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I don't suppose it's occurred to anyone that the second ammendment is fully exercised whenever a state has its own national guard? Those are mailmen and paperboys and dentists and whoever else who take it upon themselves to reserve some vigilance (against the scary Federal government or whatever your paranoid fantasy is ...) in the form of an armed force. If I heard correctly, that force is not subordinate to, or directly monitored by the federal government and it comes in real handy whenever a fascist takeover occurs. So what's the problem with removing handguns whose only perceivable function is to kill humans?
and hey, if one of your perverse arguments for having a unlicensed handgun under every couch-coushin in America is "we need to protect ourselves from our own government" then let's pick up the pace! My atomic cruise missle is coming in from Pottery Barn next week! What else would it take to defend myself from the U.S. armed forces?
And all this bullshit logic about the second ammendment's parallels to the first ammendment ... or how ANY of this in any way links to homosexuals is just a syllogistic fuckup. No, no, no, the first ammendment doesn't let you say whatever, whenever, wherever -- it is restricted (and reinforced) by libel laws and a whole smattering of regulations. I can say what I want, but I can't go shoving it onto your doorstep. I can report what I think is true, but I can't lie about something important or skew things to harm others -- and when I do? I'm punished, my freedoms are restricted. So the parallel to the second ammendment isn't as simple as "I speak therefore I shoot." It's more like "I have a voice -- protected and restricted by law just as I have a gun, protected and restricted by law."
If guns were as "inalienable" as our voice-boxes, we'd have them growing somewhere on our bodies.
Full disclosure: i'm actually against most kinds of gun-control -- I think local districts handle the problem according to their needs. The u.s. is too large and diverse to make a national mandate and deconstruction of gun traffic successful right now. The decreasing crime rates during the Clinton years had nothing to do with gun control (how could it? the fight STILL rages on) -- it had to do with rising employment and a healthier public ethic about living in a cosmopolitan society.
I'm sure people will always point to school shootings and the guy at the baseball game as proof of the converse -- but what kind of people are these anyway? Not to demonize them, but they have a very specific set of problems and you can't put all the blame on the catalyst. second, school shootings don't happen every week, every month. When they do happen, we recoil as we should -- BECAUSE IT IS UNUSUAL I.E. NOT INDICATIVE OF A NATIONAL SITUATION THAT HAS TO OR CAN BE FIXED WITH A FEDERAL LAW. It wasn't guns that made the kids at columbine think of killing -- it was years of estrangement and alienation from every wise-fuck adolescent that shat on them coupled with the KNOWLEDGE that they would instantly achieve fame through death. And you know what? They have. The only thing that motivated the size of that spectacle (i.e. the body count -- to use one sick barometer) was a teenager's media-savvy notion of what becomes "important" in the national eye. I ask in all candor: who has to do more to fix Columbine? Me and you, watching from Diane Fucking Sawyer every night hundreds of miles away? or the dozens of families who are still greiving about what's happened to their community? And what do you think has caused all the copycat variants in other schools around the world? Inate evil? Or the television crap that REACHES the rest of the world?
It's not for lack of sympathy -- but sympathy doesn't often convert into purposeful federal laws.
I still think restriction and registration are fine, as local governments see fit, and that leaves plenty for one-man militias to protect themselves with if they're dissatisfied with the government. I only mention the media-bitching above because I really hate the way liberals use specific tragedies to wedge-issue their way into useless federal laws ... not that it matters since the conservatives have sold out for monetary (insted of moral) reasons anyway.
Blah blah blah. I'm sure I sound confusing or contradictory -- I just wanted to throw out some other angles to this whole debate. I will say that it is silly to compare our policy to foreign countries -- the UK, Austrailia, whatever -- because the United States is a legislative and historical anomaly that doesn't really fit any rules for democracy.
Submitted for ridicule ...
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