Quote of the moment
“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed, where the government refuses to stand for re-election and silences those who protest, where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees,”. – Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski
Big Fat Update: Bubba makes a most excellent point in comments (so excellent, I’m putting it here), which reads:
The 2nd Amendment is for all practical purposes moot in its original intent.
Not really.
If citizens can’t own tanks, artillery, aircraft carriers, f-18s, JDAMS, and nukes, it’s kind of irrelevant isn’t it?
Actually, in the early part of America’s history, cannons and warships were owned by individuals and essentially lent to the government. I’m sure it’s possible to buy an F18, but I doubt you could equip it with arms. I think now most scholars agree that the right to bear arms consists of arms that can be carried.
And judging from Rumsfeld’s assessment of our military victory in Iraq, he wouldn’t need more than a couple of platoons to suppress any ragtag yahoo hillbilly uprising.
I’m no military tactician, but it seems that our military is capable of destroying other standing armies handily. I tend to doubt that it is capable of defending against essentially an infinite number of pinpricks, which is what your ragtag yahoo hillbilly uprising would be. Plus, such a scenario is dependant upon said military personnel (who live here) to be willing to fire on their own countrymen, destroy their own hometowns, and be blindly allegiant to politicians. Our military doesn’t have a history of doing that. In fact, militia men even refused to invade Canada and Mexico. Having the gumption to order your men to fire on citizens would probably also be deterred by the fact that they can shoot back. They’re not going to carpet bomb or nuke Knoxville, would be my guess.
And we can’t even have AK-47s.
Actually, you can have an AK47, but the criteria for such possession are arbitrary and meaningless. You can legally have a fully automatic one if it was made and registered under the NFA before 1986 and you pay a $200 tax. You can have semiautomatic ones made after that date but prior too 9/14/1994. And they can have any feature you want. For those made after 1994, you can’t have a flash-hider, bayonet lug, collapsible stock, or threaded barrel capable of accepting a flash hider. At the end of the day, regardless of when the gun was made, you can still have a rifle capable of firing a 7.62 X 39 cartridge at a high rate of speed and capable of accepting magazines that hold up to 300 rounds (those big drum things). Said magazines are perfectly legal, so long as they were manufactured prior to 1994. Entirely arbitrary criteria defined by dates are pointless, as none of the features and criteria affect the gun’s performance.
An excellent reference (written by Instapundit) is here (it’s where I got a lot of that stuff).
Not quite as big an update: The reasons for the Second are to resist government tyranny, repel invasions, and defense of self. So even if the first reason is moot, the other two aren’t.
