How?


Not by your lights, by your logic we should give them medals.

How about Timothy McVeigh? Did he have the right to blow up that building and kill all those people? He did have support in the US.

According to most of the conservatives on this board John McCain will be the people's choice in November. If he loses, do they thus have the right to just go off killing govt officials because the people's choice, IN THEIR OPINON, was thwarted?

How about the Obama people if they're the losers, hell, how about Hillary and Ron Paul? By your logic anyone who really felt strongly on the matter should be holed up in a tower somewhere with a thousand rounds

AHA

So there IS some abridgement of the right to bear arms you believe in.

How DARE you sirrah, How dare you say that someone doesn't have the Constitutional right, nay, I say the sacred DUTY to defend his azaleas IF THAT IS WHAT HE THINKS HE HAS.

Why? Why should they get in trouble. by your lights we should give them a medal

I think you guys need to brush up on your manuals. No one, the NRA included, is really arguing that people should have the individual right to just blow away any govt official they want. The only people I've seen seriously advocate it AFAIK are you guys here.

Read the post and some history. The Bill of Rights was written about 20 years after the events we're discussing. I'm referring to the Colonial legislatures.

Try to keep up with what's being discussed, that way you won't break into the conversation with irrelevancies.

1) McVeigh didn't use firearms. He showed what was possible even without firearms, in the most cowardly was possible. It's not surprising someone like you would use this as an example. Pathetic.

2) Pure idiocy, unworthy of a response.

3) There is only one person here who has suggested that Americans can blow away any government official whenever they want. You.

No one else here is suggesting that, only you.

People like you are the reason up to 70 million people died under MAO.

People like you are why well over 100 million people were killed in the 20th century by their own government. Possibly as many as 300 million.

Statistics of Democide

Democide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



I only wish you could have lived under MAO's rule. Or Stalin, or Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Suharto. If you had and lived, I would bet everything I own you would support the right of the people to keep and bear arms and would actually understand why the right is SO IMPORTANT TO PRESERVE LIBERTY.

But of course, you care nothing about these 100-300 million people who were murdered by their own governments. Instead of imagining what that must have been like, you prefer to make nonsensical and illogical analogies in order to attempt to demonize the right to bear arms.

Gee, I wonder if any US politicians know the real reason for the 2nd amendment.

Let's take a look.

[i]WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Senator Russ Feingold today weighed in on the hotly debated constitutional question of whether or not the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees an individual's right to bear arms or if that right is reserved solely for states.

"The Second Amendment was clearly intended to counterbalance a distrust of a potentially oppressive federal government and to protect the right to defend against an oppressive government. The question arises over whether that right rests with the states alone or with the states and the people of those states," said Feingold. "I have always believed the Second Amendment clearly guarantees the people themselves the right to bear arms."

//////////

"I believe the original intent of the Second Amendment was to protect each individual's right to keep and bear arms, and to guarantee that individuals acting collectively could cast away the harness of any oppressive government that may arise. Unfortunately, there are individuals and advocacy groups who take the position that the Second Amendment merely protects the state's right to an organized military ("well-regulated militia") while rejecting any notion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. I find it hypocritical and distressing when civil libertarians who support the individual rights recognized in the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments and defend these rights against governmental abuse are overcome by their own fear of one another when the subject turns to the Second Amendment."--Congressman Don Young

"...the second amendment is not for killing little ducks and leaving Huey and Dewey and Louie without an aunt and uncle. It is for hunting politicians, like [in] Grozny, [and in] 1776, when they take your independence away."__ Representative Bob Dornan, US House of Representatives, January 25, 1995

These quotes illustrate that our Founding Fathers wrote and passed the second amendment to guarantee individuals the right to protect themselves, their property, and their loved ones from others and from the government itself. They fully understood the danger of allowing power to be concentrated in a government. Power corrupts; if the government were given the power to be the sole guarantor of a person's life and property (pursuit of happiness), it would have tremendous coercive power, and would inevitably infringe upon his liberty as well. Such a democracy would not be one in which the people elected their servants, but one in which they elected their masters, by majority vote. Individuals would be at the mercy of a government for all their protection, plus they would be defenseless before their government.

--From the vote on cloture for the assault weapon ban from the 103rd Congress.

It used to be found here......

www.senate.gov - This page cannot be found.

......but it appears to have disappeared from the net.

I have spent many hours looking for this piece again, but it is gone.

