[Thanos]

andyt andyt:

So with someone like Bart being representative of the US military that would take over? That would just hasten the police state that would never end.

I'm not making predictions, just a recommendation. The military is the only entity left that would be able to re-establish basic law & order in a country that's starting to resemble the background environment of a Mad Max movie. Congress, POTUS, SCOTUS, too many federal agencies, and far too often the police are too discredited in the eyes of many to get the job done anymore.

Want a prediction? What we're talking about here is pointless. What's going to happen someday is that some evangelical/fundamentalist/Tea Party types are going to have an armed rebellion. And, given how heavily armed they are, they might actually succeed. Then the first thing they're going to do if they seize power is rip up the Bill of Rights and establish a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. They're widespread across the entire country now, not contained to the Southern states anymore, and it'll rip the United States apart. Liberals who talk about gun control or try to deal reasonable with rational people are going to have one hell of a bad day when religious conservatives that don't deal in reason or rationality decide the time is now to get rid of all of Jesus' enemies and save America through a dictatorship that will rival anything the ISIS and Al Qaeda kind of Muslims could ever create. That's how much Americans seem to hate each other now.

[Delwin]

At this point I think it comes down to regulation. Every gun is registered, ballistics are done and filed before the weapon is sold. Ballistics are filed the way fingerprints and DNA are and when a slug is recovered, It is immediately traced to a range of potential weapons. The number of owned weapons is limited based on need, ie. Hunters and law enforcement. Anything unregistered carries a stiff penalty. 3d printing takes this away however.

[PluggyRug]

Delwin Delwin:

My point is that Prohibition would force law abiding citizens to hand over their weapons and those who disagree would not. How long would it take to round up 300M firearms and who would be left defenseless during the process ?

You would end up with this..............

[DanSC]

Delwin Delwin:

At this point I think it comes down to regulation. Every gun is registered, ballistics are done and filed before the weapon is sold. Ballistics are filed the way fingerprints and DNA are and when a slug is recovered, It is immediately traced to a range of potential weapons. The number of owned weapons is limited based on need, ie. Hunters and law enforcement. Anything unregistered carries a stiff penalty. 3d printing takes this away however.

This is incompatible with a right to keep and bear arms, at least in private places.

[xerxes]

In a perfect world, the 2nd Amendment would be repealed and replaced with something similar but modernised. When the US Constitution was written guns had a fire rate of 3 rounds per minute and an effective range of 100m at best. Moreover, the idea of each citizen having a right to own a gun is relatively new. Up until the late 60's, even the NRA was in favour of gun control as was most of the country.

But it'll never change. If the cold blooded murder of 20 children doesn't even affect even the most minor of changes, nothing will. Americans have tacitly come to a fait accompli about their murder rate and until enough have had enough, and until enough can speak louder than the 2nd amendment absolutists and the NRA nothing will change.

$1:

Our Moloch
Garry Wills

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:

First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)

Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. “It is not the time” to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.

The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:

1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism. Thus do we deny global warming, or evolution, or biblical errancy. Reason is helpless before such abject faith.

2. It has the power to turn all our politicians as a class into invertebrate and mute attendants at the shrine. None dare suggest that Moloch can in any way be reined in without being denounced by the pope of this religion, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, as trying to destroy Moloch, to take away all guns. They whimper and say they never entertained such heresy. Many flourish their guns while campaigning, or boast that they have themselves hunted “varmints.” Better that the children die or their lives be blasted than that a politician should risk an election against the dread sentence of NRA excommunication.

3. It has the power to distort our constitutional thinking. It says that the right to “bear arms,” a military term, gives anyone, anywhere in our country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons. Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his “religion” of slaughter. Moloch brooks no dissent, even from the highest court in the land.

Though LaPierre is the pope of this religion, its most successful Peter the Hermit, preaching the crusade for Moloch, was Charlton Heston, a symbol of the Americanism of loving guns. I have often thought that we should raise a statue of Heston at each of the many sites of multiple murders around our land. We would soon have armies of statues, whole droves of Heston acolytes standing sentry at the shrines of Moloch dotting the landscape. Molochism is the one religion that can never be separated from the state. The state itself bows down to Moloch, and protects the sacrifices made to him. So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.

December 15, 2012, 5:25 p.m.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

Kind'a weird when you think that the US is the only civilized, industrialized nation that doesn't have gun control OR socialized medicine.
You have the right to bear arms. You also have the right to bear the medical costs of some idiot shooting you for no good reason.

[martin14]

Every time someone talks about the 2nd Amendment in the U.S., gun sales go up.

So, keep talking.

[xerxes]

A symptom of the disease.

[bootlegga]

ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:

Rewrite it and amend it so that it reflects the modern reality. 5he establishment of a regular military and national guard negated the necessity of citizen militias....and Parliament isn't interested in reasserting its authority.

^ This.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with people owning firearms, there should just be some simple common sense limits to what people can legally own.

