The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. Read it. Re-read it. Understand it. If you do not believe in the Constitution and it’s processes, how are you an American? The 2nd Amendment does not say the right shall not be taken away…it says no infringed. There are already ILLEGAL infringements now. It did not say the right can be revoked as long as a bunch of people want to pass laws because they think guns are dumb and all.

The argument that “some kids get hurt/killed”, therefore the 2nd amendment is null and void, is mind-numbingly stupid. Kids die in car wrecks, ban all cars. Kid’s die from household chemicals, ban them. Pools? Ban them. And on and on and on. Kids die falling out of windows, ban windows and multistory buildings. Grow up. Your argument is, in fact, anti-intellectual.

“the whole point is to get the weapons out of circulation completely so that they aren’t there to be abused in the first place”
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honest, even if ridiculous; you should beware,tho- honesty is not exactly admired on the left!

allow me to leave you with the words of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution…remember that, the supreme law of the land?

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the
people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

any questions?

I just have one question for you. Okay, two actually.

In countries where guns are difficult or impossible for average citizens to obtain legally….is the violent crime rate higher or lower than in countries where the situation is otherwise?

In countries where rates of firearms ownership are so high as to render the nation “awash in guns,” is the violent crime rate higher or lower than in countries where the situation is otherwise?

Compare ownership rates in the UK to those in Finland or Switzerland. You will find that the crime rate, correspondingly, is higher in the UK, lower in Switzerland. The USA is somewhere in-between on both counts.

Your primary argument seems to be about crime rates. Until you’ve addressed this “central point,” (is arms control effective in reducing crime or not?), then all your meaningless blather about being a “rabid anti-gun or anti-individualist crusader to think things are too close to the latter extreme as they stand” is just that…meaningless blather and boilerplate rhetoric. Subjective opinion masquerading as objective analysis.

I myself actually buy the logic that the right to bear arms is the right to be a free citizen, with the right to defend oneself against those who would take away your inborn rights to life and property. Like I said, I’ve changed my mind on gun control over the past few years as a result of considering this logic. All I’m saying is that if the inevitable corollary of this is that in such a world, six-year-old kids will kill other six-year-olds — either by sheer ease of accident or sheer convenience of impulse — it is much less something to brag of and something to treat much more as a necessary evil.

It should be born in mind that guns don’t solve all the problems they create. Yes, that 90-lb woman now has a way to defend herself against the 230-lb rapist – if the rapist doesn’t simply grab her before she has a chance to get to the gun, or worse, use his overwhelming strength and mass advantage to grab the gun away from her before she can muster the nerve to fire and turn the weapon to his advantage. (Ask any rape unit officer about how often scenarios precisely like that actually happen, compared to the righteous fantasy of self-defense.) For every instance of someone successfully defending himself with a weapon against an aggressor there are multiple instances of accidental self-harm, loss of the guns to robbery before you can get to them, family murder and suicides that are much easier to commit on impulse with a gun in the house…. The list goes on and on, and because there’s no way to know how many crimes are not committed simply because a gun wasn’t available at the time of the impulse to do it, it’s all too easy to overlook this convenience factor. Guns make it easy to kill, easier and quicker and safer than anything else. That’s the whole point of them; that’s why they’re built. They have no other purpose but to make it as easy as possible to hurt another human being as badly as possible, and simple statistics means the more of them there are around, the more damage they will do.

It seems to me that there must be a happy medium between an arms restriction that robs a populace of a right to defend itself against aggressors and an unregulated arms industry that makes it criminally and negligently easy for that populace to become such aggressors; you don’t have to be a rabid anti-gun or anti-individualist crusader to think things are too close to the latter extreme as they stand, and to argue for stricter regulations. To argue that we need to do a better job of enforcing the responsibilities that go with a right is not the same as arguing that the right itself must be revoked.

Second … the primary reason for shooting deaths in the US is gang violence. A sane and legal drug enforcement policy including the right to possess marijuana will eliminate the vast majority of these shootings as well as the financial motivation of the gangs. Gang-related gun crime is the result of a dysfunctional broken system. Most of these criminals were either arrested previously for violent crimes and released, or arrested for non-violent crimes and became violent within the prison system.

So the answer is not to repeal the second amendment and turn law-abiding citizens into unarmed ducks in a shooting gallery, but for government to do it’s job by keeping dangerous people locked up, and conducting it’s law enforcement as if the US is a free republic and not a fascist police state.

Remove homicides committed by blacks and the US has a lower percapita incidence of homicides than France or Germany, who have much stricter gun control laws.

The incidence of gun related homocides in the UK has stayed about the same since they instituted draconian gun control in 1996. The incidence of non-fatal shootings has increased.

Statistics can be bothersome things.

http://americanshooter.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/historical-facts-about-gun-control/

No they aren’t – and it’s spelt Britain.