The 2nd Amendment

[spartan]

Bottom line is that Mason did not support the Constitution, and until his death, he never was any more than lukewarm to it. His views on the Constitution actually had adverse affects on his relationships with George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and to his public standing, as the majority of the public favored the new Constitution, as evident by it's passage.

Only recently has Mason even been deemed a "founding father", and that's only because a historical revisit of the Philadelphia Convention revealed his insistence on a Bill of Rights. Up until the early 20th century he was not seen as one by most historians, because of his refusal to vote for or sign the Constitution.

Bottom line is you're talking out of your arse. With all due respect of course.

[Dolorous Jason]

Bottom line is you're talking out of your arse. With all due respect of course.

No respect is due this dishonest black hole of a man. You are wasting your time even talking to him.

[CBWx2]

Bottom line is that Mason did not support the Constitution, and until his death, he never was any more than lukewarm to it. His views on the Constitution actually had adverse affects on his relationships with George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and to his public standing, as the majority of the public favored the new Constitution, as evident by it's passage.

Only recently has Mason even been deemed a "founding father", and that's only because a historical revisit of the Philadelphia Convention revealed his insistence on a Bill of Rights. Up until the early 20th century he was not seen as one by most historians, because of his refusal to vote for or sign the Constitution.

Bottom line is you're talking out of your arse. With all due respect of course.

Just because you want so badly to believe something is so, doesn't make it so....

Although he believed a bill of rights was mandatory, he had additional objections to the Constitution. Among his other concerns, he believed the convention was giving the executive branch (president) too much power. On June 4, he made an angry speech to the federal Convention.

When his neighbor, George Washington was inaugurated, Mason remained pessimistic. In fact, he was so frustrated with a federal government he believed was too strong, he retired from politics.

http://www.whatwouldthefoundersthink.com/george-mason-the-framer-who-refused-to-sign-the-constitution

Mason doubted that Congress would approve meaningful revisions, and he largely retired from public life after the convention. He was, however, partially reconciled to the new government when James Madison shepherded a series of amendments through the first session of the new Congress, and Mason deserves credit for helping create the political momentum that led to the adoption of what became the federal Bill of Rights. He died at Gunston Hall on October 7, 1792.

http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Mason_George_1725-1792#start_entry

He refused to sign the document in Philadelphia, compiled a list of sixteen reasons why he could not support it, worked against ratification in Virginia and ultimately resigned his position on the Fairfax Court rather take an oath of allegiance to it. And this brought him into direct conflict with his neighbor—George Washington.

It is fashionable to explain Mason's actions as an effort to protest the lack of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. That was one of the reasons he cited, and it resonated well among Antifederalists and still does with modern pundits embracing very different agendas. However, that explanation standing alone intentionally distorts the picture. Here are some other reasons Mason listed for rejecting the new constitution.
 
He felt that the Senate was given too much power; it did not represent the people, and sat too long. "The Judiciary of the United States is so constructed and extended, as to absorb and destroy the judiciaries of the several States." The Vice President sits as president of the Senate thus "blending the executive and legislative powers." There was no Constitutional Council to advise (read inhibit) the President. Commercial and navigation laws only required a majority vote rather than two-thirds majority to protect the commercial interests of the five Southern States against the power of the eight Northern and Eastern states to grant monopolies or demand exorbitant freight rates. "The general legislature is restrained from prohibiting the further importation of slaves for twenty odd years; though such importations render the United States weaker, more vulnerable, and less capable of defence [sic]."

http://www.gunstonhall.org/georgemason/essays/hiller_essay.html

History happened the way it happened. All it takes is a little research, and not selective cherry picking of information, to determine how that was.

[spartan]

not selective cherry picking of information, to determine how that was.

I will bow to your wealth of experience in that regards.

[CBWx2]

not selective cherry picking of information, to determine how that was.

I will bow to your wealth of experience in that regards.

I'm predicting another high-fiving, butt patting, circle jerk response from Jason, with an added "you go girl" for good measure. I wonder if he will work a "comrade" somewhere in there too?

[CBWx2]

The fundamentally hilarious thing about your assertions is that in the days of our founders, there were two things that were just cause for disarming an individual, and they were 1. if they committed a crime, and 2. if they were actively engaged in or had previously been in engaged in armed rebellion.

