Why not? I know many citizens who have military weapons (.50 sniper rifle, anyone?) and they are perfectly responsible with them.

And if the people who get them legally use them responsibly, then what is the issue?

Why not let people own military weaponry and tanks and land mines and assault helicopters? Well, mainly because it's fucking insane. Because, you know, of the death toll. What we need to be doing is cultivating a civilized society of grown ups who have no use for that shit.

Never happen. At least, not on this side of the pearly gates.

Sure it will. It will certainly take a long time, though. Too many people hanging on to old, primitive ways.

Good for bear hunting. Heh.

Criminals are going to get their hands on weapons no matter what, laws or no laws. Hence the "criminal" label.

Unless the military weapons are legal. Then they're not criminals. And nothing can be done until somebody is hurt or killed.

Why not let them? First of all they're prohibitively expensive and have a huge learning curve... they would most likely kill themselves before they killed anyone else, and in that case... oh well. They should have done their homework better.

The entire point of the second amendment was to keep the government from becoming too powerful. If the government can be overthrown by the population, they must fear the population. Any government that does not will give itself too much power... as we have seen with ours.

Letting little children get killed by weapons that are not muskets and letting cities be overrun by organized criminal armies in the name of some adolescent rebellion fantasy is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Neither is letting our government rule every facet of our lives.


Nothing about our modern government is what the founding fathers intended. Let's start in other areas. For instance removing the career politician and political hegemony that pervades every facet of our government. I realize a lot of people are happy with people telling them what to do, but there are those of us who want to live our lives without big brother looking over our shoulder.

And if you pull out that 'well if you do nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear' crap I'm going to punch a baby. :P

^^ That's against the law. And why would I respond with a non sequitur? That would be as bad as saying the average citizen should be allowed to possess weapons of war as long as he hasn't used them yet.

The government doesn't and shouldn't control every aspect of our lives. But what you're describing is no government at all. How do you feel about nuclear weapons? Do you think it should be legal for anyone to own a functioning backpack nuke?

If there were suddenly no more guns, mankind would just use its awesome creativty to find new and interesting ways to kill.

At this point I would make reference to Augustinian doctrine about the fallen state of man, but I think religious people are in the minority on this board.

Well, maybe we should just legalize all forms of murder and see if people default to the old and uninteresting ways.

Also, I know somebody who was being harassed bigtime by one of the major trolling sites. As in, not only were they trying to get her fired and get her husband to divorce her, but they were calling in death threats and the local police wouldn't do anything.

Buuuut she posted a picture of herself with her (large, vicious-looking but really a giant teddy bear) dog and her AK-47 (they've had bear problems), and suddenly the harassment stopped. Funny, that.



Oh, I fucking hate that argument.

I'm going to borrow Cory Doctorow's counter-argument because it's the most eloquent I've heard.

There's nothing inherently wrong with urination/defecation, right? Everybody does it. It's necessary. It's healthy. If something's wrong with it, it's an early warning system for other parts of the body. There's no real reason to hide it. But if the government (or anybody) ruled that everybody now had to go to the bathroom publicly, there'd be a riot or fifty. Just because there's nothing wrong with it doesn't mean you don't have the right to privacy.

Christ on a crutch man.

And... what? He's beating people to death with it?

Or are you implying disagreement with my invalidation of Theo's statement?

You could say that.