[MaggieL]

Originally posted by LordSludge
Interesting tidbit on the PA constitution! Of course it's irrelevant to the national constitution and, by extension, national arms rights

Not at all. There are no "national arms rights". They're not "national rights", they're the people's rights...the Federal Constitution's Second Amendment simply prohibits the Federal Government from infringing them. In the Commonwealth, our constitution reiterates that that right is not to be questioned.

By the way, they're not called "tid-bits". They're called "articles". If we called them "tid-bits", some dweeb might think they were trivial, optional, and amendable by whim.

What defines "arms"? How do you arrive at the conclusion that pistols and assault rifles are okay?

Arms Arms, n. pl. OE. armes, F. arme, pl. armes, fr. L. arma,
pl., arms, orig. fittings, akin to armus shoulder, and E.
arm. See Arm, n.
1. Instruments or weapons of offense or defense.

Seems pretty clear that handguns and long guns fall under that rubric.

Why not shoulder-fired rockets? Sure would be easier to defend my home with a 50 cal machine gun mounted on the porch and an M1 Abrams tank in the garage. Who are you to tell me I can't have them?? I have a constitutional RIGHT!!!

Indeed you do. And *I* certainly won't tell you you can't have them. I might offer some commentary on how effective they might be...but that's just opinion. Make sure you pay the Class 1 tax on the .50 cal, it's annoying, but legally required. You *are* allowed to have one, legally, today...assuming you can get your local cop shop to sign off that you're OK.

The Abrhams might be a bigger problem....catepillar treads tend to tear up municipal paving. :-)

I'm not going to play "slippery slope" with you about drawing a line somewhere between a slingshot and a Minuteman warhead, because we'll end up playing the old Salami Game. That's where somebody steals your salami one slice at a time, and nothing happens, because one slice of salami isn't worth fighting over. Pretty soon, there's nothing left but the string, and that's not worth fighting over either.

a simple gunshot is probably too kind...

Probably too kind (assuming you don't go in for kneecaping), but inarguably effective. Of course, there's that other constitutional "tid-bit" about "cruel and unusual punishment"...but if we're editing the constitution to suit your personal prejudices, why stop with just the Second Amendment?

I tend to think that even basically kind, decent, "good" people can lose it from time to time. A gun greatly facilitates death in such a situation.

So, you just don't trust good people with guns. You'd rather only the criminals and the cops had them (neither of whom have a particularly good record, BTW).

I don't share your view, and I don't believe the facts support it either. I can point you to piles of research and studies that show individually and in bulk that the cases where a legally armed citizen does *good* by being armed vastly outnumber the cases where they go berzerk and do evil. In fact the real-world cases where armed citizens prevent a crime vastly outnumber the cases where cops prevent a crime. They just don't usually generate press reports and anecdotes.

language which is conspicuously absent in the national constitution.

It wasn't conspicuous until I pointed it out to you, of course.

They're obviously not worded in *exactly* the same way. The Federal Constitution had more cooks messing with the broth, and it shows..even in the punctuation, much less the diction. Nontheless, they both still say what they say, and mean what they say. So while you're marvelling at points that you can't belive you need to defend, marvel at that.

If he'd had immediate access to a gun, he would have killed her....sometimes basically good people do bad things...bad things become Bad Things with a simple pull of the trigger...Guess that's where I'm coming from.

Unless *she'd* had immediate access to a gun, of course. Then we wouldn't have had to wait for his remorse to take over.

I'm sorry that you project your distrust of yourself and your friends onto the rest of us, but happily so far your opinion doesn't rule. The biggest danger you face involving firearms *isn't* that some legally armed citizen is going to go berzerk and plug you. Even if your taste in friends runs to those with personality disorders who mix drugs and alcohol. (I'd recommend the lady involved obtain a protection from abuse order, BTW. Then you won't have to worry about your drunken friend with OCD getting guns legally.)

I can't believe I even have to argue this point.

You can stick in all the eye-roll smilies you like, but I think your view of the balance of power between the government and the people is hideously oversimplified.

Your proposed scenario of a Marine assult on a subdivision sounds like something an elementary school kid would draw in crayon, but do you really think there's a battallion available for every town in the country? Do you really think they'd have much unit cohesion once they started to get orders to assault their own people? And how long do you think their weapons would remain completely in government hands? (The Vietcong at one point were issued handmade single-shot weapons--little more than zip guns--the purpose of which was to take out *one* enemy soldier by sniping, thereby arming the shooter.)

I *do* believe I have to argue the points about gun prohibitionism, because your lines of argument are very common among gun prohibitionists, and we've heard *all* of them on The Cellar at one time or another.

The slippery slope ("You don't want a nuke...do you?") the paranoid accusation ("Why can't you feel safe without a gun?"), the "obsolete constitution" argument ("Oh, it doesn't really mean what it says, and weapons are completely different today, so let's just ignore it") and the *other* paranoid accusation ("I wouldn't trust me with a gun, or any of my friends, I'm afraid they might flip out, so you shouldn't have one either.")

MODERN WEAPONRY has made any constitutional right to arms that may or may not exist obsolete

Well, it *does* exist, and I don't think it's obsolete. Just because *you* don't personally like this particular part of the Constitution doesn't invalidate it, thank goodness.