[Dan_77]

Quote by: Yarn The constitution was designed to allow slavery two hundred years ago in the days of single shot muskets. It is not a document of pure virtue, and the second admendment wasn't designed for 2008.

Yes, the "Second" amendment wasn't.

And the Framers probably never envisioned "speech" to include typing on computers and sending the text over wires to the world, but here we are.

I am all for an amendment to the Constitution. If you think you can get an Amendment passed repealing the 2nd, go for it. But an end run around it is just nonsense.

Quote by: SoylentGreen Given Robert Marsh II post on describing the guns fire power, I would think the word assault is accurate. Given that the links to a m16 all refer to it as an assault rifle then it is hardly the term of an idiot.

Except that the M-16 is a military only rifle. The rifle these men are shooting is an AR-15, the civilian semi-automatic version, which is no more dangerous or deadly than your common hunting rifle.

And i assume your desperate if your best shot is a strawman .

The car analogy was the most adept one - the rest I was just filling in.

Again always good fun to blow things to bits, But how is this defined as sporting, in any sense of the word.

I don't know, why don't you ask any of the thousands of youngsters that take part in their high school rifle team?

Why don't you ask the IOC, since shooting is an Olympic sport in several forms?

Why don't you ask ESPN, who puts many different types of shooting events on their channels?

Generally , or is it in fact a specific measure of control. From what i have read obama seeks some common sense laws and gun enthusiasts turn this into some nonsense about banning all guns.

I suppose I should explain my position - I think that law-abiding citizens who pass a background check and can state in one sentence a legitimate reason for owning a weapon should be allowed to purchase any firearm they would like to have after a 5-day waiting period. These things are all possible and entirely feasible with modern technology.

My point is that there is no reason to limit law-abiding citizens to particular types of weapons.

Quote by: Morality Games In fact, the second amendment explicitly states its purpose is maintaining a militia. That's a bit different from stating the right to bear arms shall not be infringed upon whatsoever simply for the purpose that people should be allowed have guns, as gun-rights advocates contend. If they were honest, they would admit that.

I do admit it. The problem for you is that does not change the argument and in fact strengthens it. The way to interpret laws is to use the plain meaning of the word at the time the word was written.

At the time the Bill of Rights was written, the "militia" was a community organization made up of townsfolk, and dedicated to maintaining public order and security. It was ordinary citizens arming themselves.

That is exactly what today's gun-rights advocates want.

Quote by: Sonart . No, tivodan, it's not. Assault Rifle is a legitimate term for a variety of military weapons. The problem, of course, is when you get a bunch of gun loons drooling over such weapons, "GooOOOolly, I want me one a them". A WWII M1 carbine may be one thing... once you start playing with more modern, powerful assault weapons, rational Americans start to get worried and start passing reasonable restrictions.

What are your "reasonable restrictions"? And why should we let anti-gun people who tremble at the very thought of people protecting themselves tell us what "reasonable restrictions" are?

You just want your high-powered playthings and you don't give a flying rip about anyone elses safety if it interferes with your "freedom" to indulge yourselves.

Anyone else's safety? Please show me in no uncertain terms how the safety of others is harmed by lawful gun owners using them for target practice.

I'll brace myself for your inevitable "correlation without causation" fallacies now.

...here we see a suspect taking aim at the outgunned police with his new, high-powered Microsoft Word. A fascinating analogy, tivo.

Which of course if you had professional-level education in criminal justice, you'd know was a good argument for my point.

The North Hollywood bank robbers obtained their guns through illegal means (in part by illegal purchases traced to the Great Western Gun Show). They were only stopped because police officers raided a nearby gun shop and got better weapons - weapons which were only in that gun shop because they were legal for citizens to buy.

Had just a few citizens been armed and carrying the high powered weapons the police commandeered, the shootout would have been over much more quickly.

I used to know kids who thought making pipe bombs was tons of fun, and others who thought street racing was fun.

LOL... are you intentionally trying to make my argument for me?

Pipe bombs and street racing are both highly illegal... and yet, strangely, they still exist.

I don't get liberals... They understand that drug prohibition doesn't work, gambling prohibition doesn't work, prostitution prohibition doesn't work... but gun prohibition will result in a magical panacea where we all sit around the campfire singing cum-by-ya and eating s'mores.

At some point one has to be mature enough to weigh ones personal pleasure against the threat to public safety. I'm sure that at one point, when our country was a pastoral, agrarian society of small, isolated, subsistence farmsteads surrounded by vast wilderness, wild game and hostile indians, firearms were a vital tool. Now, more often then not, they're simply very deadly playthings. Time to grow up.

Hmm I don't see any facts in there to support your argument. Probably because it's based on nothing but your own misunderstanding of the role of legal gun ownership in our society.

Legal gun ownership is no threat to public safety any more than legal ownership of any other tool.

Number one, who said anything about removing guns ONLY from law-abiding citizens.

Once again, you live in a fantasy world. How do you propose to remove guns from criminals? Ask them politely? Pass yet another law they won't follow? Go door-to-door asking for them?

Really, your arguments come straight from the playbook of thoroughly debunked anti-gun nonsense.

Number two, the U.S. has the highest percentage of households with guns than any country in the world that measures such things, while also being among the most violent free, supposedly civilized nations, so owning guns obviously hasn't helped make us less violent, have they?

Correlation without causation. Thanks for playing, though.

So do you think that the prohibition of drugs has made less drugs available? LOL...

All it does is make more guns available to criminals...

Right, just like making drugs legal would... oh wait, making drugs legal would make them LESS available to criminals. Nevermind... LOL

..."criminals" being a "scary term cooked up by gun lovers" since a criminal may be a perfectly law-abiding citizen... right up to the second they decide to squeeze the trigger on their perfectly legal firearm.

The fact that your "point" here is unsupported by any reasonable measure of fact notwithstanding, how do you figure that removing guns will lead to the person not making that decision anyhow with a different instrumentality of criminal behavior? The criminal decision isn't pulling the trigger, the criminal decision is what it's pointed at.

Given that the Bush Supreme Court just overturned 70 years of the only Supreme Court definition the 2nd Amendment has ever had, I'd say it was RE-designed for 2008. How fitting... yet another glorious victory for the Bush legacy.

Quote by: Sonart . Alas, the opposite is true. After generations of the NRA and gun owners lying to themselves and us about their 2nd Amendment rights, which 70 years of Supreme Court and lower Court precedent said we don't have -- it being a "Collective Right" for the purpose of arming volunteer civilian militias, rather than an individual right -- Dear Leader's Robert's Court hypocritically went against everything Roberts, Alito and Scalia claim to stand for and overturned U.S. v Miller this past June. So only now is the law of the land what they've been trying to say it was back when it actually wasn't. Ironical, huh!!! .

Yeah... incorrect precedents should always be followed. Brown v. Board and Roe v. Wade were terrible, illegal decisions, right?

Roberts, Alito, and Scalia claim to stand for original intent. If you think the original intent of the Founding Fathers was for the citizenry to be unarmed, i'm sorry to say you're pathetically uninformed.

I'm assuming you have a law degree to understand what actually happened in that case? If not, you're merely quoting liberal talking points without really understanding the situation.