1) The only thing which matters is the text of the Constitution. You’re saying MAGIC FAERIES over and over. Doesn’t matter.
2) You’re a Corporatist Capitalist of course. As you’ve made clear repeatedly.

I’m “trolling” because I actually believe in the things you work to suppress, right. Typical totalitarian thinking.

Gun control outside militia has NOTHING to do with the 2nd amendment. You keep pushing your fantasy of it being the ONLY meaningless pre-statement in the entire Constitution. MAGIC!!!!!!!

@51 – Yes, you keep pretending that trying to get innocents killed is amusing.

Deputy “forgets” two K9s in a patrol SUV, leaves them to die overnight. I love how the media spinned it on the radio this morning : “Hot weather to blame for death of police K9s.”

Group right, your oxymoron of the day.

Efutue, servuus dominum.

Both violent revolution and peaceful campaigns have poor track records overall, with violent revolutions having a tiny edge in terms of actually accomplishing SOMETHING, good or bad.

As to your observation about disarming the government; I have been toying with the idea of proposing (as a Constitutional Amendment, since I think that is what it would take) a measure that would allow citizens to buy and carry without interference any weapon available to any government enforcement agency, excepting only the Military which would be allowed other weapons only on designated military reservations or outside the national borders.

That way if the Gun Nuts want Uzis they can put up with the local beat cop carrying the same, and if the Gun Controllers want to disarm the public they can have the BATF do it while armed with nerf bats.

Probably wouldn’t work in real life, but as a thought experiment it has a pleasing symmetry.

American levels of violent crime, particularly murder, remain stuck at about three times the Canadian rate, concealed carry laws, capital punishment, and unprecedented levels of incarceration notwithstanding. As a guarantee of political freedom, guns have an especially unimpressive record. Since the nineteenth century, how many violent revolutions have led to greater democracy, as opposed to how many peaceful mass campaigns? In the United States, the expansion of permission to carry weapons, the so-called “concealed carry” laws have gone hand in hand with the highest incarceration rate in the world, and certainly the highest in American history, and an extension of criminal law so great that a public official intent on denying an individual the ability to legally own guns will almost certainly have the ability to find some act or oversight possible to turn into a “felony” and a permanent bar on legal ownership of guns. You have more prisons, more people in those prisons, more people under the supervision of the judicial-prison-industrial complex than ever before, and a higher rate of incarceration than anywhere else. You have an ever more heavily armed and armoured police establishment, one that flaunts its ability to terrorize anyone correctly or incorrectly suspected of drug involvement and slaughter the family pets in front of them, apparently more or less as a policy of establishing dominance. And, of course, you have the fungus of asset forfeiture, that institutionalization of corruption in the justice system, a practice that in many cases has led to legal highway robbery by agents of the state. Basic principle of democratic governance, such as the accountability of the authorities to the people, based on the dependence of those authorities on the support of the people, have gone by the wayside over the past thirty years. In this context, the expansion of so-called “concealed carry: permissions looks more than anything else like a consolation prize, even a distraction.

Looking at the current state of American political culture, I think it makes more sense to disarm the government, or at least check and reverse the rampant militarization of police that has taken place since the 1980s, than to fight over the ability to carry pistols in public. However, since a border protects me from most of the undesirable developments to the south of me, I’ll leave my observations at that. If you want to make the letter of the second amendment a priority, rather than asking whether your current legal system really reflects its spirit, well Ben Franklin did observe that in order to have a republic, you will have to take care of it.

“The National Guard having guns really worked out well for all those kids protesting peacefully at Kent State.”

While I am more or less agreeing with you overall, this is a “Narrative” that I just cannot let pass. I refer you to James Michener’s KENT STATE; WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY. The day before the Guard was called in, the protesters set fire to the ROTC building and interfered with firefighters on the scene. Now, I expect that each and every one of those politics-addled children was thinking of that building in purely symbolic terms, but a building sized fire is not under anybody’s control. It is pure luck that that fire did not run out of control and burn down most of the town, killing hundreds. I don’t know why the Guard was sent for, but I know why they SHOULD have been; by setting a building sized fire the protesters had committed an act of potentially lethal violence. That they almost certainly did not see it that way was not a mitigating circumstance – if anything it should have frightened the authorities even more. That protest had to be shut down, pronto, before some raving nitwit committed another “symbolic” act that could kill lots of people.

The idea that the Protesters at Kent State was innocent children has distorted the history of the event for far too long. Children they certainly were, and arguably innocent in intention, but they were quite literally playing with fire. They were entitled to no better treatment than the arsonists that set fire to Watts.

I’m planning a protest at  a Decatur park on Aug. 4 and
plan to call it either “Bark Against Police Brutality” or “Protest
Puppycide” and inviting concerned citizens to bring their four legged
family members for a day of peaceful protest and to hear various speakers.
The media has indicated they will be in attendance.

There is a smack down editorial in todays Decatur Daily taking the Sheriff to task for her childlike behavior and threats to pursue legal action against the creators of the Justice for Aubie Facebook page. If you are near Decatur please consider attending. I will release firm details as they become available.

1) States don’t have rights, people do. States have powers relegated to them. If maintaining an official state militia was all the founders had intended with the 2nd amendment it would have been included in Article Four of the constitution. The 2nd amendment wouldn’t exist within the “Bill of Rights” if it wasn’t an individual right, meant to be held by individual people. This is explained over and over with the personal writings, letters, and memoirs of the people who wrote it originally. No constitutional scholar maintains otherwise.

2) Again, just nonsensical rambling. What the hell are you saying?
What unintended consequences are you talking about? What do you even think my ideology is?

Not one of your responses to any of my posts has been a full coherent thought. If you don’t understand why people call you a troll; this is it.
Short, vague, pointless responses that never proposition or further any semblance of an argument.

You just started with this notion that I said the government is good @37 (I didn’t), felt necessary to point out the 2nd Amendment doesn’t prohibit anything (no one said it did), something about faeries, claimed gun control is a separate issue (from the 2nd Amendment?), made a pointless comment about protests @41 (which clarified nothing), and finally when I point blank ask you about clarifying what you are even talking about you dismiss the whole thing as ideology @46.

I’m not even going to respond to you after this. At this point I’m just leaving this comment for anyone else. Is he making any sense to anybody? Because I’m not seeing a point.

Lets localize it up a bit futher…by looking a bit further down the sentence – “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”. Not the right of the “government”, or the “states” or the “local whatever” to keep and bear arms. Because that wouldn’t make any goddamn sense. And even if that is what it did say, against all logic, it doesn’t make the 9th and 10th amendments magically disappear.

Nowhere else in the constitution is there a functionless preamble.

@42 – So your ideology bans thinking about unintentional consequences and being played by political factions for their benefits. Ah, well there we go then!

Look at it this way:

According to the “National Guard” types, gun control advocates think that if the second amendment didn’t exist government agents would be disarmed by roving bands of civilians. I can’t think what else they think the amendment says – the government has the right to have guns. Why would you need an amendment to give guns to the government?

Not to mention that even if what they were saying was true, trying to ban/restrict guns based on the 2nd would be a violation of the 9th amendment, and trying to ban/restrict guns at all would be a violation of the 10th amendment. Those amendments that no one pays attention to ever.

You’re just tossing off flippant and incomprehensible statements about stateism and protests. Literally, the things you are writing do not make any sense within the context of this discussion. For instance, how can you draw the conclusion “whatever the Government does is good” from my post @ 37? Where the hell did that come from?