Comment

Comment by ATUM RA on January 31, 2013 at 10:08am

Donp - "A more meaningful question would be: "If you violate the rights of American People are you prepared to be fired on?" 

Me - What you are saying is that you believe that you have the right to open fire on those who you believe to be acting as tyrants against, that which you believe to have acquired as a right. I have some statements and questions about your belief program.

The argument that an individual right  to firearms  was  intended  as  a  deterrent  to tyranny  is  inherently unstable, for it assumes that each individual may act, or threaten to act, against the tyranny he sees.  How else is tyranny to be defined?  Timothy McVeigh presumably acted against a tyranny that he perceived,  but that does not justify his actions.  Would Lee Harvey Oswald have had a Second Amendment right to  assert in his  defense  if he sincerely  believed  that John  Kennedy  was  a tyrant?  When Dan White shot and killed San  Francisco  mayor  George Moscone in retaliation for Moscone's  refusal  to reappoint  him to the  city legislature, from which White had improvidently resigned, was White asserting an individual right to combat tyranny?

I would argue that the right to open fire against tyranny is when People congregate in mass to oppose the perceived tyranny, no less the scale of that of the civil war. Less than that, what could make you short of being defined as a tyrant against the majority will of the People, by opening fire on those who have majority support? According to you, individually, who was acting as the tyrant in the civil war; the North or the South? Would you have opened fire against tyranny during the civil war? If so, then against who and why?

Comment by Mark Twain on January 30, 2013 at 9:41pm

Comment by donp on January 30, 2013 at 6:18pm

A more meaningful question would be: "If you violate the rights of American People are you prepared to be fired on?"