Of course many government documents have disappeared from the net.

Secret Agreement Reveals Covert Program to Hide Reclassification from Public

Secret Agreement Reveals Covert Program to Hide Reclassification from Public

Let's establish one thing. Do you, or do you not, support the idea that people have an INDIVIDUAL right to defend their rights, with violence, from the legally constituted government.

This is a yes or no question. Please, no explanations and for god's sake, no more quotes. I just want to be sure we're both clear on this.

Look, a rebellion starts with one person. You seem to think only a group has this right, so let me answer with a question, even though I know you will hate it.

How many people are needed in order to determine if a rebellion is legitimate?

Do I need 5 people?

500?

500,000?

How many people are needed to legitimize the right to overthrow a government?

I will say this........

If the government ever starts rounding up a group of Americans to exterminate, I will fight them, even if I fight ALONE.

Not at all. I'm simply saying that allowing individuals to bump off government officials when they don't approve of their actions is a cure far worse than the disease. Government does more good than harm, even tyrannical governments, and if government officials are being murdered left and right, the government cannot operate. If you make accepting that a principle, then it applies to any government anywhere, if the people don't like it. There are people who consider the U.S. government tyrannical, are there not? Some of them foreigners, some Americans. Some even on this forum.

What you are saying, in effect, is that Timothy McVeigh was simply exercising his rights. I cannot possibly agree.

There are times, in extremity, when it may be necessary to organize an armed resistance and work to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical regime. (Far less often than might be supposed, though. All too often, when a revolution overthrows a tyranny the result is another tyranny. France -- Russia -- China -- Cuba. Was Napoleon better than Louis XVI? In some ways yes, in other ways he was worse -- more of a warmonger -- but certainly France under his rule was no model of liberal democracy. Were the Communists better than the Tsars? Same answer, yes and no. Seems to me that expending that kind of blood to replace one set of tyrants with another is not a good investment. And this is the rule of revolution; there are precious few exceptions.)

But in any case, that is not the same as saying we should have an armed populace for the purpose of restraining tyranny. That is a prescription for anarchy, not for revolution.

And so -- it doesn't matter how many people were murdered and otherwise oppressed by the regimes in question. I know the answers, or can easily look them up, but once again, you are arguing for B on the basis of A, when B does not logically follow from A. And so the truth of A (on which actually we don't disagree) is irrelevant.

So, if the Chinese were able to overthrow Mao's regime and save 30-70 million lives, that would have been irrelevant?

I give up.

You and Drake just don't get it.

While you seem to think I have been brainwashed by the NRA, it is you who have been brainwashed, from the schools, the government and the media, all 3 of which are controlled by the foundations and their front organizations.

Believe whatever you want. I know that if I had lived under Mao's rule, or Stalin's, or Hitler's, I would have taken at least one government scumbag with me before I died. You on the other hand, would have died cowering in a corner.

Overthrow Mao's regime and replace it with what? I remind you that Mao himself overthrew Chiang Kai-Shek, who was hardly an angel, and that Chiang in his turn overthrew the Manchu Emperor. Your reasoning would support both of them in doing so, yet were they actually improvements? You seem to operate on the assumption that when a tyranny is overthrown by an insurgency the result will usually be a liberal democracy. In fact, the result is usually another tyranny. Actually, I can't think of a single counterexample.

OTOH, after suffering Napoleon's dictatorship and several attempts to restore the monarchy, France evolved into a genuine democracy, which she is today. That democracy survived many crises, including military defeat and several years of Nazi occupation. Britain also evolved a democratic government, which while never actually terminating the monarchy has rendered it pretty much irrelevant to ordinary governance. And so on.

If China develops a liberal democracy, it will be by a similar process of evolution. Violent overthrow of the Chinese government will serve only to replace, yet again, one tyranny with another.

It is not enough to seethe with outrage against a repressive regime. There are good and bad ways to fight repression. One must think about the consequences of one's actions, not merely react in a knee-jerk fashion.

Look, I live in the USA. We, the people, have a constitutional right to bear arms which was included in the Bill of Rights as a protection against tyranny in government.

Either you accept this, or you do not.

Now that's the favorite trick of Philadelphia lawyers, but I'll accept it, since I did so before and it almost makes a point.

The actual number varies, but it should be a majority of those who care about the relevant issue(s) This is why I spoke of a legislature before, since that's the most common way of determining this. Town councils, or groups of them are probably even better.

