State's Rights and She-Weasels
Montana. Big Sky country. Ah, were it not for my very real fear that global warming will soon bring glaciers down from the north to overrun the place, I would give serious thought to moving there.
You see? Montana gets it. The whole "gun control" issue has never been about GUNS. it has always been about CONTROL. Control over people. Control over people's lives. Control over people's choices. Control over people's ability to take responsibility for their own safety and the safety of their own home and family. Control over how they choose to view the world. Control over which traditions they choose to preserve.
It is, and has always been, about control over how and what people think. And why they think it.
Meanwhile, Ms. Nancy Pelosi, the Head Madame of Washington's most popular House of Ill Repute, had the following to say to ABC news:
I personally don't want Pelosi crossing state lines either, but there's not much I can do about it. i didn't want her crossing the city limits of Washington, D.C. in the first place, but nobody listened to my opinion.
http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articles/article/montana_poised_to_buck_federal_gun_control/9392/
...they plan to find a "squeaky clean" Montanan who wants to send a note to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives threatening to build and sell about 20 such rifles without federal dealership licensing. If the ATF tells them it's illegal, they will then file a lawsuit in federal court — with any luck triggering a legal battle that lands in the nation's highest court....
..."Firearms are inextricably linked to the history and culture of Montana, and I'd like to support that," said bill sponsor Rep. Joel Boniek, R-Livingston, during its House debate. "But I want to point out that the issue here is not about firearms. It's about state rights."
You see? Montana gets it. The whole "gun control" issue has never been about GUNS. it has always been about CONTROL. Control over people. Control over people's lives. Control over people's choices. Control over people's ability to take responsibility for their own safety and the safety of their own home and family. Control over how they choose to view the world. Control over which traditions they choose to preserve.
It is, and has always been, about control over how and what people think. And why they think it.
Meanwhile, Ms. Nancy Pelosi, the Head Madame of Washington's most popular House of Ill Repute, had the following to say to ABC news:
."..in recent months, the Supreme Court has ruled in a very- in a direction that gives more opportunity for people to have guns. We never denied that right. We don't want to take their guns away. We want them registered. We don’t want them crossing state lines..." (emphasis added)
I personally don't want Pelosi crossing state lines either, but there's not much I can do about it. i didn't want her crossing the city limits of Washington, D.C. in the first place, but nobody listened to my opinion.
Yes, Montana gets it It is definitely about control, control over people's lives and choices. So what else is new?
What the gun lobby seem to miss is that no right, liberty or freedom is ever absolute. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater (negative containment). You must make sure the product you sell to the public does what you claim or customers won't be back (positive).
I believe in the right to bear arms but not when the technology of the weapon (automatic vs. handheld pistol) has given the "bad guys" so much an advantage of law enforcement.
So if you can't find or control the "bad guys", then you can limit or regulate access to the weapons like we regulate so many aspects of today's life i.e. peaceful nuclear energy/power, food supplies, electricity, etc.
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You have been misled by propaganda. Please let me present the other side of the argument?
First off, note that Montana is doing this primarily as a way to flip off the federal government. Guns are part of the tradition of the western US, so they chose guns as the issue to go with. but the main purpose for deliberately provoking a conflict with the ATF is to force a court battle that will (they hope) make it necessary for the federal government to finally admit that they have been routinely exceeding their constitutional authority. (Which they have by the way.)
Secondly, I freely grant you that no right is ever absolute. We, the "gun lobby" do not try to claim that the right to keep and bear arms is absolute. Just as society has the authority to deprive a citizen of their god-given right to life if they commit a heinous crime, or their god-given right to liberty if they commit a heinous crime, society also has the innate authority to deprive a citizen of their god-given right to keep and bear arms if they commit a heinous crime.
My first point is that it is already illegal for a convicted criminal to own a gun anywhere in America. It has been illegal for a long time. If you commit a serious crime in America, part of your punishment is that you lose the right to own a gun for the rest of your life.
Why should I, innocent of any crime, be deprived of my right to own a gun? I didn't do anything wrong. If my neighbor can arbitrarily demand that I be forced to give up my property just because it makes him nervous, then I should have the authority to arbitrarily demand that he give up his damnable yellow truck, because it makes me queasy to look at the nasty thing. Fair is fair. I have no intention of shooting him, and he has no intention of running me over. But my gun is no more dangerous than his truck. Right?
As far as automatic versus hand held pistol, this is where the most egregious form of deliberate lying by the government and the media gets under my skin. The weapons that the mainstream media call 'assault weapons" are no such thing. An assault weapon is a machine gun.
It is already illegal for a private citizen to own a machine gun in American without special governmental permission and registration. This law has been in for more than fifty years.
The so called assault weapons are not machine guns, they are not battle weapons. They are simple hunting weapons. They not automatic either. They are semi-automatic. They means that instead of going cock-the-trigger-and-fire, cock-the-trigger-and-fire, cock-the-trigger-and-fire, when you shoot one of them, instead you can simply go cock-the-trigger-and-fire, pull-the-trigger-and-fire, pull-the-trigger-and-fire, etc.
