Man carries assault rifle to Obama protest -- and it's legal

[The_vagabond7]

Jackson50 said:

mrstickball said:I would argue that our culture of rejecting tyranny helps, but that's manifested in the right to bare arms. If the country did impose laws that destroyed freedoms, then the populace could at least resist in a way that would cripple the govenrment and prevent them from doing anything.

Again, I think you are overestimating the impact a right to bare arms would have. Even baring arms like these would have little impact.

Is that a fucking tumor???

 

I think guns are like power in that the people that want them the most are the people that should have them least. The people I see proudly bearing arms are sure as hell not the people I would want creating a revolution and taking over the country, it would not better the country. I don't really mean this as a commentary as to whether or not the second amendment is good or bad, merely that the ideology that people invoke of it does not match up in any way to reality. The NRA is supposedly about protecting civil liberties with the idea that if they take our guns, what's next? But really they just like guns. During the Bush administration when he was vastly over extending his power by being able to listen to any phone conversation, or detain anyone in the world for any reason indefinitely without trial, they essentially were like "Wait, but we can still have guns right? Ok, fuck the rest."

We have to take school courses, and pass tests to get behind the wheel of a car, and regularly renew this liscense by passing more tests, and then there is an abundance of laws on how where and when to use cars, but to carry the power of life in death in your hands you only need wait two weeks....sometimes. What we need isn't to ban all guns, but to greatly restrict who has access to them. Make people take a psych evaluation to see if they have aggressive or violent tendencies, make them take training courses on how to use them properly emphasizing safety, put them in mock situations where they are defending their house from a burglar or somebody starts shooting everyone up in a resteraunt, don't just hand them a fire arm and a box of bullets from a drive through window.

The problem isn't the fact that in America we allow civilians to have guns, but that we have such an ridiculously lax view of what makes a person qualified to handle a gun.