orphious wrote:
Sanuk wrote:
Interesting how these post-mass-shooting threads eventually become about firearm minutia, and open love and adoration for such weapons.
And that's the real reason there will never be changes...
Of course not. It's really hard for law abiding citizens to give up rights they already have.
I'm all for people having guns, they have the right under the Constitution as we do in Canada and have never suggested people take away guns from responsible gun owners.
Some will say they have them to protect their family which they might intend on but really, how often does it actually happen that someone breaks into your home and you use a gun in self defense? Most people keep them locked up so unless you are given lots of advance warning that someone is going to come into your home so that you have time to get your gun and ammunition ready, it's probably not going to happen regularly.
Some go on about the Constitution and how important the 2nd Amendment is but most people probably can't recite all of the Amendments or even know what is in them. They focus on the 2nd Amendment, because they like guns and it's important to keep them. Nothing wrong with that but a lot of people seem pretty flexible when it comes to other parts of the Constitution so I don't think that is the main driver.
I think the real reason is that people just like guns. They like shooting them (it is fun), they like the power and feel of a gun and they look nice. I would love to go to a firing range and shoot an AR 15 or similar weapon and there are a lot of people like that.
Sure. All sorts of reasons why people fight gun control. All of your reasons are fairly accurate. My statement was more to the fact that it is way harder for people to give up rights than to not of had them at all. Once you have a right to something, there is always resistance in giving it up. Listing all the reasons in the world why people like guns and want to keep them doesn't change this fact.
What the left does is chip away at fundamental rights. Slowly but surely. Until one day you wake up and one or another of them is either completely unrecognizable or gone altogether. It's like Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises," when Mike is asked how he went bankrupt: "Two ways," he replies. "Gradually, then suddenly." That's how it works with fundamental rights. They're gradually diminished until, suddenly, they're gone.
A more hyperbolic way of looking at the matter of fundamental rights -- including the right keep and bear firearms -- and how some of the more far-left of the left looks at them is this: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." (Mussolini).
I know that most of those on the left are in no way akin to the WWII Italian fascist dictator, but there's no denying most believe that the state should be the primary source of all that we receive, including our rights, and the only regulator and interlocutor in our lives when it comes to those rights. Most libertarians and non-Republican-conservatives aren't so eager to go down that road. As to the GOP "Stupid Party"... who knows? They're stupid for a reason, right?
And so, with 300 million guns -- at minimum -- in circulation, the only measure that might actually be effective, outside of the raft of gun laws already in existence (which, if the state would have been minimally competent and enforced the existing ones, Texas wouldn't have happened), is confiscation.
So the left should be honest about what it wants and then devise a plan to come and take them. Never mind the civil war that would erupt as the government steps in and starts kicking down doors in red state America. ;-)
"Politics is just show business for ugly people."