That is not my argument at all. I have an opinion on what the 2nd amendment ought to mean. I advocate that others share my position. I've acknowledged numerous times that others don't share my opinion and I've suggested that they keep vigilant to maintain their rights. That's the whole point of politics. This is a political issue and people advocate for/against positions all the time. Sometimes attitudes that once were accepted become repugnant.
We best not just agree to do what I want. That would be absolute power and that would be horrible. No one deserves that much power. No one should be so arrogant that they think they are always right or that their opinions are beyond reproach.
I welcome discourse and debate. It's necessary for a properly functioning society.
Which, btw, is one of the better arguments I've heard against gun restriction. People fear the government might turn on them and they have to fight the state-loyal parts of the army.
Arguing about the merits of second amendment (or first amendment, for that matter) is reasonable. Suggesting that the government pass laws that subvert The Constitution is not.
It has been a 2nd Amendment argument for ages because it's tautologically true.
It correctly identifies that the proponents need to justify the cost from substantially all law-abiding citizens following the law against the benefit from only the law-abiding criminals following it.
And say what you will about the benefits of law-abiding citizens carrying firearms, but if you want to seriously dispute the benefits of law-abiding citizens using encryption, try convincing a credit card company to let you accept credit cards on your website without encrypting the traffic.
The view of Second Amendment advocates is that civilian access to firearms is a fundamental civil right that protects the people from their government. This makes it a fundamentally different question than the standard utilitarian arguments one could come up with. It's easy to imagine ways of making people safer by eliminating their civil rights. But we choose to maintain these civil rights despite the costs.
I don't understand why advocates for gun ownership need always be painted as crazy or having some kind of bizarre inadequacy that necessitates gun ownership rather than something reasonable and logical.
The 2nd Amendment protects the rights of the people. It enables the populace to stand up to it's government and loudly say 'you work for us.' It's ideological.
Liberty comes at a cost. If you are free, you are free to succeed as well as fail. If you are free to own guns, you accept that there are those out there who will misuse this. It's part of the system. There are better ways to solve the problem than just taking away guns. We can try to solve the root of these problems. The people who are against so called 'assault rifles' end up supporting measures that will be essentially ineffective at solving any of the actual problems.
This is not unique to people who are anti-gun, but it is still foolish. Always putting band-aids on problems rather than fixing the root causes because it's easier to do a band-aid solution.
As a side note, firearms as self defense are an indispensable tool. For example, I for one support The Pink Pistols, which advocates for the gun ownership of marginalized LGBT groups.
> The right to bare [sic] arms doesn't mean we give everyone an M60.
Actually, most second amendment advocates believe that this is exactly what it means. They think that the whole point of the second amendment is to empower people to resist the government by physical force.
I'm not even sure how someone could support or oppose the second amendment. It really doesn't say much (anything?) about personal gun ownership. What people are arguing over is the interpretations through caselaw trying to figure out what this rather ambiguous segment of text was trying to say.
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