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To: thames_sider who wrote (11980)	5/3/2002 8:26:14 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

The right to bear arms is a privilege Americans granted themselves in their constitution. It is a right given knowing that at some time they may have to replace a government with force that does not respect their other inalienable rights such as the pursuit of happiness clause. It might not make sense to you but it has been very successful and who can argue with that?

To: thames_sider who wrote (11980)	5/4/2002 10:24:12 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 21057

Since I did not defend La Pierre, your claim to prescience is bogus. Since I do not even own a gun, much less carry one, I have no personal or emotional investment in the issue. Since we had advanced beyond your original post, it is not supposed to be relevant to that particular post, but to the subsequent claim that rights are purely arbitrary. How one can acknowledge that my exposition is "worthy and valid" and yet continue to claim that it is irrelevant to a determination of what the appropriate law should be beats me. Of course, as a practical matter, you cannot exercise a right that has been denied by the government, or one does so at some peril. Dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Elena Bonner, however, lived out the tension between the assertion of natural rights and the attempt to suppress their exercise. If you think that they were fundamentally mistaken, and that rather than asserting rights that the government refused to admit, they were fools who did not know their place, your dismissiveness is at least consistent. Otherwise, I beg you to rethink. As for the practical point, about whether you are less likely to be shot, there are so many variables influencing the disposition of criminals that I am not sure a simple analysis will suffice. I have speculated in the past that the comparative pacifism of Western European societies is a by- product of the blood- letting of the World Wars, and that rather than being more pacific than America, you have merely been "binge killers". Certainly, after direct experience of so much carnage, a reaction might well have set in........