Actually there are a number of Eastern Block countries that are dictatorships or quasi dicatorships.

Azerbaijan, Kazahkistan and Belarus come to mind.

When you say that the American Revolution wasn't a revolution, but a rebellion... you're really just getting into semantics.

You don't need guns, no. But if you live in a tyrannical dictatorship, you might want one.

Do I want school teachers carrying guns? Not really. Do I want whole schools completely unarmed? Not really. Do I have the right to tell people that they can't hold guns to protect themselves, no matter what their occupation? Not really.

You might not like guns, but that does not give you the right to disarm everybody else.

Because the ownership of deadly weapons should not be a right. If it's a cultural matter, then it needs to be weeded out of our culture.

Though it has been a specific agenda of recent tenancies of the US government to uneducate the public, it will always be embarrassing to listen to those that are so vocally stupid.

>User was moderated for this post [RH]

Anything can be a "deadly weapon" if someone is motivated ...

The motivation, not the tool, leads to violence. If we lived in a happy magic land where you could ban guns the violence would still be there, but people would use knives, baseball bats, and any other weapon they could fashion.

Beyond that, how are you ever going to prevent people from owning weapons when we not have affordable technologies that allow people to "print" assault rifles?

Gun control is as outdated today as trying to prevent music theft by preventing people from shoplifting at HMV.

Your post is quite ironic.

It's not semantics, it's a very important distinction. The politics of a regional rebellion versus a revolution run completely differently, because in a regional rebellion, the majority of people living within a geographic area resolve to have their region break away, and this then is a decision often backed up by the local government, duly elected, or at least representative of the people's desire to break away from the national government. This means that if the rebellion succeeds, the new government already has structures in place, and can operate off of the old social contracts, just independently of the old overlords. This makes for a scenario much, much cleaner than a revolution. That's why there was never any real danger (despite what historical anecdotes may say) of George Washington becoming a military dictator, because he was appointed by the Continental Congress, who were appointed by Colonial Governments, duly elected by the colonial peoples: lots of structure and order in the whole affair

Compare that to, say, real revolutions: 1790s France or 1917 Russia. The dynamics are completely different, and in the case of a real revolution, gun ownership makes things much worse, because you have a breakdown of the state monopoly on use of force and armed groups running around, suddenly any guarantees for an orderly process or any attempts to preserve rights or liberties have gone out the window, entirely at the mercy of how well-organized the armed groups are, and whether they happen to believe in such things (because even if they are pro-liberty, like the leadership of the Libyan Transitional Council, if they don't have total control over their ranks, you end up with Libya as it is)

Really, the American Revolution should be called the "American War of Independence," as "Revolution" is the incorrect term.

So you want to ban something out of sheer ignorance - since you obviously don't know what an assault rifle is for, sans militaristic uses. Got it.

The reality is that an assault rifle is the premier platform for competitive shooting. They combine the accuracy and distance of a sniper rifle with the capacity and rate of fire of a handgun (obviously at a cost of size). They're incredibly fun to shoot for stress relief. There is nothing in the world quite as fun as using an AR-15 to ding targets at 100 yards away at command.

By the way, my gun stance is based solely on having evaluated the different studies regarding it and finding which studies were more flawed.

I could give a damn about gun ownership, I don't plan to own one, and I don't really think the right to bear arms is going to help overthrow the government until the average citizen can afford their own airfield and Jet Fighter.

Never fired a gun, don't want to.

It's worth noting, most crimes are committed by people you know... so these are people who will likely know if you own a gun or not.

I'm more or less of the same stance - I don't own a gun myself. Although my brother does and I love to shoot for leisure on his dime (since ownership is pretty expensive). The data available that discusses gun ownership and crime is very sound and impossible to refute.