Wyoming Bill Would Nullify Obama Gun Control, Jail Feds
- Thread starter achilles28
- Start date
Wouldn't be OK with restriction on free speech beyond what we have now.
Wouldn't be OK with government confiscation of all guns. Am OK with some restrictions, but believe strongly that they need to be uniform and hence federal rather than state by state.
Not going to try and amass enough firepower to hold out against the U.S. army when they come for me.
OK with universal national service for a year or two so long as there is some choice in what type of service. Not OK with trying to force everyone into the same mold.
You are probably aware that although firearms are common in Swiss households (locked up), the Swiss have very restrictive and tightly enforced gun laws.
Quote from piezoe:
I just finished reading Scalia's opinion in the D.C. v. Heller case. He jumped through all manner of hoops to get the stated reason for Madison's second amendment separated from the right to bear arms. Breyer and Stevens of course dissented. They wanted to tie the two clauses together. I read just the briefs on Breyer and Stevens' dissenting positions.
This ruling leaves the door wide open to legislating precisely what type of guns you can own as an individual, and Scalia so much as said that in his opinion. The ruling does preserve, with exceptions, the right to own firearms. There is no question at all there.
One could not ask for a better example of how the court can by interpreting freely our eighteenth century constitution, move it along with the times, and keep it alive. A literal reading of the second amendment would suggest it is obsolete, as there is no longer a need to raise a militia; we have a permanent one in the National Guard. Yet through some rather strained arguments, the court was able to dismember the amendment, which Scalia presumes was there because the States were fearful the federal government might try to consolidate its power by seizing the arms of state militias. Through skilful surgery, the Court separated the individual right to keep and bear arms from any consideration of a militia.
Curiously, Scalia was not impeded in his interpretation of the "real reason" for the amendment by the definition of "militia" embodied in the constitution itself. There it is made very clear that the militia is for protecting the federal government from rebellion or foreign invasion. There is no mention in the constitution of the states using their militias to protect the states from the federal government.
Scalia has always insisted he is a "strict constructionist" yet the calisthenics he went through in handing down the majority opinion that separated the reason --the overt one, not the imagined one-- for Madison's second amendment from the rights it endows would have done Houdini proud.
The single most amazing statement in the entire 64 page opinion was that the 18th century definition of arms is exactly the same as today's definition. The support Scalia's bevy of young clerks turned up for that unbelievable pronouncement was rather unconvincing.
So Lucrum, after reading the majority opinion in D.C v. Heller I am' inclined to think it will be somewhat easier to legislate what arms you are allowed to own now that we have Heller. If you read the opinion, I think you will agree the door was left wide open.
When I asked if the allowed arms could be legislated outside the Constitution you had it exactly right! When you said, "I don't think so, but the Supreme Court does."
I've never understood why the focus is on this very narrow definition of "assault weapon" which involves the barrel length, short or folding stock, the presence of a flash suppressor and the accommodation of large detachable magazines.
You can still buy an M1A (.308) but they don't seem concerned about those because they are "long rifles". Buying an M1A in California requires nothing but a 10-day waiting period. You can sell the gun to anyone afterwards and no record of the sale is needed.
Buying a .22 Pistol requires a background check and the weapon must be registered, there is the waiting period and the seller will usually required to you look at a safety video after which they give you a safety card to carry in your wallet. Ownership cannot be transferred without an FFL holder handling the sale.
I think the whole idea of banning semi-automatics is unworkable. I don't have a link but I'm pretty certain that the majority of guns being sold are semi-automatic and after years of shunning them I've bought a few myself in recent years. I've read that there are something like 65 million gun owners in the USA and I suppose that nearly all of them have a semi-automatic or even more than one. Are they going to go door-to-door asking for them or just place draconian criminal sentences on people who are caught with them? If the ban is only on new sales of semi-automatics how is that effective if there is 60 or so million of them already in private hands?
I still haven't gotten a direct answer on the question "why punish millions upon millions of law abiding gun owners instead of concentrating on the mentally ill people who are shooting up schools, theaters and political events?
go to your local gun store or even shop online.
You're making arguments against things that don't exist. hey man, I didn't label the ar-15 and its variants 'civilian', but they AREN'T the same gun used by our military so I just pointed that out to you. any gun and any number of other weapons used would have still produced tragedy at Newtown. These events are anomalies, and no amount of legislation, and no ban on a type of gun or even all guns will prevent violence in the future. Gun confiscation on the other hand, would turn MILLIONS of innocent, law-abiding Americans into criminals for NOT giving up their birthright.
The agenda is to disarm Americans like most of Europe. The rest are just baby steps in that direction.
Just like gay marriage is on it's way to becoming the same as hetro marriage in all respects and government dependency is on course to become available for all. Eliminate the rich through taxation and regulation making government the sole authority over our lives as we make a slow march to socialism, then communism and Marxism and soon it will be the Orwellian society. Just look how far we have come already.
The end game is the great society with one world government controlling everyone and everything. Watch out for the thought police.
Maybe the robots really will become smart enough to save us from ourselves.
Because we don't know who all the crazies are. Which is why we don't let just anyone have nukes, because the cost of a crazy emerging and employing the technology is too high. So everyone is "punished".
We don't know who all the criminals are, but the police need to be more powerful than them. As we don't know if you are crazy or not, or if you'll become crazy one day, you are "punished" by being left at a relative power disadvantage vis a vis the police. Again, everyone is "punished" because of the inevitable existence of crazies and criminals.