You dare not get to fast about doing it either, or those semi-auto guns will get hot and jam on you. Not only are they not designed for full automatic fire, they are not made out of the same steel as a machine gun, nor are they designed with the same type of cooling arrangement.
The police in America already have guns as good or better than the so called "assault weapons" that Pelosi and her crew want to ban.
The problem that the police in this country face comes from gang member who are carrying real machine guns. You recall that real machine guns are illegal here? And that they have been illegal here for fifty years? Yet somehow the criminals have never had any perceptible difficulty getting their hands on them.
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So if you can't find or control the "bad guys", then you can limit or regulate access to the weapons like we regulate so many aspects of today's life i.e. peaceful nuclear energy/power, food supplies, electricity, etc.
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The difference between regulating guns and regulating nuclear power or the other things you mentioned is this. Regulating access to guns cannot be done. We tried to regulate access to illegal drugs. You can see how well that is working. We are the biggest market for illegal drugs in the world. It is already illegal to own a REAL assault rifle here, and has been illegal for the last half century, but the crooks have no trouble getting one whenever they want one. We tried to regulate our politicians access to bribes. Hah!
How would limiting my access to a hunting rifle (an AR-15 shoots .22 caliber bullets) make the cops any safer? Am I a danger to the cops? For sure, limiting my access to a semi-automatic hunting rifle is not going to stop the drug gangs from getting their hands on real military machine guns. They buy those directly from suppliers in eastern Europe, who ship them across the Atlantic and the Pacific (both) and run them through Canada and Mexico (both countries have extremely stiff gun control laws), then sell them to their lieutenants on the street.
Meanwhile, well meaning people who have been repeatedly lied to by the press are led to believe that preventing law abiding citizens from owning hunting rifles will keep the police safer. it won't make any difference.
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What is the limit of the "routinely exceeding their constitutional authority." As I read the 2nd Amendment, the people have the right to keep and bear arms. It didn't say what kind of arms and how technologically advanced.
So I think this is where we are splitting hairs, I agree with you, if the citizens of this country wish to bear arms, then have at it.
However, I don't think some gun dealers are as honorable as you when they sell automatic or semi-automatic private gun deals. We just had a big gun show in Chantilly, Virginia, a brother of one of the of the Virginia Tech victims in co-operation with some organization just walked in and bought as many guns as he could carry and walked out with them in his hands. No cool-off period, no background checks. They donated the guns back to the ATF. It is the ease in which any "son of a gun" off the street can get a gun that scares the heck out of me. Also, seems more people are buying guns in this recession to protect themselves. Seems like everybody wants to participate in an arms race even though they might not have the money to pay the mortgage/rent next month.
By the way, one of the guns he bought was an AK-47. Is that any kind of automatic or semi-automatic?
No regulatory system is perfect either i.e. peanut butter scare, Arkansas Nuclear #1 fire drills. Do you live near the Arkansas nuclear units?
No, I don't want to take away your AR-15 hunting rifle as long as it isn't a semi-automatic. I want to give the poor animal a chance.
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Well, the part about the federal government routinely exceeding their authority refers to the tenth amendment to the Constitution. In other words, #10 on the Bill of Rights. It states:
In other words, the federal government is specifically forbidden to do anything except that which the constitution specifically says it is supposed to do. Unfortunately, ever since the Civil War the federal government has taken more and more centralized authority unto itself. MUCH more than the constitution permits. To understand the full picture, you need to go back to the beginning and study the past two hundred years of political and military history in America pretty intensively. But that is what it boils down to. The Founding Fathers were worried about power becoming concentrated into the hands of a few powerful men inthe federal government. So they deliberately wrote teh constitution isn such as way as to make it clear that the states and the people held the ultimate authority.
But that isn't the way it worked out.
The whole system was based on the principle that the government answers to the people, the eople do NOT answer to the government. The government has NO right, has NO authority of any kind that the PEOPLE do nto specifically delegate to it. The system was also designed with the mechanisms in place so that (theoretically) the people could revoke their delegation of authority at will if they decided that their servant, the government, was getting too big for its britches. In final extremis, the Founding Fathers wrote teh Second Amendment so that the People would have the ultimate option of naked force as an option to enforce their will on a rebellious servant (government) who refused to accept its place as the servant of the people.
Remember that the men who wrote the Constitution were radical revolutionaries who had just finished fighting a bloody war against their own king, and had bought their own freedom against their own oppressive government at a horrible price. They wanted to make sure that their descendants never had to pay the same price.
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As far as giving the animal a chance, why should I? If I go varmit hunting, why shold I give a coyote a chance? Does a coyote give a rabbit a chance? Or a chicken? You ever see what a possum or a coon can do to a farmer's chicken coop? When I hunt I am far more merciful than any animal predator. And a semi-automatic weapon allows me the option of a second shot instantly if I make a poor shot the first time, thus minimizing the animal's suffering.
No honorable hunter would deliberately cause suffering. The kill is the least of it. Actually, killing is quite distasteful to me. It means that the pleasant part is over and the work is starting. If I didn't love wild meat I would not even bother with it.
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