Will the Second Amendment survive?

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by regular.joe

I'm begging to think that you are not aware of what you are saying, or that you are mis representing on purpose.

[regular.joe]

To say that our Military today doesn't have militias in it's history would be out right lying. I would have to answer no, the 2nd amendment was not written to birth the Armed Forces as it is known today.

[regular.joe]

The Army traces its heritage to the colonial militias. These were precursors of today’s Army National Guard. Citizens answering the call to protect their homes and families began a heritage of selfless service and sacrifice that continues today. Opposition to British colonial policies in the eighteenth century led to war in 1775.
After the battles at Lexington and Concord, militia forces from across New England surrounded British forces in Boston. The Continental Congress assumed command of these units as “Troops of the United Provinces of North America” on 14 June 1775.

from the start, the Army comprised a small national force and the state militias’ citizen-Soldiers. In times of emergency, the standing army was enlarged with recruits and augmented by mobilizing the militia and creating volunteer units, initially by state and nationally by the time of the Civil War. This tradition of an Army that combines “full-time” regular Soldiers and citizen-Soldiers serving for short active service periods is still the cornerstone of Army organization.

-FM 1 United States Army

yes the 2nd amendment was tied to the idea of having armed citizens in the United States, in militias, and not. Militias in those days could not be formed unless the citizens were privately armed. You are right to see a connection between the militia and the Military. The second amendment was not written to create this connection. This connection was started 14+ years earlier in our history.

[icileparadise]

These were turbulant times. France at war with England (again) the Boston tea party', Science... Majour leaps in society, moving to cities etc. All I'm saying is that the 2nd amendment is the army today. We as citizens should not have the right to bear arms as so many people argue we can. What do i need with an assault rifle that fires armoured piercing rounds if I am a civilian? If I am a Soldier ok. But where is the malitia if your country has an army?

[regular.joe]

"The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, ... all men capable of bearing arms;..."
— "Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic", 1788 (either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith).

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."
— Tench Coxe, 1788.

These are quotes from people of the day. It should shed some light on why the second amendment came to be. We in the United States have a long tradition behind us. These quotes were made in 1788 a year before the 2nd amendment was ratified with the first ten.

[regular.joe]

Yes

[Radar]

The anti-gun nutjobs would have us believe that the words "the people" refer to individual rights in every single part of the Constitution other than the 2nd amendment.

[regular.joe]

Training has a lot to do with that Radar. The man who sent his armed militia up against U.S. Troops in....say...Fallujah in November of 2004 should be strung up by his yoohoo's. Even George Washington brought in a Prussian Military Officer to write one the Army's first regulations and help train his troops. It's a lot like the movie 300, without training they were just a bunch of farmers and city folk with rifles. The training, along with tactics learned from the Indians gave them what they needed to win.

[Aliantha]

yeah...or those people could have killed me.

It's a two way street. That's what people such as yourself seem to keep forgetting.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'd rather have a two way street than a one way street where only the bad guys have guns. They would, like they do in every nation.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

yeah...or those people could have killed me.

It's a two way street. That's what people such as yourself seem to keep forgetting.

Actually, you're forgetting it's a two-way street. Antigunners are famous for that. Consider how much raping a guy can do with a smoking, spurting hole where his testes used to be, or if he's got the immediate concern of keeping breathing with a nasty case of pneumothorax from a round or two in the approximate center of his mass. Trying to shoot him right through the zipper is also good gunfighting tactics; if you get excited and take too much front sight, you hit high, and your assailant goes down with a blue hole between his eyebrows and the back blown out of his head, as Kipling put it.

If you decide not to have armament in your hands, it all goes the other guy's way, doesn't it? Criminally assaulted and you can't stop it. That's not a life, that's a walking death. I'd rather have a life myself, and I think you should have something better than walking death yourself. I give a damn, Aliantha.

Frankly, your handling of arms would be responsible. You have the necessary and becoming reluctance to deal out death. Still, "He's dead, and I'm alive, and that's the way I wanted it." Kind of hard to object to so favorable an outcome.

[Aliantha]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Actually, you're forgetting it's a two-way street. Antigunners are famous for that. Consider how much raping a guy can do with a smoking, spurting hole where his testes used to be, or if he's got the immediate concern of keeping breathing with a nasty case of pneumothorax from a round or two in the approximate center of his mass. Trying to shoot him right through the zipper is also good gunfighting tactics; if you get excited and take too much front sight, you hit high, and your assailant goes down with a blue hole between his eyebrows and the back blown out of his head, as Kipling put it.

If you decide not to have armament in your hands, it all goes the other guy's way, doesn't it? Criminally assaulted and you can't stop it. That's not a life, that's a walking death. I'd rather have a life myself, and I think you should have something better than walking death yourself. I give a damn, Aliantha.

Frankly, your handling of arms would be responsible. You have the necessary and becoming reluctance to deal out death. Still, "He's dead, and I'm alive, and that's the way I wanted it." Kind of hard to object to so favorable an outcome.

UG, I explained my reasons for disagreeing with people carrying guns around the street. If you don't understand my point, then that's fine. You will not convince me to think otherwise no matter how dramatic you want to get about it.

I know how to handle a gun. I could have my hands on any number of weapons within a couple of hours if I wanted to. My children are in the process of learning how to handle weapons.

I don't disagree that people should own guns. I simply disagree that they should be carrying them around the street. I also happen to think there should be very strict laws about who should be allowed to own them. For instance, nut jobs should not be allowed to own guns. Clearly, many do. Clearly many of them own guns illegally also, but my concern here is for the people who commit impulse crimes and because they happen to be carrying a weapon because that's acceptable, the crime becomes exponentially worse.