[CountLothian]

Canada has the same problem with gun culture and should not make judgement until they fix their own problem.

Deleting the gun registry in order to get the rural vote was just more Harperism vote getting and we lost a valuable and expensive tool.

The money was spent and we had a base of operations in order to implement various gun laws in future.

[martin14]

CountLothian CountLothian:

The money was spent and we had a base of operations in order to implement various gun laws in future.

Thanks for explaining the Liberal Party platform, lil' Justine.

[DrCaleb]

DanSC DanSC:

This means only allowing militia members to own guns would take guns from any men over age 45 and any women not currently in the National Guard. Maybe that's the right thing to do.

DanSC DanSC:

The only sure way to remove guns is to actually remove guns.

Australia had a massacre by someone with a gun every year for 10 years, until the Port Arthur Massacre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arth ... stralia%29

Then they banned everyone from owning a gun, and took all the guns away from everyone. They haven't had a gun massacre since.

Now, Australia and the US aren't the same culture any more than the US and Canada are, so a similar solution may not be appropriate. But, if there is to be a solution to the problem, then all options have to be on the table.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

CountLothian CountLothian:

Canada has the same problem with gun culture and should not make judgement until they fix their own problem.

Deleting the gun registry in order to get the rural vote was just more Harperism vote getting and we lost a valuable and expensive tool.

The money was spent and we had a base of operations in order to implement various gun laws in future.

Wow, you truly are bound and determined to show off that fridge temp IQ of yours aren't you.
The LGR was a gross invasion of privacy, something little maggots like you cry about whenever the big, bad Conservatives do it.

As far as Liberals and gun laws go, their idea of study and decision making runs along the lines of, "Oooo, that gun looks scary. We better ban it."
After the L'Ecole Polytechnique killings, the Liberals went on a long firearm banning rampage prohibiting all sorts of firearms, except the very model used in the shootings.
But their logic doesn't just fail there. Take a standard, perfectly legal .22 rifle. Add a folding stock for portability and the weapon becomes a restricted weapon. Add some after-market cosmetics to make it look like at AK-47 or any other "scary gun" and it becomes a prohibited weapon even though it's actual operation hasn't been altered in any way. Same rate of fire, same muzzle velocity, same ammo capacity.

Letting today's Liberals decide gun laws would be like allowing a child to decide which groceries will be allowed in the home based purely on their like or dislike of them.
They've proven they lack the maturity to make rational decisions about firearms, the LGR being a fine example of that. Firearms are already registered within the province in which they purchased/owned. There doesn't need to be a second tier of bureaucracy wasting tax payer dollars on something that's already being done. Cops in Vancouver also don't need to know if some dude in Toronto has firearms in his home either.

Just stick to topics you actually understand, like your childishly simplistic, "Harper sucks" threads.

[BartSimpson]

The first ten amendments (aka The Bill of Rights) to the Constitution are intrinsically part of the Constitution itself and cannot be repealed or amended to reduce the rights they enumerate.

This bit of scholarly study came up in regards to the First Amendment on several topics when proposals were floated to...

Ban pro-Communist speech.

Ban flag burning.

Ban pornography.

Restrict the right of protest (redress).

And there's no way the 2nd Amendment can be repealed or reduced without a revolution. The Constitution itself has no mechanism in it to allow for such a thing.

What many scholars (left and right) agree with is the notion that subsequent Amendments can enhance the liberties of citizens.

For instance:

The First Amendment can be enhanced by a subsequent amendment to include expression via technology that did not exist at the time of ratification. It can also be used to extend the protections of the press to all citizens who are acting in the capacity of press - something that is occurring in court decisions and, most recently, in California law.

The Second Amendment can be enhanced by a subsequent amendment that defines the right to carry, the right to keep, and can expand the notion of arms that one can bear - possibly legalizing full automatic weapons given that the Act that licensed automatic weapons has been, since 1986, an unconstitutional ban on such arms.

The 10th Amendment can be enhanced to return power to the states that the Federal government has taken unto itself absent anything other than the Interstate Commerce Clause - which has been horribly abused since the FDR administration.

But in no circumstance can the first ten amendments be repealed. They were ratified as a part of the Constitution and they are inseparable from it.

Ironically, anyone who really doesn't like the 2nd Amendment will need to use the freedom it protects so they can take up arms to try to overthrow it.

And anyone not willing to die for denying that liberty had damn well better appreciate that millions of Americans are damn well ready to kill for it.

[xerxes]

And that's the crux of the problem right there. Legal issues of repealing it aside, the problem is Bart's mentality. Everywhere else in the western world, gun ownership is a privilege that has to be earned. In the U.S., it's a right that's all but impossible to lose. Too many Americans have got it into their heads that their gun is going to take back their country when Obama declares himself president for life in January 2018. And their twisted conception of liberty is responsible for thousands of easily preventable deaths every.

If liberty means thousands of my countrymen die needlessly every year then I waive that freedom.