Just my opinion, but not without basis, I believe
When it comes to those categories of prohibited persons, I believe that the govt should only prohibit those individuals that have been determined through due process to be unable to manage their own affairs. People adjudicated top be mentally incompetent (such as unable to understand basic right from wrong, for example). I don't care if you think you are the Queen of the May, you could own a gun, as the Queen of the May knows it is wrong to shoot people for fun or profit.
Abuse the right, and you get the same punishment as anyone else. Now if you are the kind of mental case that will do whatever the voices tell you, even when it is wrong, then, no gun rights. And I wouldn't be too comfortable with you driving a car or owning a sharp knife either.
I think you are equating them and they are not the same. Firearms are dangerous and are designed mostly to kill things. Since the chain saws and machete were not designed to do that I think there is your strawman. Lots of things can kill people but firearms are different and we gun owners should acknowledge that
emphasis added
No, they are not. Here, you have fallen into the trap of the anti gunners. Your statement that firearms are dangerous demonstrates that you think they have some innate ability of their own. They do not. Firearms, chainsaws, machetes, laptops and books are not dangerous. Only
people are dangerous. Firearms may be designed to kill, but so are chainsaws and machetes designed to kill trees and plants. Knives are designed to
cut. That does not make them dangerous. It is the hand that wields them, and the mind that directs it that makes anything dangerous. Guns are more efficient at killing at a distance than a knife or a bow and arrow or a thrown rock, but it is the will of the user, NOT the firearm or other object that makes it a weapon. Antigunners want us to believe that it is the gun that determines our choices of behavior, that the gun, by its mere existence causes good people to commit evil. How can any rational person simply ignore the concept that humans have free will?
Every act we do throughout our entire lives is because we
choose to do it. Our reasoning behind the choice may be flawed or valid, but it is an inescapable fact that we choose to do it. We may regret doing it the moment after it happens, we may regret that it had consequences beyond what we wished, but the fact remains that at the moment we did it, we chose to do it. "I didn't mean to do it" is an emotional cop-out. Every one of us, at the instant we do it,
always means to do it. "I didn't mean for what I did to have the result it did" is the honest meaning of "I didn't mean to do it", but we don't say that, or not often at any rate.
We have free will. We choose to do things, good and bad. Accept that, and move your thinking out of the dark ages. You can't have it both ways. If we don't have free will, if we are compelled by some outside force, then why are we punished for breaking the laws? If it is not our choice, what is the point of punishment? After all, if we can't help it, if it isn't our fault, what good does punishment serve? None that I can see. The fact that we have free will, and that punishment (or fear of it) influences our decisions is one of the major cornerstones of civilization.
And for those who argue that we do not have a fundamental right to military weapons, one of our Founders (Adams, I think) once said something like "all the terrible implements of the soldier are the birthright of the American people". I may not have the quote exact (going from memory here), but the implication was that ALL military weapons are the people's right. Don't bother with arguing that they could not have known about machineguns and bombs, it won't wash. They knew about cannon and explosives. Actual repeating firearms did exist during the time of our Founders, and even though primitive by today's standards, the concept that weapons would improve over time was understood by them.
Our Founders considered the people to be the militia, and believed that we should have legal protection (2nd Amendment) of our natural right to military weapons. The right to arms for personal protection is only a subset of that fundamental right. Clubs and rocks, swords and bows, rifles and cannon, machine guns and rocket launchers, all are only the details of technology. The fundamental underlying principle is the same. And it is a valid one.
It is a legal fiction, and a popular one, that the Constitution and Bill of Rights grants us our rights. They do not. And they contains language specifically stating that not all our rights are listed in them. What the Constitution and Bill of Rights are is a document listing the limits of govermental power. It is a list of what government shall not do, not a list of what citizens are allowed to do.
We have come a long, long way from what our Founders intended, and the chains we wear today have been forged patiently, link by link, over a long time by men who deliberately sought power and authority over others. And they did so while claiming nothing but the best intentions for all of us.
They lied.
