Re: Breaking News: Shooting At U.S. Navy Yard In Washington, D.C.
Fine. Let the gun nuts have all the 18th century muskets they want.
No, those would be for the 'liberals' who can't read with comprehension.
Since when is limiting magazine size "restricting guns"? A 10 bullet size magazine will shoot out your bullets just as well as a 30. Forbidding guns doesn't mean that anyone can have a bazooka or AK-47. Let them have a BB gun. Besides, you're playing with the constitution here. Why does everyone forget about the "well regulated" part in the 2nd?
I've explained what the Founding Fathers and the Framers meant by "well-regulated". It doesn't allow for "gun control".
As for magazine size, look at this:
See the little dangly things on the sleeves and elsewhere? Those are the fringe. They have absolutely nothing to do with the functioning of the jacket -- they're pure decoration.
What the phrase "shall not be infringed" means, with reference to this picture, is that not only can't you mess with the coat itself, you can't mess with the things about it that don't even matter to its function -- the apparently trivial or inconsequential things around the edges. So in the Amendment, the phrase means not just that Congress can't have any laws or regulations that affect the arms themselves, but they can't have any that even deal with fringe matters -- such as caliber, or how many a person can have, or magazine size, or anything else even cosmetically related to arms.
That's what it
means. It was the strongest language in the Bill of Rights, forbidding government to tamper with even apparently unimportant things about arms. That it was such forceful language was one of the points proponents of the Bill of Rights made when arguing for ratification.
So, technically, not a single law on the books concerning arms is constitutional -- not a one.
What are constitutional are laws concerning such things as who may not have arms. The FFs and Framers understood that concept very well, and included it in the Constitution when they handed Congress the duty of providing for the discipline of the militia. Some people just weren't competent to be responsible for having firearms, and they recognized that -- in fact, that's where we get the two basic categories of people barred from keeping and bearing arms, namely those who have shown themselves a threat to the security of the Republic by using violence against citizens, and those not mentally competent to adhere to their responsible use.
And those can be covered by Congress' authority to provide for training and discipline for the militia. I conceive a new Militia Act which could do that, though it would make many scream, including libertarians, because it would require extending not just registering for some hypothetical future draft, but being trained and evaluated as well. I don't even want to guess what it might cost, but a workable approach would be to require every graduating high school student to undergo a complete psychological evaluation, as one step in establishing competency to be a member of the militia -- as a beginning.
