“Not the bees! Though I’m sure some of them are great bees, they’re in my eyes! And my eyes are the best eyes, really terrific…”
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It may seem far fetched in today’s reality, but launching an armed invasion of America would be particularly difficult. There is no other first world country that would have half of it’s citizens shooting back. That being said, I do think it would be a good idea to raise the bar a bit when it comes to qualifying to purchase firearms.
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One emp Bomb. Wait for the muricans to kill each other over a can of beans, rather than work together.
Problem solved.
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We are a rather self centered group compared to other societies. I have a lot of Japanese friends and was impressed with the way the country was able to pull together following Fukushima and conserve energy as a collective group. Most Americans would have just cranked up the air conditioning and let someone else worry about the consequences.
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They were specifically talking about not living the way the British army made them live. You can’t house troops in people’s homes when you decide to. Citizens have a right to bear arms, and form into militias. Remember this is a handful of revolutionaries in a town of like… 20,000 people. And arms are shitty rifles and swords.
Not assault rifles and grenades.
People are arsenals these days. There wasn’t an instance where a guy could walk into a school and shoot everyone. It was a black powder musket. You could probably turn sideways and have a good chance to be missed. They didn’t even rifle the barrel.
Switzerland has the right to bear arms down. They did it right.
We use guns to solve arguments about trivial shit and people die. We use guns to protect ourselves, but all that happens and is they go off unexpectedly. And kill people. It’s… poor ignorant people with guns and a weak fabric to our society. Mostly it’s fear that brings us together. It’s really a shitty place… America.
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They’d turn on their TVs to find who to blame. It’s sad. A bunch of people made permaignorant by an educational system meant to turn then into commodities… this one gets As and knows all their multiplication tables… oh yay!
Struggling with the legacy of racism… trying to wrap their minds around what skin color means now that it’s not the uniform of a caste system.
I feel like the real story of America was told in a million back rooms of a million frontier homes… how we got this fucked up. How there’s such a prevalent mean streak and stubborn love of violence here.
We can show a hundred people exploding on TV and it’s fine. A naked lady and our kids will never be the same.
That’s a fucked up ethic. It all is. America is exceptionally full of shit and awful.
And behind the big cities… there’s that sprawl of crumbling middle of nowhere America. And all these dumb redneck Cossacks who populated the place… going what do we do now? You did it. You occupied a space where someone else was… and you had babies and paid taxes. And your time is done. No one needs you… Tennessee… except once every four years to rubber stamp the plan to turn America into “Macy’s presents… America.”
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There is discussion about what those particular words mean. While modern usage of “regulation” almost always refers to legal restriction, in the context of a militia, “regulation” means to make the individuals regular, i.e. standardized. So a well-regulated militia is probably one which is well-equipped and otherwise well prepared.
I’ve found in my own life you can never underestimate how dumb people are in mass.
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Yes. Thank you.
If you read militia laws from the 1780s you had to have x amount of this, and y amount of that, and boots, and food, and a bed roll, etc, so you were an assets, not a liability.
An other example of it’s use would be a well regulated watch keeps time.
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It supports the state’s ability to form a militia by having armed citizenry. The first clause informs why, the second informs what. Right of the people, not right of the state. It doesn’t say only for having militia, and firearms were and continue to be general purpose common use items. The specificity for milita use only at the hands of the state is the modern interpretation.
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so all meanings of “well regulated” are currently not enforced?
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I don’t understand the question.
ETA
I am assuming your question is the about the meaning of the militia clause, and hopefully this will clarify the intent of the 2nd Amendment.
The purpose of the Amendment was two fold. 1) to secure individual defense and protection against the government disarming them, as the British and other had done to control people, and 2) to provide a well armed pool of people for a militia.
I suppose with the size of our military now, it is probably hard to remember that in the past our standing Federal army was incredibly small. Until WWII, we usually only ramped up the federal army in times of war, and then reduced it when it was over. Early on in the US’s history, the Militia was the main back bone of the US Army. We didn’t even have a Navy for nearly a decade early on.
But anyway, the theory was that the states would have Militias, and the Militias would be called up during times of war. This model was first tested during the War of 1812, and honesty it didn’t work out so well due to lack of leadership and centralized command.
So the first part: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State,” is giving some reasoning behind the Amendment. That one needs a well armed populace to pull a Militia from. But the militia isn’t a requirement.
But the second part, obviously extends to EVERYONE, just as all the Bill of Rights do. “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed.”
TL;DR - first part not a requirement for the 2nd part.
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All this talk about guns and the second amendment just shows how the NRA has managed to define events like these, and divide us at a time when we should be uniting in sympathy around principles of tolerance, and showing how Trump and the conservative movement’s intolerance divides us and empowers movements of hate.
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There is a punchable face right there.
It’s racism plain and simple. The Drumpf campaign is only about racism.
People say they like him because he ‘tells it like it is,’ but the only thing he has been consistent about is racism. He’ll say anything on any other subject but he always says the same thing about racism. The only reason to support him is racism.
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Yeah, but all mobs aren’t created equally and Trump isn’t getting your quality, all-inclusive “stampede out of a burning building” type mob. He’s appealing, clumsily, to the much smaller bigoted, racist, and/or not-capable-of-critical-thought mob. And his support will only get smaller as the Democratic Party machine targets him–which it had ample reason NOT to before he was locked in as the GOP candidate. Coupled with lukewarm support from his own party and donors not wanting to touch him, this election is over before it’s even begun. In my (correct) opinion.
I know the party doesn’t want to admit how great it is to have him as an opponent–campaigns get more donations when there’s a crisis atmosphere–and predictions have been wrong about him before–but seriously. This guy’s shtick might be enough to get the nuttiest nut job half of the nut job party in the primaries–when there was no organized or well-funded opposition–but he’s going to be an absolute fish in a barrel for Clinton, despite her considerable weaknesses as a candidate. Short of Bill Cosby winning the GOP nom, Drumpf is the best thing that could have happened to her - a buffoon of a candidate, hated by half his own party, underfunded, prone to alienate entire classes of the electorate with a single tweet, and someone that terrifies rational people so much even those who normally would not have voted for her will feel compelled to turn out.
In a way, I love the guy–he turned what could have been a very close election into (IMO) a guaranteed win by the democrats, and may hand us the senate as well.
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Thank you for clarifying your interpretation.
I disagree that the two clauses can be divorced from each other like that, but many people do agree with you, including five ninths of a particular U.S. Supreme Court.
“firearms were and continue to be general purpose common use items”
Hmm, general purpose. I see firearms as having a rather narrow purpose, though I admit I once saw a guy use one as a can opener for a tin of baked beans. It certainly did open the can, but the beans were ruined…
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Feels so strange for an European that part of Americans can´t understand that giving guns to everyone is a… bit dangerous! How can an idiot like this say something like that??
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He’s referring to all the high fives he’s gotten.
- Recreation
- Self Defense
- The ever popular militia readiness
- Putting meat in the freezer
- Pest control
I mean, it isn’t necessarily the do it all Sledge-o-matic or anything, but I don’t think that is narrow.
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