CompuServe Messages

>one's right to bear arms should end where that right likewise begins to >impose burdens on fellow citizens. >Forget the government. **I** do not want the guy next door to me owning >an automatic rifle. (I will assume that when you are referring to an "automatic" rifle you mean semi-automatic or self-loading, but it really doesn't matter for the purposes of my argument.) "(I)mpose burdens"? The mere posession of a particular class of firearm by your neighbors somehow burdens you, without any misuse of those firearms? How so? Do you lie awake nights, worrying? But the fact that your neighbor owns a bolt action rifle accurate to a quarter mile or more is somehow less troubling. What about knives, baseball bats, or axes? Just what do your neighbors have to give up in order that you don't feel "burdened?" The problem you and your fellow gun controllers have is that your vision of what is proper for citizens to own is quite at variance with that of the drafters of the Constitution. Few people these days have any idea just how radical the Founding Fathers were, how profoundly they distrusted government, and how much this distrust is reflected in the Constitution. GOVERNMENT'S posession of "automatic" firearms would have filled them with horrified alarm, but I doubt their posession by citizens would have caused them to turn a hair. It was the professional military which was seen as the primary source of danger, and therefore intended to be relatively small and temporary, and to be used only in times of emergency. (Thus the power granted to Congress to "raise armies") The right of the citizens to be armed is quite old you know, going back some six hundred or more years to the Rights of Englishmen. The great complier of the English Common Law, Willian Blackstone, said it best: "Free men have arms. Slaves do not." Now, for the red herring that "Similarly, it's obvious (at least to me) that the Second Amendment isn't absolute, either." Well, yeah, but so what? What IS obviously protected is arms capable of being born, and appropriate for use by a citizen militia. You can make arguments either way that fully automatic weapons are not "appropriate", since their use requires training that citizens are not likely to have. You cannot make this argument (at least, not with any integrety) with regard to semi-automatic versions of the issue military rifle. It is, clearly, nearly the IDEAL militia weapon. Of course, with your "growing" Constitution, I guess you don't HAVE to make any argument. The Government just needs to cite "changing conditions," or something, and can then interprete the provisions of the Constitution as they wish. How convienent for them. -Karl