Quote:

An armed society is a polite society. If you assume everyone may be packing you're less likely to be rude to them, assault them, rob them or rape them. Being young, large, strong and ruthless is much less of an advantage if the older, smaller and weaker intended victim may be armed.

If you disarm a society you are simply making it easier for the worst elements of society to prey upon the rest. "More Guns, Less Crime" is not just the name of a book. It's also a demonstrated fact.



Well, that would make the US and Somalia the most polite (and, by extension) the least violent countries on the planet because we are certainly the most heavily armed.

I've just never understood the paranoia attached to the mere mention of gun regulation. Sandwich bags are more heavily regulated in this country yet every election one candidate will insist the other will 'take away all your guns'. What a load of crap that is.

While anyone with a soapbox will throw out their interpretation, the history behind the Second Amendment is pretty clear. It has nothing to do with protecting yourself against the military (which is extraordinarily ridiculous anyway unless you have a trillion dollar armory). Our forefathers were opposed to having a peacetime standing army. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison wrote about their fears of a peacetime standing army at great length as they felt that it was a potential threat to the new republic(they were great students of history). The post office is the only governmental organization as such that is actually written into the Constitution. The military was not.
The new country was to be protected by citizen soldiers belonging to an organized militia. These citizen soldiers were expected to at least have access to firearms in order to arm the militias.

THAT was the purpose of the Second Amendment.

While I have no problem with gun ownership in general, the interpretation of the purpose Second Amendment as a guarantee that citizens could arm themselves to the teeth to protect themselves against the black helicopters just demonstrates that most people don't know enough about US history.