Fortunately I don't live in your country though. So I don't have to worry about all the nut jobs out there who carry guns around.

I would walk down just about any street in Australia without carrying a gun and feel safe. Certainly I'd walk down any street in Brisbane and feel safe. There are some areas of Sydney and Melbourne I would avoid after dark because I know it's not prudent to be there after dark alone. Those areas are very small though, and I don't believe having a gun in my handbag would save me from opportunistic crimes anyway. It's been proven time and again that just because you carry a gun, it doesn't mean you're safe. See shopping centre shooter last week as an example.

[Aliantha]

Well, there's bad guys and then there's the idiots that commit crimes on impulse. Crimes of passion. Call them whatever you like. Any crime that's premeditated can be committed with a gun regardless of where you live, but when idiots aren't allowed to walk around with them, it means they can't do as much damage (death) when they decide to act on their impulses.

How many people do you think commit murder on purpose? How many murders do you think might not have been murders if the purpetrator had not happened to be carrying a gun?

I don't know the answer, but I think it's a fair assumption to say there'd be less if people couldn't carry guns. I'd base that assumption on the difference in the number of murders per capita between the US and Australia as an example. However, if you believe Radar, then you couldn't possibly agree with that assumption. He thinks we have more murders per capita here in Australia than in the US. This clearly is not the case regardless of what his claims are.

[TheMercenary]

Why Britain needs more guns

By Joyce L Malcolm
Author and academic

As gun crime leaps by 35% in a year, plans are afoot for a further crack down on firearms. Yet what we need is more guns, not fewer, says a US academic.

"If guns are outlawed," an American bumper sticker warns, "only outlaws will have guns." With gun crime in Britain soaring in the face of the strictest gun control laws of any democracy, the UK seems about to prove that warning prophetic.
For 80 years the safety of the British people has been staked on the premise that fewer private guns means less crime, indeed that any weapons in the hands of men and women, however law-abiding, pose a danger.

Government assured Britons they needed no weapons, society would protect them. If that were so in 1920 when the first firearms restrictions were passed, or in 1953 when Britons were forbidden to carry any article for their protection, it no longer is.

The failure of this general disarmament to stem, or even slow, armed and violent crime could not be more blatant. According to a recent UN study, England and Wales have the highest crime rate and worst record for "very serious" offences of the 18 industrial countries surveyed.

But would allowing law-abiding people to "have arms for their defence", as the 1689 English Bill of Rights promised, increase violence? Would Britain be following America's bad example?


The 'wild west' image is out of date
Old stereotypes die hard and the vision of Britain as a peaceable kingdom, America as "the wild west culture on the other side of the Atlantic" is out of date. It is true that in contrast to Britain's tight gun restrictions, half of American households have firearms, and 33 states now permit law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons.

But despite, or because, of this, violent crime in America has been plummeting for 10 consecutive years, even as British violence has been rising. By 1995 English rates of violent crime were already far higher than America's for every major violent crime except murder and rape.

You are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than New York. Why? Because as common law appreciated, not only does an armed individual have the ability to protect himself or herself but criminals are less likely to attack them. They help keep the peace. A study found American burglars fear armed home-owners more than the police. As a result burglaries are much rarer and only 13% occur when people are at home, in contrast to 53% in England.


Concealed weapon can be carried in 33 states
Much is made of the higher American rate for murder. That is true and has been for some time. But as the Office of Health Economics in London found, not weapons availability, but "particular cultural factors" are to blame.

A study comparing New York and London over 200 years found the New York homicide rate consistently five times the London rate, although for most of that period residents of both cities had unrestricted access to firearms.

When guns were available in England they were seldom used in crime. A government study for 1890-1892 found an average of one handgun homicide a year in a population of 30 million. But murder rates for both countries are now changing. In 1981 the American rate was 8.7 times the English rate, in 1995 it was 5.7 times the English rate, and by last year it was 3.5 times. With American rates described as "in startling free-fall" and British rates as of October 2002 the highest for 100 years the two are on a path to converge.


Gun crime rates between UK and US are narrowing
The price of British government insistence upon a monopoly of force comes at a high social cost.

First, it is unrealistic. No police force, however large, can protect everyone. Further, hundreds of thousands of police hours are spent monitoring firearms restrictions, rather than patrolling the streets. And changes in the law of self-defence have left ordinary people at the mercy of thugs.

According to Glanville Williams in his Textbook of Criminal Law, self-defence is "now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it still forms part of the law".

Nearly a century before that American bumper sticker was slapped on the first bumper, the great English jurist, AV Dicey cautioned: "Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians." He knew public safety is not enhanced by depriving people of their right to personal safety.

Joyce Lee Malcolm, professor of history, is author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience, published in June 2002.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2656875.stm

[icileparadise]

This is a good observation by J.L.Malcolm thanks TM. You should click the bbc news link you included and scroll down to the mini bio for J.L.Malcolm and just below click on "have your say..." and read the comments. It will give you an insight to the British way of life today, without guns. I agree with Ali on this, in the U.K. or Australia I wish to walk down a high street without worrying about who's carrying a firearm. In the U.K. we have gun shops and gun clubs which are seriously controlled. Apart from the odd homicidal maniac (very rare) it works fine.But in the U.K. armed robbery is still a shock to the public even if the guns were not used. The courts deal very severely with gun crimes - they throw the fucking book at you. The British are not comfortable with guns, as Ali said most crimes are passion or rage orientated. I'd hate to spill my drink on a gun carrying person. J.L.Malcolm is an American who has written good work for Havard but it simply will not do for the British Government to listen to her advices, when public opinion is so set. It may take a few generations yet TM to when people in the U.K. carry arms. I lament the recent violence of teenagers with firearms - this is not a happy time; firearms are not good.