"The Second Amendment is about revolution."

[darxus]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/4/881431/-Why-liberals-should-love-the-Second-Amendment

I am the choir. I do not understand liking anti-gun laws.

Comments

Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)

[beowabbit]

If your entire thesis revolves around impossible fantasy situations you need to spend less time writing about your arguments and more time thinking about them.

That’s how I feel about the pro-gun argument that we need to oppose government regulation of firearms because we might need to overthrow the government. To my mind, that’s already a ridiculous fantasy situation, but clearly to some people it’s not. I’m making a sincere effort to take you guys seriously. If I adopt what sounds to me like a ridiculous premise to start with (we need lots of guns in private hands because we might need to shoot the soldiers and the cops and the politicians) and argue what follows from that, and you tell me my conclusions are ridiculous, that doesn’t leave me much motivation to continue to try to understand what you have to say.

(This is, of course, assuming that you or Darxus or that intitial Daily Kos poster whose article I should have read but didn’t spoke for a monolithic and unanimous gun rights movement, speaking of silly premises.)

I certainly could have made exactly the same argument just discussing various points in the range from captive-bolt pistols used in slaughterhouses to machine guns, but I was hoping to demonstrate that there are extremes that any reasonable person is going to agree about. And I have the impression that there are plenty of gun-rights activists for whom a machine gun isn’t the obvious thing that private citizens shouldn’t be able to get easily, so that wouldn’t have been a good end point to choose.

(Also, while we’re throwing around dictators, Yanayev. Just to point out that not only are handguns not sufficient for a revolution, neither are they necessary.)

PS — Where on the scale from a little toy gun with a flag that pops out and says “bang” to the hypothetical doomsday bomb that will destroy the entire universe do you think a discussion of restricting private citizens’ access to weapon becomes ridiculous? Put another way, what kind of weapon is so powerful that it is obvious to you that a sensible government ought to restrict access to it?

Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)

[darxus.livejournal.com]

"You need to think more then you type."

You need to stop. You've embarrassed me enough. beowabbit is a very thoughtful and intelligent person.

Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)

[darxus.livejournal.com]

beowabbit: I'm sorry fluffy2097 has been such an asshat at you on my lj.

fluffy2097: Please contemplate the counter-productiveness of alienating your audience.

[darxus.livejournal.com]

"fluffy2097 has removed you from their Friends list."

Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)

[beowabbit]

(I gather fluffy2097 isn’t participating here any more; just commenting on the following since it ties in with a point I was making.)

Despite it being this easy to get a hold of a long arm in California, Most gun crime here is committed with handguns, which require a firearms ID to own.

Yes, which is why plenty of people (myself included) feel like relatively looser restrictions on longarms make sense than on handguns. A bunch of what I said is about how guns (much more so than, say, knives) make it easy to surprise your opponent and win the fight (and end or seriously damage a human being) before anybody around you knows the fight has started. That’s still true with a longarm (cf. John Allan Muhammad, Lee Harvey Oswald, and of course military and police snipers) but considerably less so than with a handgun. If you carry a shotgun into a bank or a day-care center, people are likely to notice.

If I had to choose between the world we have now and a world where absolutely anybody could walk up to a counter, plop down a wad of bills, and walk away with a(n unmodifiable) rifle or shotgun, but absolutely nobody could get their hands on a handgun, I’d feel like the second world was a lot safer.

Civilian ownership of tanks and cannons is already legal

And if you walk into a bank with a cannon, people are really going to notice. :-)