10/07/2006

2nd Grade Amendment Rights Are Not Just For Adults


Welcome to the NRA Kooky Kidz Korner boys and girls! Hope you're packin' heat and lookin' for fun - cuz we're all about playing with high-caliber guns! Old Mr. Boring never shows his head 'round here, and if'n he does, we'll slay him like a deer!


Step into the shootin' range club house.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cato:

Where is your sense of humor and satire? A walk through the idealogical forest requires right and left truns to get around the trees...unless, of course, the corporate profit takers have clear-cut everything.

Andy Rand said...

I think this page is just the place for all 2nd grade Amendment Rights advocates. What's really cool is that there's no adult supervision so the kids can excercise their right to shoot 'em up, Oh I mean protect themselves and their right to the pursuit of happiness without pesky adult interference. I'd say happyness to a second grader probably means getting a bunch of new toys and candy.

tim_roth1618 said...

I'm curious to hear thoughts on what exactly the 2nd Amendment means in terms of the conceal and carry law.

I'm pretty sure the framers didn't create the 2nd amendment because of extremely rare acts of violence. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." I'm no constitutional scholar, but it seems like the true intent of the 2nd Amendment was to allow citizens to band together and protect themselves from tyrannical forms of government.

This is very valid concern and there is much wisdom in the dissenting opinion of Alex Kozinski, Circuit Judge in the case of Silveira v. Lockyer: "The majority falls prey to the delusion — popular in some circles — that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people... A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble. All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. ... If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars."

I don't own a gun and I have no intention of ever buying one. However, that would all change if I ever got the slightest feeling that the political and security situation of the United States might deteriorate to dire scenarios like Judge Kozinski described. Thankfully, I'm 99.9999999% (but, not 100%) certain that I'm never going to need to learn to how to operate an assault rifle. I would much rather spend my energy trying to prevent this frightening scenario in America and elsewhere (this kind of situation is very real for a lot of people around the world as we speak)

How this connects to the recent rash of school shootings: it wasn't like one day out of the blue, Hitler suddenly burst into a classroom and took away Jewish children. The kind of situations that the 2nd ammendment was designed for don't suddenly jump from the shadows in an empty parking lot. Having a society where everyone has a handgun concealed under their coat is simply madness. This isn't the lawless Wild West. The number of gun deaths (homicides and accidental deaths) in this country is simply staggering and we have to do something about it. Trying to address the program by allowing people to carry handguns on their person just doesn't make sense. Yes, I'm fully aware that tomorrow when I'm at work somebody could walk in and gun me down for no apparent reason. I definitely would feel helpless and as I bleed to death I imagine one of my last thoughts might be "damn, I wish I had a gun right now". However, if you follow that logic and look at the statistics we should all wear helmets and kevlar vests everywhere we go. We should all bring parachutes on every flight we take. We should all drive in heavily armored cars so nobody would die in car accidents.

Let's work on addressing the root causes of crime in this country and maybe conceal and carry proponents wouldn't be so scared for their safety. I don't have any children right now, but I understand the fear of parents right now. As a taxpayer and potential future parent, I would have no problem paying extra taxes to have a greater police presence at schools. It's a large gathering of people and there is always a police presence at large gatherings like sporting events. Totally logical. Plus, they can serve as school liaisons and help form community partnerships. All in all, it would certainly be a much more reasonable solution then arming teachers and other drastic measures.

Anonymous said...

The NRA is a bunch of chickensh!ts. They don't have the courage of their own convictions.

The 2nd part of the 2nd Amendment says "keep and bear ARMS" -- NOT guns. The NRA should be out there stumping for Jethro's right to keep and bear weapons-grade anthrax, smallpox, ricin, napalm, thermonuclear devices, and anything else that can kill everybody in sight.

I got no use for the NRA -- namby-pamby weasels.

Andy Rand said...

Well said Tim Roth1618.