Also, Scalia’s always the one using the potential for lawsuits as a reason not to overturn laws and/or previous decisions, and yet he didn’t seem to have that problem this time. Because of this decision, every law ever passed regulating armament can now be challenged.

That said, I would’t mind seeing a mational ban on handguns, assault rifles and other non-sporting guns.

What an effin’ moron!

What is a “militia?” Who runs it? What is their chain of command? To whom are they accountable? Who gets to join? Who dcides? To be a true bulwark against a tyrannical government, it would have to operate outside of the government, no?

Michigan had a militia. Maybe they’re still around, the Michigan Militia. I think Terry Nichols was in it.

The published statistics on gun violence speak for themselves:

One child every three hours is killed by gunfire in the U.S.
Between 1979 and 2001, gunfire killed 90,000 children and teens in America.
American kids are 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined.

I’m just grabbing a few horrifying facts from one source (linked above). There’s lots more.

You bring up safety for your family, but when you weigh the documented carnage against the remote possibility that you might someday deter a home invasion with your gun, I don’t see how a sane adult could possibly hold that the proliferation of these deadly weapons is on balance a good thing. More likely, if the bad guys aren’t sure who’s got a gun in their house (or car, or pants), they’ll just get badder guns themselves, and you still won’t be safe. For evidence of this, look at all the arms races in history.

I call bullshit on your spurious conflation of gun control, abortion rights, immigration issues and governmental invasion of privacy. I’ll have any debate you want on any topic, but I don’t have time to defend my entire worldview to every dittohead every time he disagrees with something I’ve said. If you want to express your views on everything, get your own blog, or TV show or something, and I’ll write in to hassle you.

Finally, in light of your gun advocacy, before you get too thanky to the founders for the 2nd Amendment, you should read it, paying attention to the first clause. Here’s the whole thing:

“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.”

I don’t own any guns and in a sense I am a coward, because I know about the dangers of accidental shootings and such. I am counting on others to have guns, though, and I am banking on potential home invaders of having second thoughts about the advisability of breaking into my home.

The odds are in my favor for my family staying well, thanks also to some self-defense training, community police protection and a minimal security system. If I lived in a different city or at a different time (in a post-Katrina-like anarchy, for instance), that calculation would change. So I say God bless the chief justices who voted in favor of my freedom to make that choice if need be.

If concern for the safety of innocents is what’s really behind your bias against gun ownership, may I ask if that concern extends to the unrepresented victims of abortion? The statistics of innocent deaths there should shock any truly liberal-minded humanist. Why is restricting that right a form of tyranny but restricting my freedom to protect my family not an act of tyranny?

All that aside, do you think a gun ban is even possible? You can’t muster the will to close our southern border yet you think a new law restricting the right to bear arms will instantly halt the flow of guns? You don’t want government agents listening into phone calls from terrorists but you’ll allow them to scour our closets for signs of gunpowder residue?

In the most tightly restricted population in human history — the Warsaw ghetto — people dropped dead from a lack of food but they still got guns when they decided to rise up against the Nazi guards. If a grandmotherly liberal lawyer like Lynne Stewart could sneak messages out to her client’s terrorist buddies and a U.S. official can smuggle secret documents out in his trousers, what law will stop motivated, self-righteous but wrong-headed evil-doers from helping to arm revolutionary factions?

I say thank the founding fathers for our 2nd ammendment. Long may free peoples cling to their guns, for that is the foundation of freedom itself.

-ST

Guns are like dope. As long as people want them, somebody will sell them to them.

Watch Bowling for Columbine. Canadians have guns but, compared to foks in the U.S., they seldom shoot each other. It turns out economic inequality and crime are highly correlated.

Why don’t so many of us own guns? We choose not to based on our information. Information and education have taught us they’re trouble.

That’s how you get rid of handguns.