Quote:
Originally Posted by eqgmrdbz
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Look, im all for peeps wanting to protect themselves, but there has to be a limits to the weapons regular people own. General public should be limited to guns, rifles, and shotguns, anything more is overkill. The police and SWAT, should be allowed to have anything short of M1 tanks.
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I take a different approach. Police aren't fundamentally supposed to be militarized, and I don't believe they should have access to anything that the ordinary public isn't allowed to own. I felt that way when I worked in that line of work, and I still feel that way today. Excessively militarized departments display a consistent tendency to behave like occupying armies. With the above in mind, I'll happily give up firearms as soon as all law enforcement does the same. If they don't--if their job is so dangerous that they have to wear a gun to work (two, usually)--then I cannot see a justification to deprive that same protection to everyone else. Since there's no way police in the U.S. would currently submit to total disarmament, I therefore fall firmly on the "keep 'em legal for everyone" side of that debate.
For my part, my HK .45 mostly sits locked away except when I oil it from time to time. I rarely shoot. I don't quite "get" gun nuts; it seems a boring hobby once the novelty wears off. I guess a lot of hobbies are like that, though. The folks around here who shoot in their backyards don't bug me one bit.
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Under a strict reading of the constitution, ordinary citizens should be allowed to own pretty much anything--tanks, fighter planes, missles, whatever. The entire point was for the civilian populace to be equipped comparably to a standing army (that's what "well regulated" meant in an era when government soldiers were called "regulars"). Since this aspect of the constitution has long since gone by the wayside there's no real point in even citing the second amendment in gun debates. It has long since been repealed in all but name. That's just as well. I don't really want to see Wal-Mart operating its own military force in the vein of the East India Company of old.
Danth