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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (53615)	8/31/1999 2:57:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

>But my impression is that the NRA supports the sale of those automatic weapons that spit out round after round of bullets in seconds, often so lethally. They don't seem like either hunting or sports or home-protection weapons, more just like killing machines; and it seems to me that not cooperating to the fullest in an attempt to severely limit those weapons, in particular, seems extreme to many Americans.< When I read this I get so exasperated at whoever has made this story sound so plausible. Is the NRA championing automatic weapons? NO. As for spitting out round after round in seconds ... think about that for a second. That is what a gun does.. "Automatic" means one pull of the trigger ... several shots. Y'know, machine gun stuff. Right now the legislators are concentrating on so-called "assault weapons", and they are defining them as just about any autoloader made. One pull of the trigger - one shot fired. This is what a gun does. After all if you can pull the trigger like Parkinson Man, you can send out round after round in seconds. How many seconds? Your mileage will vary. The real question here is when this stopped being a normal, unremarkable feature of firearms and some sort of Public Menace. And it is this sort of thing that has finally and irrevocably pushed me into siding with the NRA. The media and legislators are disguising it, but there is a survival struggle going on for the dignity and acceptability of the very idea of any sort of civil gun ownership. They're registering shotguns, plain ol birding weapons, in CA now because some illiberal State Senator has written a sweeping "assault weapon" registry bill and our socialist Governor has signed it. The goal is firearm confiscation ... just wait and see. Just like NYC in the Sixties. They're trying to make "a gun in the house" a beacon of moral failure. <long string of very old English> It is in the very nature of "balanced, reasonable" gun control law to go in one direction and one direction only. (So the tactic is to divide guns into categories and ban the "bad" categories - of course the "good" leftovers get divided some more ...) It is flat out not in the interest of the politicians and police chiefs to restore gun rights once they were taken away. The Framers realized it when they wrote the Bill of Rights. And I'm baffled at and p.o.ed with the ACLU for failing to evenly defend the Constitution.

To: E who wrote (53615)	8/31/1999 6:23:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

To me, the interesting thing is WHY the second amendment, and does that still hold? The reasons, I think, were twofold. First, and minorly, to have local militias available to defend the country. The federal and even state governments at that time didn't have standing armies, so local militias were necessary. But far more important, IMO, was the basic mistrust of big government (nothing new there!). The colonies were able to win independence because the farmers and tradespersons had weapons and used them against the British. But what if the new government became as oppressive as the British had been? (There's a good argument to make that they have become far more so.) There was a clear sense that the local militias might be called out again to defend their communities. New Minutemen might be needed to defend liberty. After all, keep in mind that at that time no European country had ever experienced long periods without either civil war or war on their own territories. Self-defense against either an opposing faction within your country or an outside invader was expected. There was a great fear of a government which controlled all arms and was thus free from the controlling influence of local insurrection. As Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots." For better or worse, or as it has turned out for a complex combination of better and worse, we now have a government which is basically beyond any need to fear local insurrection or uprisings. Those who think this is a good thing, who trust the same government that brought us Ruby Ridge and Waco to use its arms responsibly and in the best interests of freedom and liberty in all circumstances, or believe that the ACLU is a sufficient force for the protection of personal liberties, probably see the 2nd amendment as an anachronism which should be discarded, in fact if it can't be in law. Those who still retain the 1770s suspicion of big government and believe that an armed citizenry is the best guarantee of personal liberties probably see the second amendment as the last protection of free men and women, and the attempts to functionally eliminate its guarantees as precursors to functional enslavement by a government which no longer has any need to fear citizen uprisings.