http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/12/18/it-is-our-living-constitution-that-gave-us-our-right-to-a-bushmaster-rifle Comments On: It Is Our Living Constitution That Gave Us Our Right to a Bushmaster Rifle by Eli Sanders en-us Copyright 2013 The Stranger. All rights reserved. This RSS file is offered to individuals, The Stranger readers, and non-commercial organizations only. Any commercial websites wishing to use this RSS file, please contact The Stranger. webmaster@thestranger.com (The Stranger Webmaster) Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:01 -0700 Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:00:00 -0700 Foundation http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Posted by Rhett Oracle]]> Wed, 19 Dec 2012 11:01:47 -0800 The Stranger Posted by Dominic's Mom]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 20:50:33 -0800 The Stranger Well, despite being ambushed one of the officers managed to shoot and wound the killer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakewood,_W…

"Officer Greg Richards managed to fight back against Clemmons and fired his own weapon, hitting Clemmons in the abdomen, before succumbing to a shot to the head. "
Posted by Cascadian Bacon]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 20:40:17 -0800 The Stranger Posted by JenV]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:03:41 -0800 The Stranger
You keep re-posting the same stupid shit. Nobody is buying it.
Posted by Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:07:55 -0800 The Stranger
Mind telling me who "the people" are?

The militia is not a formal organization, it consist of the people, who have both a right and a duty to be armed. An armed population is necessary to a free state.

@36
Contrary to popular belief most people on an Army Base are not armed, guns are kept locked up in the armory unless actively being used for training. The only ones armed on a base are the Military police.
Posted by Cascadian Bacon]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:22:09 -0800 The Stranger Posted by Wondering]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:02:01 -0800 The Stranger
Actually, the area of Fort Hood in which the shooting took place was a gun-free area. None of the soldiers were armed, or even allowed to be armed, at the time of the shooting.
Posted by Walter Matthau]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:55:13 -0800 The Stranger Posted by Beetlecat]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:48:26 -0800 The Stranger Great articles

"John Lott, who conducted a study on mass shootings in 1999 spoke with John Fund after the Newtown school shooting and pointed out the following, "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns."

Gun-control advocates generally scoff at the "conservative" argument that if other people present at the scene of a mass murder had been armed, that they could have stopped the shooter. As we know from the above articles, as well as several studies, mass shootings happen in places like schools, churches, etc.. All gun-free zones.

Meanwhile, when was the last time you heard about a mass-shooting at a gun show or gun store? It just doesn't happen. And I'll give you one guess why.
Posted by Walter Matthau]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:33:11 -0800 The Stranger For the record, I don't and never have possessed a firearm. I do believe that assault rifles should be banned.

That said, I just read these two pieces from gun-rights advocates:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/20…

and

http://www.redstate.com/2012/12/17/quest…

What intrigued me was that Connecticut has one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Also, I did know the late author, William Burroughs (first piece) was a gun nut and didn't know he said those words in the wake of a mass shooting.
Posted by lark]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:47:19 -0800 The Stranger Because the SCOTUS has already ruled on that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v.…
Posted by fairly.unbalanced]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:33:41 -0800 The Stranger
Which is to say, I don't believe the authors of the constitution could have ever imagined an assault rifle with the capability of massacring 50 or 60 people in under 5 minutes.
Posted by JenV]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:26:36 -0800 The Stranger "I''d like to see us take another look at what 'well regulated' is supposed to mean. "

Functional. Skilled.
Posted by fairly.unbalanced]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:04:51 -0800 The Stranger
I thought the little thread to which I was responding was about the language used to write the 2nd amendment and just what it might've meant.

Did you know, for instance, the 2nd amendment's grammar differs slightly between what the states ratified and what congress approved? Perhaps - just perhaps - some inconsistent scribe's' grammar is at the root of all this. ( and, oh I suppose some might argue that the discrepancies might even invalidate the amendment altogether )

Think about it, or dismiss it as irrelevant, or just bark some more.

Posted by NotSean]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:56:00 -0800 The Stranger
I'm not saying I like it, that's just the way it is. There are plenty of conservatives who don't like the separation of church and state that constantly claim that's not what the Constitution says, even though it's right there.
Posted by GermanSausage]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:47:09 -0800 The Stranger
Nuclear power plants are privately owned. The fuel used to create power produces plutonium. This plutonium could be extracted and enriched to create nuclear weapons.

So in a sense, we already have private ownership of nukes.
Posted by Urgutha Forka]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:12:58 -0800 The Stranger Posted by fletc3her]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:12:33 -0800 The Stranger Posted by treacle]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:03:11 -0800 The Stranger
You really do take whatever some anonymous shut-in wrote on Wikipedia at face value? You do realize that an 8th grader who wrote a paper from Wikipedia like that would get an F?
Posted by Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:42:56 -0800 The Stranger Posted by Will in Seattle]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:40:50 -0800 The Stranger
The strength of our constitution is its mutability, and I think consititutional originalists are stupid and miss the point of the very document. Just like taking the bible literally: you miss the morals of the stories.

But, I think the statement is clear, and the history of why they put the amendment in the document also points to private gun ownership, as derived from English law.

Fighting on the interpretation when most of the country and the Supreme Court has ruled on its meaning is essentially a losing, pointless fight, as it has already been lost. The fight now is convincing people that gun control does not infringe, and that gun control is needed.

What I think is most humorous about the amendment is that the whole point is for the people to defend themselves from the government, and the very real fear that the powerful would simply declare themselves kings of America. So the spirit of the amendment is to ensure that the people would have access to the same arms as the government, which was the case in 1776, with long muskets and cannons. So if we really want to be originalists, then the people should also have access to nukes, tanks, .50 caliner machine guns, etc.

Of course, that would be horribly stupid, but it proves that we already, as a nation, do not believe in the original intent of the amendment.
Posted by Theodore Gorath]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:39:41 -0800 The Stranger To be fair, I did say there's a lot of restrictions.

The unregistered commenter(s) said, outright, "automatic weapons (i.e., machine guns) are banned," which is not true. They are not banned. Heavily, HEAVILY restricted and regulated, but not banned.
Posted by Urgutha Forka]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:39:12 -0800 The Stranger "My understanding - from wikipedia (fwiw) ..."

I can post this over and over and over.
In fact, I HAVE! LOL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v.…

On June 28, 2010, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, reversed the Seventh Circuit's decision, holding that the Second Amendment was incorporated under the Fourteenth Amendment thus protecting those rights from infringement by local governments.

Kind of the opposite of that.
The SCOTUS says that lower governments (state / city / etc) cannot take away your 2nd Amendment rights.
Posted by fairly.unbalanced]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:38:24 -0800 The Stranger Posted by Blackdog]]> Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:36:44 -0800 The Stranger