Q: Gee Paul, why to you have the need to own such a (choose one or more:) ugly, powerful, black, evil, dangerous, and quick firing rifle(s) to hunt with?
I get this question asked more than any other:
A: First off I have a right to own such firearms and when we start talking about how one feels about my need to a right, things get very dangerous very fast. One never has to justify a right. See, I don’t feel that you have a need for a car that travels faster than 65 miles per hour, a video camera that can make child pornography, a church, temple or synagogue different than mine, access to books that I don’t feel good about, or to have more children, the need to vote ... can you see where this all leads? Secondly, I don’t hunt and neither does the argument that the Second Amendment is about hunting. Don’t be so stupid to think that the Constitution guarantees our right to hunt, it instead gives us the tools to keep our government in balance.
Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria, “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
Taking a rifle from my safe will not prevent some doped up gang banger from doing yet another drive by shooting over drug territory using a gun bought illegally. There are some pretty clear laws prohibiting murder yet it continues so why continue to pass more gun laws attempting to prevent murder? The number one weapon of choice (by a wide margin) continues to be hands and feet (FBI crime statistics) yet the media’s major focus is on so called “assault weapons”, which according to the FBI facts are used in less than one percent of killings.
Quite clearly the Founding Fathers were most strongly for law abiding citizens owning military firearms. To quote James Madison “The Constitution preserved the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation .... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms”.
Again quoting one of the patriots who risked everything throwing off an oppressive governement: “The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.” Samuel Adams
Words mean something and despite the best efforts of some to change their meanings or to completely ignore them in some cases the Constitution is still the supreme law of the land. The loss of a single child is a tragic - the loss of the freedom to suppress a tyrannical government is a tragedy on a much larger scale.
Paul
Do you believe that the 2nd Amendment, ratified in 1787, allows the states to have a National Guard, created by act of Congress in 1917?
