Can't You Read the Signs?

“God made all Men, Samuel Colt made them equal.”

Being agnostic, I would consider the first issue debatable. Being a Vietnam Veteran and gun owner, I would affirm the second.

Comment by ET from New Iberia,LA — October 1, 2007 @ 6:31 am

Were to start commenting?  Cars wear out and are melted down and recycled.  Most guns last forever, there are many guns over 100 years old still in daily use.  So the number is not an issue.
The right to keep and bear arms does certainly exist, it will be affirmed soon by the U,S. Supreme Court.

Just to raise the issue, the Second Amendment is not at all ambiguous, unless it is because some want to pretend it means something other than the plain language.
It reads [with only one commas as written and adopted]
A well regulated [trained and armed] militia [the whole of the people] being necessary to the secutity of a free state,
The right of the people [citizens] to keep and bear arms [held in private and by individuals- see Concoerd and Lexington] shall not be infringed.
The authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights knew that the Revolution began with the attempt by the British to confiscate the arms held in armories at Concord and Lexington.  They did not want to allow such conditions ripe for oppressive government actions to threaten the “security of the free state” and thus they carefull crafted the words.

Comment by p51mustang36@hotmail.com from Wichita,KS USA — October 1, 2007 @ 9:47 pm

Ms. Wagner wrote: “This year’s (NRA convention) theme was `Celebrating American Values’.  Now, this strikes me as a misnomer or a typo or a grammatical error because the NRA appears to care about one, and only one, supposed American value:  the alleged right to bear arms.”

Apparently she doesn’t know much about the NRA.  Its members also value the Constitutional right to Freedom from Unwarranted Searches and Seizures (which is violated whenever carjacking and mugging victims have no gun on their person with which to stop the robber).  The NRA also values the right to Privacy in the Home (which is violated when people with no gun have no choice but to stand by helplessly as a burglar roots around in their home).  They value a woman’s right to control her body by shooting any rapist who would force her to conceive his child.  They support freedom of religion by defending Jews’ right to shoot murderous antisemites, and racial equality by defending blacks’ right to shoot at white-robed abductors with lynching on their minds.

German and French political scientists have defined “government” as “that institution which claims for itself a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.” By defending the American tradition in which all citizens share in the legitimate use of force in self-defense (this was once also the British tradition), the NRA defends the American value of self-government—or as Abraham Lincoln put it, “Government OF the People, BY the People and FOR the People” (emphasis added).  In other words, government in which the people themselves share the authority for the legitimate use of deadly force.

Ms. Wagner, in contrast, would reject these values—I suppose for the sake of (at best) tripling the price of guns exchanged among criminals on the black-market.  (Low-level criminals seem to have little trouble obtaining, say, illegal heroin smuggled in from the other side of the world if necessary.)

Or, perhaps she feels it is better that we should have to accept between being robbed or raped to avoid death rather than that the criminals should have to refrain from robbing and raping to avoid being shot.  Or, perhaps the safety of Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings and racist skinheads as they go about their activities is her priority.

Comment by fsilber from Memphis, TN — October 2, 2007 @ 6:36 am

Of the 300 decisions in both the federal and state courts that have taken a position on the meaning of the Second Amendment or the state analogs to it, only 10 have claimed that the right to keep and bear arms is not an individual right. Many of the other decisions struck down gun control laws because they conflicted with the Second Amendment, such as State v. Nunn (Ga. 1846).

Here are two recent ones:

• U.S. v. Hutzell, 8 Iowa, 99-3719, (2000) (cite in dictum that “an individual’s right to keep and bear arms is constitutionally protected, see United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 178-79 (1939)

• U.S. vs. Emerson, 5 Fed (1999), confirmed an individual right requiring compelling government interest for regulation.

Comment by Homepcmd — October 2, 2007 @ 11:38 am

The 2nd amendment is by no means ambiguous. Rather it was so important to the founders that they felt the need to mention why this right should be secured from government interference. In case overeducated and under learned students of history attempted to distort it, q.e.d.

Comment by Mark from Gainesville, FL — October 2, 2007 @ 3:07 pm