Properly framing a subject at debate

[unixronin]

Or, in which luxobscura asks a very pertinent question:

BAMBI'S MOM IS DEAD.  IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLAR TO MOVE THE 2ND AMENDMENT DEBATE BEYOND DEER HUNTING, WHICH HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FRAMERS INTENT REGARDING SAID AMENDMENT?

I keep hearing from members of my friends list that Obama is a Constitutional scholar.  Yet he keeps trotting out the same old deer-and-ducks canard about the Second Amendment.

So:  Is he such a piss-poor Constitutional scholar that he honestly doesn't understand twenty-eight really rather simple words, or is he knowingly and intentionally trying to blow smoke up our asses?

He did, after all, issue a statement in which he claimed to support the United States Supreme Court's decision in Heller vs. DC stating that yes, Virginia, the Second Amendment does refer to an individual right, but even in that statement he clearly showed that he doesn't understand the meaning of the words "shall not be infringed."

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

That phrase contains too many long words for _any_ politician.

[luxobscura.livejournal.com]

For me, this was GAME OVER/INSERT COIN

http://www.ontheissues.org/domestic/Barack_Obama_Gun_Control.htm

(1st question)

"Q: Is the D.C. law prohibiting ownership of handguns consistent with an individual's right to bear arms?

A: As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right, in the same way that we have a right to private property but local governments can establish zoning ordinances that determine how you can use it."

I bolded the moment when the WTF? climaxed.

So, just because we have a right doesn't mean the government can't take it away?

Ok....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That is indeed a very telling quote.


As I've said before ... "Illinois Democrat."

[gdmusumeci.livejournal.com]

Are you suggesting a very literal interpretation of 'shall not be infringed?'

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

To summarize our discussion last night:

Yes, I am suggesting a very literal "shall not be infringed". The Founders chose, quite deliberately I'm sure, to use the mandating "shall not" construction, and I believe their meaning and intention in so doing is clear. There is really very little ground for misunderstanding in those four words. If one randomly chosen citizen cannot be trusted not to misuse a specified weapon, what makes five or six hundred citizens more trustworthy? Especially five or six hundred citizens who, at the very least, act as though they believe they're above the law? (And that's not even getting into the ever-proliferating sea of armed Federal law enforcement departments.) The trust model should not be one of what weapons the government trusts its citizens to possess and control, it should be one of what weapons the citizens trust their government to possess and control. Our government has been a rather poor steward of the arms entrusted to it, having started several unnecessary foreign wars for reasons that, in the final analysis, basically come down to "Well, you know, we really wanted to." (Not to mention incidents like, say, Waco and Ruby Ridge in which it needlessly made de facto war upon its own citizens, then smeared the victims afterwards.)

That said, nuclear weapons are another order of destructiveness. The machine-gun, the flamethrower, the mortar, the howitzer, the tank: these things are really only quantitatively different from the pistol, the shotgun or the rifle. Nuclear weapons are qualitatively different. You cannot defend yourself from assault with one, or hunt with one, or apprehend a criminal with one. It's a strategic weapon that requires a strategic target. Even so-called "tactical" nuclear devices can contaminate huuuuuge ... tracts of land, beyond any remediation other than just bulldozing off all the topsoil and burying it somewhere. It's like burning the house down in order to prevent a burglary. In any even approximately sane setting, a nuclear weapon is useless because you don't dare use it. The destructive potential of an accidental discharge is so great that we must build them with multiple levels of safety interlocks that are beyond the ability of the average person to construct or properly check and maintain. Merely accumulating the materials to assemble one could irradiate your entire neighborhood.

Now this doesn't mean I think nuclear weapons should only be entrusted to governments. On the contrary, I think governments are the VERY LAST entities they should be entrusted to, because governments are liable to sooner or later actually use the things. Our planet is in bad enough shape without some couple of rival governments rendering a quarter or half of it uninhabitable in a fit of pique. We already once almost had a full-scale nuclear exchange between Russia and the Soviet Union by accident (thank you a thousand times, Lt. Col. Petrov).

(The rivalry between India and Pakistan is particularly scary in this regard, not just because both sides are now nuclear powers, but because both sides believe themselves to be manly near-supermen, completely unlike those weak and decadent Westerners, and as such, perfectly capable of both winning and surviving a nuclear exchange. Fallout and radiation sickness are for the weak.)

[databeast.livejournal.com]

good grief, LJ is a very small place! never realized you knew Lux before today.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I just remembered what was nagging at me since yesterday. This concept is reminiscent of the UN Joint Declaration of Human "Rights". I write "Rights" in quotes because, buried in the text of this declaration, there is a clause that basically states that no "human right" may be used in any way in opposition to the will of the applicable government, and said government may restrict or prohibit the exercise of any listed "right" at any time and for any reason.

That's not a declaration of human rights. It's a declaration of privileges that you will be permitted as long as you behave and do as you're told.

[luxobscura.livejournal.com]

That's not a declaration of rights; that's the fine print on the soda cup of a fast-food chain promotion.

Participating localities only, while supplies last, void where prohibited.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

To quote someone from my Civil War event this weekend:
"The difference between Democrats and Republicans is only in which parts of the Bill of Rights they hate and want to throw out, and which groups of people they want to disenfranchise."