A firearm question for you LeftiesFollow

Huh? They're free to ignore your vote. They are not free to take your gun. They have to actually take it. You know, by force. What do you think would happen? The government would just say "Ok. We're disbanding congress and all state authorities and moving our troops in to maintain order. Now everyone just hand over your guns as part of this peaceful process" and folks would all just go along?

Um... And at the risk of stating the obvious, wouldn't that be a lot harder to do if they didn't have a nice list of everyone who owned a gun?




Yes. And that works only so long as everyone agrees to abide by the results of election and be bound by the same rules. Those things work once you are in a democracy. They do not cause democracy to exist, nor protect it from being destroyed. You are foolish to think so.



I think that everyone having the right to own guns ensures that sufficient people will own guns such that it would be very very difficult for any one person or group to just take control and take away all of the rest of our rights. One can argue that the right to own guns is what protects the rest of our rights. Take that one away and the only thing protecting the rest of them is politeness.



The folks who wrote the constitution disagree with you. So perhaps you're missing something?

Let me point out again that referring to the right to own a gun as a "stupid 2nd amendment loophole" also grossly undermines the claim of any level of reasonableness on your part.




Arguing that the 2nd amendment of our constitution is important is "stupid"? Really?


Fortunately for you, you are not required to understand how the 2nd amendment protects your rights and freedoms for it to do so. Unfortunately if sufficient numbers of people do come to think like you do, then they may just be dumb enough to vote away that very protection. Which would be both sad and ironic.

Edited, Feb 25th 2013 7:21pm by gbaji

And they'd use their own, privately owned weapons and not steal the ones from the military on their way out! Oh wait, guess that was yet another bad example from gbaji about private gun ownership.

Original or remake?

Well excuse me for not knowing which scary foreigners the extreme right is telling us to be afraid of this week.

Ok, let me state this as succinctly as I can. The US Gov't already has those lists. This story is about making those lists a matter of public record. This isn't a totalitarian power grab, it's a transparency/privacy thing. Try arguing for or against this thing that it actually is.

And you do?

You really have no concept of reality or what it means to, you know, live in a democratic society with other people under the rule of law. The 2nd amendment doesn't give any private individual some weirdo undefined right to rise above the very laws that hold us all in check.

Reality check time little buddy.

If our government becomes so ill-equipped to govern us the then the constitution becomes just a worthless old conglomeration of nicely arranged words.

I still want to know why Russia sent Spetsnatz to Colorado of all places when a couple of bears on unicycles could have probably gotten the job done. Then again, a handful of high school kids did beat those Spetsnatz, so it kind of makes me question just how effective they are anyway ...

You're missing the point though. Until that time, having a constitution which allows for private gun ownership helps ensure that when/if such a collapse of our democracy should occur, the population is sufficiently capable of defending itself against said tyrannical replacement. Additionally, because this potential is present, it reduces the odds of such a thing happening in the first place. No one's going to try a top down power grab because they'd suddenly find themselves opposed by tens of millions of armed citizens not too happy with them doing so. It helps ensure that the only way to take and hold power is via means that the people find to be legitimate.

And that's a good thing all by itself. But that's not all. The founders were also concerned about the more direct and local forms of oppression. They realized that a disarmed public would be dependent on the government forces to protect them, not just from armies of enemies (whether foreign or domestic) but from smaller threats as well, like thieves, brigands, and whatnot. And we see this effect all the time. Citizens disarming themselves because they've been taught that "guns are bad", and then complaining when the police can't protect them and their property (cause, well, they can't really), sometimes followed up with demands for more police power and authority. And instead of realizing that nothing short of a brutally oppressive police force involving terrible infringements of all our rights could possibly protect us from crime ahead of time and that the best method is to empower themselves to protect their own selves and property, they clamor for more protection and to eliminate guns as though they are the enemy here.

We've just somehow lost sight of why the 2nd amendment exists and have (some of us) gone in the exact opposite direction. But as with many solutions to problems, there is no perfect one, just some that are better than others. And relatively loose private firearm ownership, while not perfect, is a better solution to the problem of crime and violence than heavily restricting them and relying on police forces to protect us. Because the only way they can protect us from crime (as opposed to investigating after the fact) is to employ stringent restrictions on all our activities in order to make it harder for the bad guys to do bad things. Again, I just think that's counter to a free society and *not* the direction we should be going.

gbaji you stay here and guard our stuff when the government collapses. I'm going to Canada.

I really need to stop underestimating you. Every time I think you can't possibly know any less about firearms and politics, you go and prove me wrong. That registry already exists, nimrod. You'd know that if you bought a gun in the last twenty years.

Edited, Feb 26th 2013 7:42pm by lolgaxe

Yes, idiot. I'm talking about how I think things should be, not how they are now. And frankly, I think arguments of the form "the government is already doing X, so there's no point in preventing it from doing Y" are monumentally stupid.


And I see you've still avoided answering my question about the 4th (and 9th and14th) amendment as it relates to the principle of privacy. Shocking really.

You didn't mention a Y though, you drew a picture of a fish with crayons on X and claimed it as your own. There's already a registry of everyone who *can* own a firearm, and backgrounds checks are fairly super easy and quick (usually a single phone call, in fact! Another fact: SpoilerFrom 1994 through 2009, over 107 million background checks were conducted!) and the knowledge of who actually owns guns and what they own is still relatively private. You didn't come up with it, shit for brains. And we only need to point to Sandy Hook to see how well "your" brilliant idea works.

Seriously, how shallow is your well of knowledge? Is it a well? Maybe a thimble?

Nah, shocking is how they've been answered and you're just not liking the answers so you're repeating yourself in hopes of getting a new answer. Not like it's any surprise that you hate consistency. Probably the difference being my answer deal with analysis of facts and data, and yours are on emotional hypotheticals and third-hand information. Maybe if I was a little ***** like you I'd cry about how you completely ignored my analysis of your votes and gun ownership theory (which coincidentally you've completely dropped), or how looking at the facts proved how luck was the highest factor when dealing with concealed carry and mass shootings (something else that you just coincidentally completely dropped), or how you're as we speak slipping away from SECOND AMENDMENT into FOURTH NINTH AND FOURTEENTH AMENDMENTS! Alas, I know how scared you are of facts and have let you scurry away from them each and every time with nary a word.

Edited, Feb 26th 2013 10:55pm by lolgaxe