Maybe this is what the second amendment meant...

The right to arm bears....

 

No, it was a typo. It was supposed to be bare arms, meaning people can wear short sleeved t-shirts. At least that's what my grandpa told me.

 

is it the same in canada?

 

They do have bears in Canada.

 

Grandpa knows best.

 

Makes sense to me. Because we definitely don't have the right to carry guns or even use them to defend our household.

 

What part of "well regulated" do the gun nuts not understand?

 

^^ the same difficulty realizing that a 'gun' in 1776 is not the same 'gun' in 2011. Or that bubba on the farm or bob in the suburb is not farmer on the frontier. Or that the independence and autonomy that guns facilitated in 1776 does not exist today. Or that the risk/benefit to society has flipped.

 

What part don't YOU understand?

In Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that "[t]he adjective 'well-regulated' implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training."

And how is "regulating" it the way YOU are implying going to help anything? You can make guns as illegal and unattainable as you wish. The end result will be a bunch of criminals with guns and a bunch of unarmed honest people. Yep, sounds perfect.

Zhe Wiz

 

Therein lies the problem. How do you train a moron ?

As for your soundbite, look around. Ever wonder why gun violence is so much higher in the US than Canada, or the UK, or Japan, or .... any other western country where widespread gun ownership is NOT common or allowed ?

 

I'll try to ignore the unnecessary insult. I happen to be college educated, and very trainable. Just ask my wife.

Oh please! You cannot seriously believe we have violence BECAUSE we have guns? Really? If it weren't guns, it'd be knives or rocks or fists. We (in the US) live in a violent society. We could argue all year about why. I would suggest the vast gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" is SIGNIFICANTLY more responsible for our violence than guns are. Guns are one tool of many used in carrying out acts of violence. Should we ban all the others too? Where do we start? Knives? Forks? Pointed rocks? Fists? Yeah, that's ridiculous. The idea that tougher gun laws will put an end to violence is equally ridiculous. We need to find and solve the problem, not flail around making more unenforceable laws.

I'd love to live in your dreamworld where the solution to our violence problem is yet another law against guns. That is a very optimistic, simplistic and ignorant view of the world. Keep on dreaming! Criminals will always have guns, no matter how many or how tough you make the laws. So tell me, PLEASE, what would be the point?

Zhe Wiz

 

Personally I think it's a matter of WHY you choose to own a gun...

Zhe Wiz, I see you're from Ithaca. I assume you keep guns either for hunting, or at the very least to blow away the bear that might be trying to crash thru your front door.

Sagebrush, I don't know where you're from. But let me ask you this, are you OK with guns used for hunting?

I ask this because I'm from an area where the only reason to have a gun is to either commit a crime or prevent a crime from being committed upon ones self. But someday I hope to move upstate, and when I do I will no doubt own a gun. I'll probably never hunt, but the bear issue is real...

 

Yeah, boy-howdy: one surely can kill kids and Congressmen in a parking lot or a school with a fistful of rocks just as easily as with an extended-clip Glock.

The armed citizenry argument is ridiculous on its face. One lunatic at Fort Hood was surrounded by hundreds of armed people trained in the use of their arms, but nevertheless killed 13 of them. Random gun nuts in a civilian crowd are never going to prevent a single lunatic from committing future slaughter. Better to keep the guns out of their hands in the first place.

 

And you are going to accomplish this how? Nice plan, sounds great, ain't gonna happen. Why don't you see that? There's NOTHING you can do, no rule you can make, no law you can have passed which will accomplish your stated goal. All you WILL accomplish is disarming the honest. There's no way that's an improvement.

Zhe Wiz

 

The part about how anti-gun nuts kept saying that the amendment still allowed for 'reasonable regulation', then insisted for more than thirty years that a total ban was 'reasonable regulation'. And every attempt to rescind the ban put congressional Democrats and national press into an apoplectic fit.

It shouldn't be any surprise that it took SCOTUS two centuries to put any teeth into this piece of the Bill of Rights, when it took them more than a century to put teeth into the First and numerous other amendments. And they still haven't completed this process.

What is shocking is that some opinion polls have found that, if the Bill of Rights was put to a modern vote of the people, it would likely fail.

 

I notice that you include neither death by other violent means, nor any western hemisphere country south of the Rio Grande. Why is that?

In the public debate, both exclusions are very deliberate, and very leading.

 

One thing about this debate I notice everyone neglicts is statistics. The highest fatalities from guns are suicides and juvenile accidental deaths. Accidental deaths are always contested, but at least when I was growing up...I had one acquaintance that was fatally wounded by accidental gunfire (him and a friend discovered a gun: they thought it was unarmed and played with it). I don't see the need for people to need an automatic gun: I'd at least limit it to hand guns and single rifles. And if I was a responsible parent, I would always be sure that whatever fire arms I elected to have would always locked away.

Have you bothered to look up worldwide gun violence?? While it's not surprising that Columbia has a higher rate then the US, the US still leads North America in gun violence.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_gun_vio_hom_hom_wit_fir-crime-gun-violence-homicides-firearms

 

Have you bothered to look up meaningful worldwide violence statistics?

An unknown Q&A website that doesn't even agree with the Wikipedia page to which it points, isn't meaningful.

Better figures come from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook (covered in only some periodic editions), World Health Organization's report on violence and health, and its global burden of disease reports.