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I'm amazed.
Jun. 26th, 2008 08:50 pmThe Supreme Court actually managed to rule that the right to bear arms as defined in the second Amendment is an individual right.
Gee, it's only taken them 70 or so years. And they still haven't ruled definitively on restrictions of said right, just commented that restrictions weren't 100% out of the question. <sigh>
No, I'm not a flaming "gun nut". And I agree that there are people who either misuse firearms on purpose or thru ignorance.
But the same can be said of cars. And the solution *there* was education. Make sure you've got people trained before they can operate the things unsupervised.
Alas, all the "registration" type schemes I've seen make it too easy to have a list of who to confiscate things from when the local government decides to change the rules.
And it's been done. Here in the US. In recent time. For example, California outlawed certain types of rifles merely because they "looked scary" (that isn't how they phrased it, but that's what the criteria amounted to. The features singled out did *not* make the rifles any more dangerous than thousands of other varieties of semi-auto hunting rifles. They just made them "look military")
They then proceeded to say that you weren't allowed to sell them or send them out of the state, and you had top hand them over at the pennies on a dollar the state was offering as their "fair market" value. And they had list of owners thanks to a registration law they'd sworn up and down would *never* be used for confiscating the weapons only a few years before.
( ranting follows )
Gee, it's only taken them 70 or so years. And they still haven't ruled definitively on restrictions of said right, just commented that restrictions weren't 100% out of the question. <sigh>
No, I'm not a flaming "gun nut". And I agree that there are people who either misuse firearms on purpose or thru ignorance.
But the same can be said of cars. And the solution *there* was education. Make sure you've got people trained before they can operate the things unsupervised.
Alas, all the "registration" type schemes I've seen make it too easy to have a list of who to confiscate things from when the local government decides to change the rules.
And it's been done. Here in the US. In recent time. For example, California outlawed certain types of rifles merely because they "looked scary" (that isn't how they phrased it, but that's what the criteria amounted to. The features singled out did *not* make the rifles any more dangerous than thousands of other varieties of semi-auto hunting rifles. They just made them "look military")
They then proceeded to say that you weren't allowed to sell them or send them out of the state, and you had top hand them over at the pennies on a dollar the state was offering as their "fair market" value. And they had list of owners thanks to a registration law they'd sworn up and down would *never* be used for confiscating the weapons only a few years before.
( ranting follows )