If everyone or most everyone, or at least most of he voters are really up in....arms.... and the govt is still absolutely recalcitrant, then yeah, your next step might be to at least clean a firearm or two.

But you seem to be saying that I have the right to assassinate people all on my own, to become judge, jury and executioner for whatever reasons I see fit.

Yeh, I've been conditioned to believe that murder is wrong. So shoot me.

Howsabout I don't kill anyone and don't die myself either, that seems to beat both your choices.

I wouldn't let things get to that point to begin with, if they did, I'd probably give up, that's why I intend to make sure it doesn't get that bad. I certainly don't sit around all day fantasizing about it while cleaning my Glock.

In the sense you mean, I do not. The reason the right to bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights is, rather unusually, stated up front in the Second Amendment itself: because it was believed that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. A well-regulated militia consisting of all able-bodied male citizens, prepared to serve their country's defense in time of war, and armed because, well, an army without weapons is kind of useless.

The militia was "necessary to the security of a free state" because a country must defend itself militarily when attacked, and the alternative to a militia is a standing army, which was considered a threat to liberty.

Also, it was conceived that the states -- not the armed individual -- might at extremity employ the militia to defend itself against a federal government gone bad. Well, we can see how well that worked out, can't we? The problem with this conception is that a state can have an idiosyncratic view of what constitutes "going bad" just as an individual such as McVeigh did. There were a number of states in the 19th century that believed the federal government keeping slavery out of the western territories acquired from Mexico amounted to tyranny, and that employed their militias to defend against said federal government. The result? 600,000 deaths and an awful lot of property damage.

In short -- NO, while there is indeed a right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution, it has NOTHING to do with a right to oppose the government by force.

Through demonstrations and :gasp: rebellion.

Not really. They obviously weren't acting on the will of any significant portion of the populace and chose useless targets for the purposes of upsetting people rather than actually accomplishing something by targeting the military or national infrastructure.

Yes. And the people who disagreed with him(myself included) had a right to put him to death for it.

If they see sufficient trouble with the way the coming administration handles things. Hell, they could vote for McCain, see him win, and still rebel.

Not really. If someone feels that the government has taken an unacceptable turn that can't be solved peacefully, they should take up arms. Note, they don't simply have that right. They are obligated to do so if they are loyal to their ideals.

Mostly because there are obvious peaceful solutions one could take.

Because they'd lose. If they win, they should institute the system they feel is most appropriate.

This is in response to my statement that the NRA doesn't understand the value of rebellion?

I'll put it simply. Anyone who feels the government is abusing liberty beyond their capacity to accept and beyond peaceful solutions to correct is mandated by their ideals(assuming those ideals aren't a commitment to nonviolence) to take up arms.

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During the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every profession is chosen as a means to an end but continued as an end in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent act of stupidity.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow

All good socialists have villas in Southern France. That's not the point.
-Eurosocialist

I thought elections had some role too, but if you're just that anxious to start killing people....

So your epitome of the good citizen is Saddam Hussein?

Reread your Hobbes, in your perfect world, your state of nature, noone would be able to express any opinion without fear that he and his loved ones would be killed for it.

It is, after all, the most perfect freedom that forges the strongest chains

Elections would be part of the peaceful process.

I'm fairly certain most people's opinions don't incur instant, irreversible placement into public law. It's also been my experience that most people's opinions are relatively mundane and shrugged off by others.

__________________
During the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every profession is chosen as a means to an end but continued as an end in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent act of stupidity.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow

All good socialists have villas in Southern France. That's not the point.
-Eurosocialist

I don't see what public law has to do with it.

Look, you posit that people have a right, nay, a duty, to take up arms to 'defend liberty' if they believe they must, you further posit that it is up to each individual as to what constitutes an attack on liberty, as well as whether and how liberty needs defending.

So, what's to stop me from deciding that the local school teaching evolution requires that I go down and kill all the teachers and the students, that way they'll be rescued from the devil and all go to heaven and all that nasty communism they've been teaching, well we need to set an example.

Thusly, in my eyes, I defend freedom. How can you arrest me? I was doing my Constitutional duty, as you see it.

Does anybody know if a LeMat revolver would be considered a "short barreled shotgun" since it can have buckshot loaded into it's secondary barrel? I'm just curious about any laws on this.

Info on LeMat Revolver for those unfamiliar with it.

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