a well regulated militia

[jaguar]

Ai, talk about nitpick. Why are you so unwilling to answer the question of why you want a high power assult rifle? The question was one asked out of curiousity with the possability of working the answer into another post if it proved useful.

Since when did the burden of proof lie with me? I didn't start this mess, I just weighed in halfway though. For refrence my arguement isn't "sometimes people get shot" it IS that people get shot. People DIE becase some jackass exersizing his constitutional right blows a 45 cal slug though some poor bastards back who he thought was threatening. YOur mainjsutification always seems to have been personal defense, how about less deadly means of doing that?

I mean the agurement of guns for personal defense is flawed anyway. Firstly if peopel arm themselves, crims are either oging to get more organised so people don't have itme ot use them, fire first, resulting in more deaths or get bigger guns. Great solution. I was looking into carrying weapons though cambodia and parts of Thailand for security reasons and after talking to people decided against it because in most cases it makes a bad istuation worse. Beleive it or not ciminals are not that interested in killing people, it tends to cause allot of problems. I'd rahter lose my wallet and leave it at that than risk losing my life over my wallet.

"The only purpose of a gun is to kill" is another prohibitionist slogan based in a gross oversimplification, the implication being that if a gun isn't used to kill then it has no purpose. If that were true would mean there are lots of cops out there with no reason to have a gun.

So the only purpose is a deterrant?

What the hell do you think guns were made for? Assult rifles in particular are designed from the ground up to effective kill people. Full stop. Whether they act as a deterant is irrelavent to that statement, that is their purpose. Just as a convertable can be used to impress people its still fundamentally for transport.

I'd be interested in getting some stats on this, where gun owners have killed unarmed people, armed people, people armed with lesser weapons etc not to mention percieved threat vs real threat. I mean here gun owners are a small group of people, but there penty of clubs around and stuff. I"ve been to a few of these for gun, fired a range of stuff and since i also did cadets i've done firearms traing. I swear the way a some of those people handed weapons, including loaded weapons would make scare the shit out of your average soldier. The simple fact is the vast majority of people are not mentally capable or trained enough to be able to handle wepaons effeicvely and safely in dangerous situations. Thats why i'm advocating nonlethal wepaons.

Ut: got a source on that? this one is interesting. What would a cannon have been calssified as?

Exactly; and the presence of guns in the hands of citizens puts a very large constant on one side of the equation. Is it "worth it" to put the agent in harm's way? Rarely. Ergo, it doesn't routinely happen.

On the other hand if the citizen corsses a line, they will sne dagents, who will effetive deal with that person, armed or not. If large numbers of peopel started protesting in public brandishing arms about something i'm sure the first thing that would happen is those weapons carriers would be singled out and dealt with. Lets face it anyway, the public is too stupid and too apathetic to do it anyway unless all hell borke loose in which case it woudl be ineffective anyway. I don't think bush sits there and this 'if i sign this will all thsoe armed citizens out here get pissed off.