And while we are on the subject of selectively quoting the founders, I find it odd that none of you cons bothered to post this one from Thomas Jefferson:

 “man is the only animal which devours his own kind, and I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

Uh oh. Careful there Thomas. Delirious Jason, Illuminator, spartan, and Durango might just label you a Stalinist for using that sort of language.

[Durango 95]

[CBWx2]

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." - Thomas Jefferson

"The farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of this country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings." - Thomas Jefferson

Easy there, comrade Jefferson. You might just be putting a few cracks in that "gun toting, free market capitalist" persona Delirious has ascribed to you.

[CBWx2]

You want to know how I know when Durango has no legitimate, cohesive, or thoughtful rebuttals left in his arsenal? When he starts posting stuff like ^this^.

[Dolorous Jason]

I've never seen a guy lose an argument as thoroughly and embarrassingly as CBW , and be the only one in the room who didn't realize it was happening.


Congrats , Comrade. Now go back to arguing with yourself , since everyone is done with you.

[CBWx2]

I've never seen a guy lose an argument as thoroughly and embarrassingly as CBW , and be the only one in the room who didn't realize it was happening.


Congrats , Comrade. Now go back to arguing with yourself , since everyone is done with you.

You're not done with me. You'll keep posting your little pics and gifs while claiming victory despite not proving a single thing. Jump through the hoop, Fido.

[Dolorous Jason]

U mad , Comrade ? 

[spartan]

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." - Thomas Jefferson

"The farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of this country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings." - Thomas Jefferson

Easy there, comrade Jefferson. You might just be putting a few cracks in that "gun toting, free market capitalist" persona Delirious has ascribed to you.

So let's ban guns then, that will feed the poor!

[dbucfan]

Another article for consumption

Connecticut killings: it's the shooter, not the guns
Here is an edited version of my column from Monday's Irish Daily Mail:

Last Friday 20-year old Adam Lanza murdered his mother then murdered 26 women and children at a school in Connecticut and then killed himself. The first question that ought to come to mind is: what sort of person does that? Was he insane, criminal, or morally void? What sort of person starts with the murder of his mother and then just doesn’t stop killing?

It can’t simply be that Lanza had access to a gun so he used it. As of December 31st last year, the state of Connecticut had issued 165,000 permits for privately-held firearms. One of those holding a permit was Lanza’s mother, Nancy. You can assume that tens of thousands of other Connecticut citizens who hold permits also have sons.

So the next question has to be, why did this son amongst all those tens of thousands of sons take his mother’s firearms illegally – Connecticut has the fourth toughest gun control laws in the US, and any 20-year old is banned from buying or carrying pistols – and turn into a mass murderer?

News reports say he had a history of mental instability. At least one report mentioned ‘mood altering drugs.’ That is likely. The presence of legal drugs, the kind prescribed by psychiatrists, in the blood of the killers has been a feature of mass murders in America.

Both of the Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris (described as ‘a classic psychopath’) and Dylan Klebold, were on psychotropic drugs.

So was 17-year old Jeff Weise, the 2005 Red Lake High School killer in Minnesota who killed nine people then committed suicide.

So was 19-year old Robert Hawkins who murdered eight people then killed himself in Nebraska in 2007.

And on the list goes. What drugs 20-year old Lanza might have used on top of any drugs prescribed by a psychiatrist is something we will only learn from a coroner’s report.

Yet the answer to the question, ‘What kind of person carries out such a crime as this?’ the answer may be as simple as: ‘The kind of young man who would murder his mother would murder just about anyone, and in any quantity.’

Strange facts come to mind when one tries to figure out such a killer. In the biography of Hermann Goering, the Nazi war criminal recalled that his earliest memory was beating his mother’s face with his fists. Hate your mother with enough violence, and maybe there may be no limit to the violence. I don’t know.

I do know this: there is a reason this one young man among the population of 3.6m in Connecticut turned into a killer. That reason can’t be the existence of guns in his home, any more than the existence of drugs in his blood. Among 165,000 permits, there was one mass killer. The state is on the edge of New York, so you can bet there are plenty of drugs, too. Yet the other 164,999 permits to own a gun in Connecticut produced no mass killers.

