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Assault Weapons
Sep. 2nd, 2007 05:29 pmI was reading up on Niki Tsongas today (one of the Democrats in the primary for Marty Meehan's job), and came across a mention on her webpage of the assault weapons ban. She comments that "Assault weapons are hardly a right we need to protect."
It's interesting, because I generally dislike the idea of private ownership of weapons, but I kind of disagree here. The problem for me is that bans on really scary weapons are emotionally valid (I don't want people coming into my home with assault weapons), but I feel like they do violate the spirit of the second amendment in a way that forbidding certain kinds of hand weapons don't.
The second amendment, to me, has never been about the right to hunt deer, or protect your home from burglars. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The second amendment is about the right of the people to protect themselves from the government as much as anything. When that was written, we'd just come off of a war to win our freedom from a goverment that should have been working for us, not selfishly bleeding us dry. We had to take up our weapons and fight back against that government by force.
From that core, the second amendment should imply that a man has a right to whatever weapon he might want. Hell, if a private citizen wants to own a B-2, under the second amendment, I say let them. I say stick a 2-year waiting period and background check from hell on it, but let them buy and own whatever they want.
If our government ends up going seriously bad -- and take a look at the last 6 years and tell me this is out of the realm of possibility -- I want to be able to fight with weapons as good as my enemy's.
It's interesting, because I generally dislike the idea of private ownership of weapons, but I kind of disagree here. The problem for me is that bans on really scary weapons are emotionally valid (I don't want people coming into my home with assault weapons), but I feel like they do violate the spirit of the second amendment in a way that forbidding certain kinds of hand weapons don't.
The second amendment, to me, has never been about the right to hunt deer, or protect your home from burglars. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The second amendment is about the right of the people to protect themselves from the government as much as anything. When that was written, we'd just come off of a war to win our freedom from a goverment that should have been working for us, not selfishly bleeding us dry. We had to take up our weapons and fight back against that government by force.
From that core, the second amendment should imply that a man has a right to whatever weapon he might want. Hell, if a private citizen wants to own a B-2, under the second amendment, I say let them. I say stick a 2-year waiting period and background check from hell on it, but let them buy and own whatever they want.
If our government ends up going seriously bad -- and take a look at the last 6 years and tell me this is out of the realm of possibility -- I want to be able to fight with weapons as good as my enemy's.
