5 year old given rifle as gift, kills 2 year old sister

So you're saying that the Founding Fathers did not intend for individual rights to be protected?

It's simple logic, really. The protection of individual rights can only be done by a strong government. Without government, there can be no law; without law, there can be no rights or protections.

 

Luke: "Yes, I see it now. Only a strong government can bring order to the universe! I will join with you father, and after we overthrow Emperor Palpatine, nothing will stand in our way!"

Meanwhile, back in the world of legal scholarship, the colonies had operated under their own laws for about a century and a half before the American Revolution occurred. The operated under the Articles of Confederation for years afterward. James Madison drew on the state constitutions to form the basis of his Bill of Rights. If the states were already ensuring the rights of the people (including many not detailed in the Bill of Rights), then obviously the Founders didn't need a strong central government to ensure liberty. In fact, their arguments in favor of the Constitution largely consisted of convincing people that such a government would not destroy their existing rights. Thus the ten amendments.

If a strong central government was guaranteed to be a strong protector of rights, then Thomas Jefferson wouldn't have had to get so picky about the subject in the Declaration of Independence. If the colonists hadn't already recognized their own individual rights (no double jeopardy, speedy trial, trial by jury, etc) then neither they nor Thomas Jefferson would've been pissed off about the abuses of rights that they didn't even know they had.

 

^ what gturner said.

Whoa Nellie

 

Perhaps, then, you'd care to suggest who else BUT the government could possibly ensure that your rights are protected?

 

I smell a predictable, libertarian-sounding "the people themselves will band together and protect everybody's collective rights and freedoms by using their guns" explanation coming. That, or private police and security forces who operate by their own sets of rules - perhaps a combination of both?

 

Nope. Sorry to disappoint you, but since the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to limit the powers of government (all the writers and signers said so), a little logic would help.

First Amendment: Who would be suppressing the press, censoring the mail, prohibiting the people from gathering to petition the government, or prohibiting them from exercising their religion? That would be the government.

Second Amendment: Who would be taking away their guns? That would be the government.

Third Amendment: Who would be forcing people to quarter troops? Hrm. Not farmers, not horse breeders. Not candlemakers. Um, the government!

Fourth Amendment: Who would be searching people's houses without a warrant? The government's law enforcement officers.

Fifth Amendment: Who would be forcing people to testify against themselves, or get tried again for the same offense? The government, looking to keep trying the case until they get the verdict they want.

Sixth Amendment: Who would be dragging someone to be tried before a tribunal instead of a jury? Who would be trying someone far from where the crime was committed? Who would be refusing to let them confront their accusers in some kind of Star Chamber proceeding? Who would be inflicting cruel and unusual punishments? That would be Obama. ^_^ I mean the government.

Seventh Amendment: Who would be refusing people a civil jury trial? That would be the government - since the government is in charge of trials.

Eighth Amendment: Who would be inflicting cruel and unusual punishments or imposing excessive bail? That would be the government.

Ninth Amendment: Who would be trying to crush any rights not specifically enumerated above? That would be the government.

Tenth Amendment: Who would be trying to expand federal power far beyond what it was granted by the people? The government, backed by people who somehow think the Bill of Rights is a document to expand federal government powers.

***

Or, if a powerful central government is so important in ensuring people's rights, then the nations with the most powerful central governments should have been the most free, and where people enjoyed the most liberty. Those would be countries like pre-Revolutionary France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Communist East-bloc (the Warsaw Pact countries), Communist China, Cuba, and North Korea.

If, on the other hand, strong checks and limits on government power help guarantee people's rights, then countries like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland would be known for individual freedoms.

Since the government is ultimately what limits your freedom, cranking it up to eleven doesn't do you any good, and in fact gets you thrown in a gulag for thought crimes. You have to keep it turned down to three. Some say two, some say four, but generally three.

 

The 21st Century in which we live is different than the 18th Century when the US 2nd Ammendment was framed.

