The Second Amendment, the right to bare arms, has become a somewhat ignored issue in my opinion. My question for you is do you believe it should be removed? --- I feel that the Second Amendment should be more carefully examined. People are buying guns illegally and commiting crime with them... I believe that law enforcement needs to do something about it and stop eating donuts lol ^^. (No offense, but it's in every police show ^^) This should be interesting ^^ FX
Well, as I see it, it's simply the matter that when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution, they wanted everyone to be equal. Back in England, only the aristocrats had been able to have guns/go hunting, etc., and for them it was a leisure. For the colonists, most of them originally didn't know how to use guns, so as I see it, the purpose of that amendment was mainly for making "all men equal" or whatever.
I think it should be removed; there have been a lot of shootings in my area lately and if people didn't have a right to them, that wouldn't happen.
I disagree. While less crimes would occur, people will still find ways to get guns illegally like arm smuggling. Most guns that are used in crimes were/are obtained illegally.
Well, when the Bill of Rights was drafted, they were attempting to guarantee rights that they THOUGHT would be necessary. But all they had ever known was a time where militias were common. I agree also with the equality factor. Times have changed, not everyone should be allowed to own a gun. We no longer need militias to protect the people. Yeah, there's a huge amount of black market illegal goods being smuggled and sold, it's just one of those problems that will have to be fixed. Damn foreign countries for making and smuggling weapons! Damn Somalian pirates too D=!
When that particular amendment was written, people were shooting eachother with flintlock pistols that carry one shot and aren't fatal if you're more than a few feet away from your target, and rifles that take almost as long to load as they do to make. I'm relatively certain that the founding fathers did not intend to guarentee you all the right to have a semi-automatic pistol that can kill 15 people in 15 seconds from across the street. Furthermore, the old "Guns don't kill people, people do" is a load of nonsense. Yes, it's true that people would find a way to kill eachother anyway with or without guns, but guns make it so much easier, and far less personal. If a man wants another man dead, it is far easy for him to just point a gun and pull the trigger from a hundred feet away, and then run. Would he still kill if his only option was to approach his target and kill with a knife? In many cases, yes, but in most, no. Then we come to the likes of mass shooting, school shootings, etc. Would so many have people died if the students had no access to firearms? Of course not. If the student that wanted to go on a death rampage had only knives at his disposal, he might perhaps catch one person by surprise before everyone got far, far out of the way - or before someone got the knife from him. It's much easier to run from or disarm someone that doesn't have a gun. Still, the people are to blame, not the guns, but the guns still make what they do much simpler. And why do people need guns, anyway? You don't have to hunt for food anymore. You only need guns to protect yourself against other people with guns. In this modern world that has made guns so dangerous and fatal, there are many non-fatal tools for self defense that would be more than adequate against an assailant. And guns are so rarely actually used for self defense anyway - go ahead, look it up. Look up the statistics and compare the number of times in the last year that firearms were used in self defense compared to the number of times they were used unlawfully. All that being said, however, does not change one very important thing; it depends on a "perfect world perspective", where making firearms illegal removes all of them from circulation instantly. As fantastic as that would be, it would not work. While guns would be far more difficult to obtain and most everyday criminals wouldn't have access to them, making firearms illegal would only guarentee that the only people to own firearms would be criminals.