You would have to – if you were rational – be open to the argument that having access to a gun and killing people are not cause and effect.

And you would be right, despite the emotional surge in Britain, Ireland and other countries that insists that the huge numbers of privately-held guns in American must lead to huge numbers of murders. They don’t.

Check, for example, the Guardian newspaper’s Datablog. Earlier this year it gathered statistics from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project located at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Here are the headline facts: ‘The US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world… but the US does not have the worst firearm murder rate – that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the US is number 28, with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people. Puerto Rico tops the world’s table for firearms murders as a percentage of all homicides – 94.8 percent. It’s followed by Sierra Leone in Africa and Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean.’

More guns don’t mean more crime. In fact, as the BBC reported from America at the weekend, ‘Public support for stricter gun legislation has been on a downward trend in recent years, along with overall levels of violent crime.’

Yet during the same period, gun ownership has increased.

According to the most recent complete figures in the Small Arms Survey, in 2007 American civilians held 270m firearms, a rate of 89 guns per 100 population. However, in a recent footnote the survey added that the ‘ATF [US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] and other sources suggest that the total private ownership in the United States in 2010 was closer to 270m-314m firearms, for an average of 290m firearms or 96 per 100 residents that year.’

What the survey doesn’t mention is one reason for the jump: the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Since his re-election this year, there has been another surge in gun sales. Yet violent crime has continued to fall. What is happening is that millions of Americans are afraid President Obama may have an opportunity in his second term to add leftwing justices to the US Supreme Court who would interfere with their Second Amendment rights. So they are stocking up. They intend to go on being able to defend themselves, their families, their property, and their liberty.

For that has always been the foundation of the Americans’ determination to prevent the Federal government from taking away their Second Amendment right to bear arms. The amendment has always been misunderstood or wilfully misinterpreted abroad (though of course that is true of the entire US Constitution: so in passing I will say yet again that the US Constitution includes no right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, nor does it state that all men are created equal, nor does it say anything about government of the people, by the people for the people. But that is for another column.)

The Second Amendment limits only the powers of the US Congress to interfere with the right to carry weapons. The sovereign states remain free to regulate the possession and carrying of weapons in accordance with their own constitutions. Any state in the union could, for example, legislate for gun control very like the gun control in Britain or Ireland. They just don’t want to.

Even so, the right to bear arms is not absolute. The federal courts have upheld federal laws that limit the sale, possession and transportation of certain kinds of weapons such as machine-guns and sawn-off shotguns.

But it is the states which have the power to limit possession and carrying of firearms, and they do. As I said, Connecticut is rated fourth-toughest in gun control among the 50 states. The three tougher are California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The rankings come from a report by the Washington DC anti-gun Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Much less tough degrees of gun control exist in, for example, Vermont, South Dakota and Arizona.

There are as many different regimes of gun control in America as there are states in America, and Americans intend to keep it that way for many reasons. Here is one. The amendment protects the rights of the states to maintain their own militia, or ‘armed citizenry,’ independent of federal forces. This was established as a safeguard against oppression, either domestic or foreign.

If you think this is a peculiar idea of Americans, look at the list of which other countries besides America have citizens who intend to remain armed. Number three on the global list of civilian gun ownership is Switzerland, a country with an historical understanding of the importance of an armed citizenry. The Swiss have 46 firearms per 100 of population. Yet there the rate of homicide by firearm per 100,000 of population is just 0.77 percent.

Fourth on the list is Finland with 45 firearms per 100 population. The rate of homicide by firearm in Finland is 0.45 per 100,000 of population.

Fifth on the list is Cyprus with 36 firearms per 100 of population. Homicide by firearm in Cyprus is 0.46 per 100,000 people. (For contrast, in Venezuela, the homicide by firearm rate is 39 per 100,000 population.)

Number 13 in global terms of private gun ownership is Canada with 31 firearms per hundred people, then Austria, Iceland and Germany with 30 guns per hundred of population. These are all amongst the most safe and orderly countries on earth. The fact that that they also have high concentrations of privately-held guns may be connected.

December 16, 2012

[Chief Joseph]

Presenting facts to those who make decisions based on emotion isn't likely to phase them much.