 

Demonstrate that anybody posting in this thread wants the government - as you put it - "cranked up to eleven." I've been reading this thing since it was first started and have followed every post that's been made since the OP. I haven't been seeing the words and wishes of fascistic, authoritarian posters who want to create a brutish nanny state, demolish freedom and toss others into a gulag.

Hyperbole to make your points doesn't help you make your points. In fact, it makes you sound desperate and silly. Most of us here are probably familiar enough with the Bill of Rights as enacted in 1791 to understand that a repressive government turning on its own people is indeed the only force that can limit or even crush the rights of the people enumerated in those first ten amendments. A repressive government that doesn't exist nor gives signs that it's about to spring into being.

The question is: why do you think the most successful democratic republic in history is on the verge of becoming tyrannical against her own people after 230 years of continuous and evolving democracy that has only grown more and more expansive over the generations, granting more and more people well-deserved liberty and opportunity as the decades and centuries have passed and we as a people have socially evolved and become more tolerant?

Why are you paranoid and distrusting of a government that - in spite of its innumerable flaws and acts of stupidity throughout its history - has been one of the most stable and democratic systems that's ever existed on the face of our planet? What do you think is going to happen to the American people and our Constitution, and why?

 

Yes, and it's different from the world when then 1st, 3rd, 4th... Amendments were framed. How does that argument establish anything with judges in black robes?

Regarding standard firearms, the changes since the 2nd Amendment have been far less than the changes affecting the other Amendments. George Washington was shot at by the British using breech loading Ferguson rifles, comparable to the 1811 Hall rifle which became standard US issue in 1819. The Hall wasn't really superseded until the cartridge-based repeating rifle designs blooming during the Civil War. Those remained in limited use until the turn of the century when bolt actions took over, and by WW-I the modern fully-automatic rifle was largely here. US forces in Afghanistan still use Browning 1917s for their superior range and firepower. With pistols, nothing much changed from 1787 until the Colt revolvers, which were soon followed by the cartridge fed Smith & Wessons. Those are still currently used, and many police departments only recently switched away from revolvers. Pistols changed again when Browning developed his various semi-automatic pistols from 1902 to 1911, and hardly a thing has changed since then. The US Marine Corps is going back to the 1911.

Despite what all the glossy gun magazines claim, nothing truly significant has happened in firearms in over a century. Even the electric powered mini-gun is over a hundred years old (The Ordnance Corp rejected it in 1905). Prior to that the only truly significant change was switching to brass cartridges, smokeless powder, and developing good feeding mechanisms, a set of changes that occurred from the 1860's to about 1910.

In contrast, the First Amendment environment we live in now bears virtually no resemblance to the 18th Century. Modern printing, photography, and photo printing would be unrecognizable, and that's still just putting ink on paper. Electronic communications would've been a crazy fantasy back then, much less Tweeting through the aether. The entire practice of journalism has been transformed, with the ability to record images and sound and broadcast them (or stream them on the Internet). And unlike guns, which seem frozen almost unchanged since the early 1900's, journalism keeps changing at an ever more rapid pace. Now there are citizen journalists, bloggers, news aggregaters, and streaming content driving newspapers out of business.
Even most of our old-school journalists have never actually touched real ink. In the future, news ink won't even exist. The First Amendment's whole "freedom of the press" section needs to be discarded, the relic of an obsolete technology in a primitive world.

The freedom to assemble and petition is likewise completely different. In the old day the citizens would have to saddle up a horse or hitch up a wagon and ride over mud trails to get to the seat of government. There were no convenient stores or motels along the way. Actually gathering any sizable number of citizens from across this great land was extremely difficult. Now they just hop on a plane and fly thousands of miles, then jump in a rental car, and boom, they're waving signs in front of the capitol and shutting down half the city. That First Amendment provision needs to be junked, too.

In the old days, freedom of religion probably made sense because churches were small and everyone had a different preacher. But now we have broadcasting - and mega-churches. Why not have a big national religion? Technology allows that now.

And finally, modern technology gives ordinary people the power to speak to millions, a privilege once only reserved for professional journalists and elected politicians. The government desperately needs to control what idiots say on the Internet.

