“Now, let’s not start screaming about the Second Amendment. To begin with, the amendment should be abolished — a sensible interpretation of the amendment is that it was written to allow the people to raise a militia for protection and to hunt for food. Clearly no one needs to raise a militia these days, and those who hunt for a living can be licensed to do so.” (Read more from WashingtonPost.com)
I have done a 180 on this issue from how I felt in my youth. Here’s how I feel now:
– Banning guns does not reduce crime. Crime goes UP when the law abiding citizen is disarmed.
– The Second amendment is not about hunting and it’s not about target shooting. It’s about giving the government good reason to leave the citizen alone.
– An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.
– A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
– Gun control is not about guns; it’s about control.
– Free men do not ask permission to bear arms.
– Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
– What part of “shall not be infringed” do you not understand?
– 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday.
– Criminals love gun control; it makes their jobs safer.
– Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them.
– The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
(Read more on WhatReallyHappened.com)
“Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
without disagreeing about the reasoning behind it, i would just like to see one piece of evidence supporting the idea that crime goes up when people are unarmed.
also, if they govt will always have weapons more powerful than those accessible by citizens, why does owning guns give the govt any reason to leave people alone?
ok, scratch the first part of my comment… the link links to a study with really impressive, solid methodology…
uhh, scratch the last comment about the study’s methodology too… very complicated stuff… not sure what to think.
Thanks for reading & thanks for posting, esoteridactyl.
Yours is a common refrain: What’s the point, since government will always have more and bigger weapons? Why not just give up?
Several points:
1) I feel like reading about the several decades of Soviet purges against its own population (The Gulag Archipelago), and about how society broke down in the Balkans (War – A Force That Gives Us Meaning), has given me glimpses into the plight of helpless populations – ones that have been trained to look only to government as the purveyor of force.
2) There are a million shades of gray between complete peace and complete war. Guns, even against a vastly superior foe, are useful for most of them.
3) Our government, thankfully, is fairly sensitive to spectacle. Hopefully it’ll never come to it, but if a substantial number of American’s took up armed resistance, government would not necessarily employ it’s vastly superior force. (At least, not until government’s enablers in the press finished condemning the resistors as ‘domestic terrorists.’) In any case, it gives government incentive to leave us the hell alone.
4) The thing I learned from my three combat tours: insurgency.
5) Never give up when your liberty is at stake.
re: spectacle… isnt UNarmed resistance far more effective in that case? nothing gets people more upset than seeing unarmed people killed, whereas the killing of armed people, no matter how unjustified, is very easily rationalized.
I sure hope so, but the government has ignored 250,000-person anti-war protests, and the Washington Post relegated it to the back pages of the metro section.
It also went largely unnoticed at the RNC, where tyrannical countermeasures were used to quash it: www.lostrepublic.com/archives/304 .
sure, but would those protests have been any more effective had people been armed? no, the police would have had a great excuse to do more serious violence and the public would condemn the protesters rather than police. people got mad when we protested the war (and rnc 2004) because we disrupted *traffic*, omg. if resistance to the war or anything else involved armed people, the backlash would be insane.
not that this is really an argument against the right to bear arms. im just saying.