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

To: Grainne who wrote (24643)	8/31/1998 12:25:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

>I have never read anything about anyone stopping a crime by being armed, although I am sure it occurs occasionally. < Read "The Armed Citizen" on the inside cover of "the American Rifleman" each month. There are twenty-plus selected events there. The regular press does not print such things unless coerced. I imagine there is a conflict with editorial policy - Demonize Guns. There is a book out by a legal scholar which works the numbers and finds that civilian gun ownership has actually had a damping effect on violent crime in the last fifty years. I don't recall the title off-hand. Thus I am unwilling to trust either content or intent of the numbers from the sources you favor. >How can you argue that putting even more people in prison would build a decent society?< I follow one overridingly simple precept. "Commit a [violent] crime - go to jail." We're not doing that currently with any consistency or resolve. Thus we have squandered the deterrent value inherent in a healthy judicial/penal system. We need to rebuild that. Paradoxically, the high prison census now doesn't help this, because it is so fluid. Finally, >Alex, first of all you do not explain how the Second Amendment is "perverted" by the anti-gun lobby. < I did more than once. I don't want to presume upon the patience of our audience and engage in "treaty negotiation" style repetition. You say there has been "absolutely no" court support of the individual nature of the Second Amendment. This is not actually true. There were a few high-profile cases early in the century. While they did not declaratively state that the citizen's right to own and carry is beyond abridgement, they did say trhat a Constitutional right existed, and that it was not reasonable to equate "militia" with "state government". The U.S Code defines "militia" as "every able-bodied man between {age group - I don't recall the exact numbers]". We remain at an impasse, because we're like Luther and a bishop on this matter. We reject each other's core premises. Wanna beer?