So the First Amendment needs to be junked in its entirety because times have changed.

Next we get to the Third Amendment, written when quartering a soldier was done in a tiny cabin with no refrigerator, hardly anything worth calling a "stove", and very limited food supplies. Now we have huge houses with all the amenities, food coming out our ears, guest rooms, and 200 cable channels. With cell-phones the military can call up soldiers and tell them to hop in their cars and be at the base in twenty minutes. There's clearly no longer any reason for the Third Amendment because times have changed.

And the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments have seen so many changes in police practice, what constitutes evidence (fingerprints! DNA! laptop hard drives, video recordings from the interview room, computerized re-enactments, surveillance footage) that they might as well have been written for a different planet. Come on, a jury trial for any case involving more than $20?

You can go through all the old laws and show that technology and society have radically changed, so why only target the 2nd Amendment for repeal when it has probably had the least underlying changes of any part of the Bill of Rights? A gun is still a gun that makes a loud noise and fires a small hunk of lead when you pull the trigger. You still have to aim it exactly like George Washington would've aimed, you use the same finger to pull the trigger and the same thumb to cock it. We made reloading easier because reloading sucked. Everyone back in the day thought so, too, which is why they hailed Colt's revolver as the mankind's greatest invention. For journalism to change that little, it would mean hooking a waterwheel to a Franklin era printing press and saying "Look! It cranks itself!" Would be people be seriously rethinking the existence of the First Amendment because someone hooked a waterwheel to a printing press? I don't think so.

 

I already posted this in a similar discussion in TNZ, but I believe it's relevant here, too.

An interesting post about the famous argument "Civilian gun ownership prevents tyranny" by an American Korean:
http://askakorean.blogspot.it/2013/03/koreas-gunless-fight-against-tyranny.html

 

I think that sort of simplistic view can be a problem at the core of right wing thinking. Government can restrict or create freedom. Other forces can do too. We shouldn't fixate totally on one part of that mix.

(I don't have much to say on whatever's in the constitution, although they looked like very forward thinking guys for the time. But they didn't see the challenges of the modern world coming.)

 

Excellent questions, Eddie.

I hear so much more of this kind of paranoia than I did years ago. Not sure how much is an actual increase in fear, and how much is that we encounter a wider variety of people online than most of us know in person, so I'm just more aware of it.

 

So one of the most gun-free societies on Earth sufferers a long chain of dictatorships. Film at 11.

There was one attempt at armed revolt when one town raided a military arsenal. They got a couple of thousand guns, and then they got crushed when the national army surrounded them. That an armed rebellion not much larger than the Branch Davidians at Waco fails is not only not a surprise, combined with the decades of dictatorship in an unarmed but otherwise functioning society, it does far more to confirm the pro-gun argument than refute it. The Korean military could concentrate on one town because no other Koreans were armed, and nobody could come to the towns aid because no other Koreans were armed.

Military officers who use coup d'etats do so because they know that nobody is going to stop them. If armed civilian unrest or mass protests didn't overthrow the previous junta, they're probably not going to overthrow the next. Public opinion is largely irrelevant in such places, because the outcome all depends on which generals can assert leadership of the military, and thus establish a monopoly of force.

 

That is true - government can restrict freedom. Sometimes it must; other times it doesn't have to. But IMHO, only government can create freedom, because the chaos of mob rule is anything but free. To wit:

Without government, there can be no laws.
Without laws, there can be no order.
Without order, there can be only chaos.
With chaos, there can be only fear.
With fear, nobody is free.

 

To para-phrase you. "Some of the most gun-free soceities on Earth. suffer a long line of democratic governments. Film at 11."

The right to own or not to own a gun, is in no way an indication of whether or not you will live a free soceity or suffer under a tryanny.

As others have already said countries like the UK and Australia have restrictive gun laws, yet it's peoples don't leave under a tryanny and haven't done so for a long time.

 

source?

 

^Aren't revolvers still in use?

 

Questions he didn't really answer, but thanks.

 

Not by anybody cool.

 

When did Dirty Harry stop being cool?