After a lot of reading into the precursors of the
Amendment, such as the 1688/1689 English Bill of
Rights, I think self defense was not mentioned
because the writers of the Second Amendment felt that
the right of self defense was so obvious that they
were afraid that if it were explicitly included, the
people would have thought it offensive and would
have thought that the writers were treating them as
ignorant idiots.

Kind of like our current government.

Let’s say some bastard would rape the woman I love, who’s in Japan. I would be over there within 24 hours. I would hunt him, I would find him and I would kill him.

That’s my god damn right AND duty towards her.

Same would happen if some pedophile would prey upon Mayumi, the niece of my ex girlfriend. I would hunt him, I would find him, I would kill him.

In such a case I wouldn’t care about any laws. And yes, by Japan’s laws I might get the death penalty for it. But I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Loyalty, gentlemen, that’s it.

Gary, the thing with “only criminals would have guns” is pretty much in effect in Japan. It doesn’t only have serious flaws, it downright doesn’t work. The yakuza in Fukuoka on Kyushu, according to some people, these clans fight each other with Ak47s, RPGs, etc. The yakuza is quite well armed. They shoot each other to bits regularly (and frankly, as long as they don’t harm innocent people, nobody really cares, not even the police -but once they hit innocent people they pay dearly (there was a trial last year where the shooter, who killed a rival yakuza leader, but also one or two innocent people, was sentenced to death for killing those innocents)), but the majority of the yakuza are free. Why? Because criminals aren’t that stupid. They don’t commit crimes in the open where everyone can see them. They don’t run around with their guns in the open.

And then there’s the fact that the majority of the crimes in countries with strict gun control are committed with other weapons. I always find the crime statistic of 2001 here in Austria quite revealing. 2001 4% of the violent crimes (leading to death or injury) were committed with legal guns. 5% with illegal guns. And the large mass of such crimes were committed with other weapons, namely: 44% with knives and 34% with random objects. Another 4% were listed as strangulation or other forms of asphyxation and a final 9% under “other”.

In the same stats it is shown that the number of legal permits for guns in Austria doubled in the years from 1982 to 1998, yet the number of gun related crimes DROPPED by 40% in the same time.

How’s that possible? Aren’t the antis always telling is: more guns = more crimes?

Funny, how countries with extremely tight gun laws have skyrocketting crime rates (UK is the perfect example, Germany too.)

If you’re a hunter here in Austria you can arm yourself relatively easy and quite well. I have three hunting rifles and one handgun (Glock 17), plus several bladed weapons (which are just as, if not even more dangerous than guns; in iaido a fellow student of mine, who has lot more experience than I have, once lacked the necassary focus… he almost took off his own thumb and bled like a stuck pig, that was one hell of a wound.)

Fact is, if I want to kill, I can kill 10-20 people every day in the subway without a gun. Subway’s packed, all I need to do is… start stabbing away. Who’d stop me? By the time they’d have overwhelmed me (if they manage it, most people would freeze up or try to flee), the floor would be full of dead and dying.

The Second Amendment does not grant rights – it is there as a guarantee that our existing right to self-defense will not be altered or abolished by government. The government, however, has, since 1934, simply ignored the Constitution and violated it, anyway. The government (at all levels) must be returned to its constitutionally limited role.

Having addressed that, your comment that allowing only criminals to have guns (which is pretty much the situation that almost exists today, thanks to seventy-five years of gun control laws) would be a good idea, as it would then allow us to pinpoint who the criminals are and then “lock them up” has some flaws of logic in it. First of all, to achieve that scenario, it would be necessary to completely ban all guns and ammunition, a situation that certainly would disarm all law abiding citizens (and make automatic criminals of those who refused to comply with the ban) and it would leave only the police, the military and the criminals armed. This would, incidentally, be a flagrant violation of the Second Amendment.

Secondly, this would hardly e a desirous situation, as it would lead to two outcomes: more crime and more despotism than we’ve already seen recently from government.

The third point is that, if you did lock up the criminals for carrying guns, you’d being violating their Second Amendment protected right to self-defense. You see, the Second Amendment (I know it’s so hard to read) clearly doesn’t make any stipulations at all about WHO may be armed, nor when, where and how. It doesn’t say anything about “guns” or “firearms,” it says “arms,” meaning any kind of weaponry. This is because the founders wanted to ensure that everyone, regardless of who they were, could adequately defend themselves. The best way to defend a young republic in the 18th century was to have an armed populace, for it was from this armed populace that the several state militias were drawn. The militias consisted entirely of volunteers taken from the population of all able-bodied men of a certain age. There was no standing armed force and no budget for arms for such a force, so all members of the militia were expected to provide their own weapons and ammunition. The fact that, today, we no longer have any state militias, but have, instead, the National Guard – a standing army – does not change the original intent of the founders. They meant for us all to have the freedom to defend our lives and property by any means necessary. It is people like you who would remove that freedom, leaving us defenseless against both crime and the rise of a police state (which is occurring as I write this).

What Murdoc probably meant by her comment “guns make people stupid” is that those who have an irrational fear of guns often behave stupidly. In other words, She isn’t saying that gun owners are stupid; she’s saying that YOU are. I concur.

Gary