.
That's one of the reasons people back in the Enlightenment advocated, as Patrick Henry did, that "the great goal is that every [person] be armed". That is a condition that functions for the "security of a free state", because it lets criminals know up front that whatever they're after, they're staking their lives on it.
Its a little difficult to counter a point that is without all of the facts of the particular cases, and even more so when i don't discredit the facts that guns can be of good use. The argument about guns is not so much about individual protection, for those who occupy the anti gun lobby. Its about the impact on a societal level and the consequences that stem from widespread availability of firearms.
If firearms have such a bad consequence, then disarm the police. Let no one except the military be authorized to carry weapons, and them only on duty on base.
This is an outrageous comment quite frankly lol. I have zero doubt in my mind that those Jews knew full well that they were not in the ghetto being 'looked after' by the authorities. They would have had plenty of knowledge prior to entering the ghetto that their 'carers' had no concern for their health and wellbeing. Some of them saw their neighbours and family members murdered whilst being forced from their homes. They would'nt have trusted the authorities one little bit. Unless the US government is in danger of succumbing to fascism any time soon, i think you are being just a diddy bit paranoid.
Have you read a history of the Warsaw ghetto? The Jews were disarmed via promises from the authorities that they would be protected, including that everyone was being disarmed. For a time the Nazis even honored that. It wasn't until the Jews had relaxed their guard that the change came.
As for the US government succumbing... 1. Santorum 2. Tea Party
We are closer to tyranny than any moment within a liftime.
No, i got the point. I said that it was the fact that there are dangerous people that is why it is preferable to not combine them with dangerous weapons, basically. Teaching other people to be dangerous is not a very effective way of reducing the danger that exists to begin with, it exacerbates it.
You're operating on the liberal assumption that people can't be trusted, so they have to be taken care of. Statistically, this has been proven false overwhelmingly since the beginning of the passage of "shall-issue" concealed carry laws: citizens who go to the trouble to get trained to protect themselves are the most law-abiding segment of society.
The conclusion is that -- in line with liberal thought on the value of education -- everyone should be trained in self-protection.
I'd start martial arts in kindergarten, firearms in first grade.
When there are predators, don't disarm the prey.
I wholeheartedly concur with this point. However, the imbalance is in the destruction to society, whenever somebody does abuse their right to possess a weapon. And it is impossible to guage who may snap for whatever reason and start rampaging. And it doesn't help the families of those from the underclass that get involved in gang cultures where gun related death is statistically higher. If you argue the point in favour of the individual, particularly the law abiding, guns appear to be perfectly safe for society to possess. The reality is that whilst you may feel a greater sense of security personally, its not such a positive outlook for your community as a whole.
The same argument can be made about automobiles, baseball bats, scuba guns, many construction tools....
It's a superb outlook for my community as a whole. As the Blue Steel Democrats here have noted, the level of gun violence in communities varies inversely with the strictness of gun laws. Case in point is Switzerland, where people are required by law to keep fully military weapons, and shooting is practically the national sport.
As for gang cultures, it's silly to address a symptom rather than the problem: first, end the war on society mislabeled the "War on Drugs"; second, take half the money saved and sink it into making places kids can be kids. Almost invariably, the level of gang activity in a community is inversely related to the level of free, interesting, challenging, and safe recreation for kids.
As for adult gang members where the gang is racist, I'd give them no choice: they go into the military, special units, and when we need cannon fodder, they go in first.
Of course not. But perhaps its about time that politics over there was cleaned up, because right now, the political environment is smeared with religious politics, and that is what is holding gay rights back, and feeding bigotry.
When you have politicians openly saying that marriage should be between a man and a woman, there is no basis other than religious views for holding that position. It should not be acceptable to base policy on religious ideology, and rather than simply campaigning for gay rights, you should be campaigning for political change. Be drastic, call for party breakdowns to separate the far right and far left from those more centrist. Impose regulation on party donations from religious groups (if not already done).
The church is too interferring in politics (even here still), but not one recognised MP would ever DARE say such a thing as arguing against gay rights from a religious perspective because its just not valid in a secular country. The only reason the UK is considered christian is because of the strings that the church of England has connected to government via the head of state.
I've signed nearly a dozen petitions to get a multiparty system of one sort or another on the ballot -- signed on my first year at Portland Pride, and another another year. The system I favor is the state Senate should be elected by county, but the state House should be statewide by party. Then it shouldn't be too great a leap to do the same for elections to the U.S. House, by state delegation -- I think Oregon would see four or five parties go to D.C. that way; in California, seven to twelve right off the bat.
As for religion... to me, a conservative religious position would be that church marriage and government marriage are entirely different entities, and should be kept strictly apart -- but then I draw on the Church Fathers and others through the ages such as Bonaventure and Chemnitz, so my view of conservative doesn't start with a man who was both politician and theologian, military officer and preacher -- Ulrich Zwingli (whom I regard as a heretic for mixing church and state). He is the inspiration, directly or indirectly, for today's religious 'right' in America.
I can certainly see why gay people may feel more protected by carrying a gun, your government is not very proactive in deterring homophobia on your behalf. But of course, its a little tricky to do that without causing an uproar over freedom of speech, so its really quite a catch 22 i reckon.
I'm almost tempted to start supporting gun ownership in the US, because, unlike the rest of the West, i think you guys truly do need them.
Given that having one has saved my life more than once, I certainly won't argue. And I suspect that having one on my hip has led to a bit more politeness toward gays (as Robert Heinlein said it, "An armed society is a polite society").
](/images/smilies/bang.gif "Brick wall ](*,)")
