90sBear said:
D. C. Bear said:
Oldbear83 said:
D. C. Bear said:
Oldbear83 said:
D. C. Bear said:
Oldbear83 said:
DC "You are arguing that the 2nd amendment wording is special, aren't you? I am arguing that its wording does not make it unique or special among other rights listed in the constitution"
Then explain why that phrase is there.
Come on, this is the Constitutional Convention that wrote this, not a high school girl sending a text to their friends about gossip.
Everything was carefully planned out, but you want to ignore that phrase.
It is there for a reason. If you disagree with my opinion, explain why it's there, because pretending it doesn't mean anything is piss poor logic, sir.
They had to use something. I am not pretending it doesn't mean anything. I am arguing that it doesn't convey a right to bear arms that is uniquely distinct or different from other rights in the constitution, like the right to free expression or religion, and my argument is supported by more than a century of US legal precedent.
Again, one thing I learned from my History classes is that it took years to craft the Constitution, because everything they could think was important was addressed.
The First and Second Amendments got specific phrases written which, by a plain reading, do set them apart from the rest of the Bill of Rights. Not that the other rights don't matter, but that the 1st and 2nd Amendments are so important that they provide the means for the other rights to be protected and defended and exercised.
And sorry, but I am not impressed by what judges have done, arguably in their own self-interest.
The US Supreme Court has made some absolutely wrong decisions, after all. And frankly, still does, when justices obsess on political posture rather than consistency with the Constitution.
You have yet to provide a rationale explaining how there would be any difference between the First Amendment and the Second Amendment we have now and the First Amendment and Second Amendment we would have if the wording was reversed between the two.
The thing for me, is that each got special wording. This clearly sets the First and Second apart from everything else.
Few people would deny the importance of the First Amendment, but too many ignore the value placed from the beginning on the second.
Going back to 90s Bear's question, I have a number of neighbors who would not worry me if they personally had their own nuke or chemical weapons. For one thing, if such weapons were held by private citizens, I would worry less about a dim-wit President sending them off to foreign countries without the public being able to say 'boo' about it.
I'm not even going the address the absurdity of having regular citizens own nuclear weapons as one can assume you are using hyperbole rather than exposing extreme stupidity on your part.
You sure about that? He would be the second poster in this thread to say that regular citizens having chemical and nuclear weapons would be ok. Also notice he avoided answering that question when I asked him, repeatedly.
Amusing that you would accuse of doing just what you did, 90s Bear.
Would you care, now, to explain why the Founders, specifically prohibited '
infringing' the right to arms? Or will you continue to duck that question?
To your question, I did indeed answer, but it obviously wasn't the strawman answer you wanted. But I did note that you seemed to imply having a personal nuke was the same as allowing someone unrestricted access to guns. You ducked that one as well, unless you really believed that.
Now with regard to WMD, I hope we can agree that most people lack any capability to create such weapons. Fissionable material is hard enough to find, let alone the means to refine it to weapons-grade, or Hitler would have had his bomb while Einstein was still trying to get the US to consider getting their research going.
As for CW, that's both difficult but also a matter of chemistry and hard work My father worked as a Chemical Engineer before he became a Project Engineer, and some things he told me about how companies store chemicals in high-population places would scare you so you couldn't sleep.
And bioweapons? The Wuhan Virology Lab should be an example of how easily that sort of weapon can go wrong. As a matter of record, I have some friends in the IC who have told me about a couple groups which tried to create their own bio-terror weapons, but instead exposed themselves and died as a result of their own poor controls. I doubt there are even a half-dozen people in the United States who would even
like to have their own bio-weapons, given everything you would need to create and maintain them, not to mention that habit viruses have of mutating at the first opportunity, often in ways the designer does not want.
My point is that the number of people who
could create such weapons is absurdly low, and of those the number who would want a WMD of their personal ownership would be zero, given the security needs and maintenance costs. And what exactly would you or I want with such a weapon? Even if someone was paranoid enough to want their own nuke in order to hold the government at bay, the most likely practical consequence of making that threat would be a short career as the target of a sniper.
With that said, maybe we can return to the more realistic scenarios of people obtaining guns for their home and workplace defense?
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
