我不认为美国是一个异类。这个国家的不同寻常之处在于它的历史，当然还有它的宪法基础。枪支管制问题很可能会比我们许多阅读和参与这个博客的人活得更久。争论的各方都有各自的优点，而那些最尖锐的人，无论属于哪个阵营，都不太可能在这个问题上做出太多让步。它将成为各种事业的素材，无论这些事业是私人的、公共的、政治的、文化的、经济的、道德的，还是上述任何一种结合。是的，美国是一个暴力和杀戮的民主国家。没有在其他地方生活过的人;任何(几乎是?)崇拜美国的生活方式和我们在这种治理体系下享有的自由的人，都会认为暴力和谋杀在某种程度上比铁腕镇压更可取。他们是吗?这是另一个论点。 I will say this much regarding best of possible outcomes: I hope the argument never falls under the purview of the Supreme Court for a final(?) disposition. Talk about ugly. Yeah...

Didn't we cover this one recently? Hate to contradict you, Harry, but most of what you've said is proved wrong in Change They Can't Believe In, by Parker and Barreto. It details the history of the right-wing assault on New Deal programs from father Coughlin to Charlton Heston. The authors follow the whole story, naming names, and tracing the money. The NRA has become the new KKK, but before the civil rights era it was a modest organization more interested in gun safety than promotion, and only became what it is today in reaction to the Black Panther claim of a right to bear arms. If Blacks have that right, it now states, Whites have a duty. This year Nixon's "Southern Strategy" is blowing up in the faces of the Republicans. But the strange thing is, the very people now incensed at what America is becoming are the one's who assured it was bound to become this.
The Bill of Rights is not what it's cracked-up to be. It was accepted in principle by the people who ratified the Constitution, it was not written by them, even though they had made it plain that ratification would not be forthcoming without it. The Second Amendment is contradictory. It is plainly asserted a collective right, not a personal one. There can be no such thing as a fundamental collective right. It drives to the very heart of the foundations of all governance and law to suppose there are such rights. It was motivated by the belief that police power exclusive to government would lead to "tyranny", but this merely reflected the ancient tensions between knighthood and the 'hundreds'. The ancient Celts and Saxons were democratic tribal peoples who extended the franchise to anyone who could show a weapon. That's the real origin of the vehemence in feelings. But that vehemence is entirely one-sided. David Hume, in his History of England, divides the political debate during the House of Stuart (when American attitudes were really formed) between the 'enthusiastic' and the 'polite'. We have the same picture today. But, in fact, only along the frontier and in the regions where slavery was heavily enforced were guns an accepted as having a place in the community. As towns grew with the Westward expansion the first order of business in creating civil institutions was to ban guns. This is just the facts. The plan was that America would defend itself with 'citizen soldiers', almost explicitly stated in the text. And that reading was the judicially accepted meaning of it until the gun lobby stepped in to capitalize on racism in the wake of civil rights legislation and the white panic at the antics of the Panthers. But the use of the Militias quickly proved disastrous in the War of 1812, which we almost lost because of the clumsy organization of our forces. The fact of a professional army effectively repealed it. I suppose the English and Canadians would be amused at being classed as 'iron-fisted repressors', but one thing is very clear, you can be prosecuted in this country for claiming a right to violently overthrow its government. And it would seem to me that if anyone is 'iron-fisted' here it is those who insist on a fundamental right to 'pack iron'.

奇怪的谩骂出现在这个博客及其深思熟虑的话题的评论中。我不谩骂，也不试图辨别外语(包括那些可能让我想起童年美好回忆的语言:猪拉丁)。在某种程度上，每个人的肩膀上都有一些碎牛肉，或者有一些其他的斧要磨或要承担。这对我来说完全没问题。当我的蜘蛛感探测到这些无理的废话时，我干脆对那些唱反调的人不得不唱反调的事情不感兴趣。在我的日常生活中，我认识一些人，他们会为了一些无关紧要的事情而开始一场争论。这也是好的。我对朋友和家人非常宽容。但对陌生人来说就不那么重要了。所以，郑重声明:如果你未来看到亲爱的老纽曼的评论，而你之前并不欣赏他所提供的东西，那就别费事去看这条评论了。 Others who read and contribute to the blog won't miss the peevishness. And, I suspect that Taylor, Perry, Maguire and company won't miss it either. One more thing to consider: lots of folks are writing books these days. Some of them get read; some don't.
Neuman.

As a transplanted Brit I have long since been puzzled by America's love affair with guns. Don't get me wrong; I have no objection to guns per se. The rancher/farmer/urban dweller with their shotguns and/or hunting rifles, the hunter and target shooter with their guns are all quite legitimate and, one supposes, responsible gun owners. It's the millions of other guns loose in the country in the hands of irresponsible owners that I have a problem with.
枪支权利倡导者经常引用第二修正案为“持枪权利”，而忽略了“维护良好的民兵”这一点。考虑到18世纪后期这个全新的国家没有常备军来提供安全保障，一个维护良好的民兵组织似乎是提供这种安全保障的合理手段。快进240年，在21世纪初，对民兵的需求似乎有些多余，这是Gary Washburn在上面的文章中提到的一点。
在我看来，携带武器的权利并不意味着任何武器。枪械拥有者拥有RPG或地空导弹是否合理?我想没有多少人会这么说。如果我给你弓箭你的宪法权利已经得到了满足只要你现在有武器。在天平的另一端，这可能被认为同样荒谬。我的观点是，社会应该对哪些武器可以在军队之外拥有发言权。当宪法的起草者把第二修正案列入其中时，他们不可能想象到当今可以使用的一系列先进武器。也许如果我们只允许那些武器，燧发手枪和枪口火枪，今天的枪支拥有者，每天报道的悲剧会少得多!
Jock

枪是为弱者准备的，让他们感到强大。
And as for the constitution, it needs to be rewritten.
It needs to be written in a way that needs no interpretation.
Equality is the way.
=

Spam is annoying, but I find the posts advertising ?winning essays? in garbled English a bit amusing. As for 'diatribes', whose sore is getting rubbed? We think of the Bill of Rights as a list of fundamental liberties, but it is fatuous to suppose owning guns among them. The framers of the Constitution really were pandering to vigilantes meant more to suppress slave uprisings than to defend the nation, and to Round-Heads fearing the return of the king. Feelings run high because America doesn't have much of a future if it doesn't deal with, deal out, its culture of intimidation. I am not accusing anyone here of that culture, simply pointing out that it is at the heart of the gun issue. It is not a point to let politeness hold us back on. I hope I am not disrespectful, but too many who post here seem to think philosophy is a matter of expressing one's opinion, and leave it at that. It isn't. It's a matter of judgment, and the only way we can develop it is to critique, and respond to, each other. There are no real discussions here, just so many placards, like the street-level window behind the news presenters on the Today show. I would welcome a well reasoned criticism for a change, but Mr. Neuman's rebuke leaves me bewildered as to what exactly it is he is irritated at, my facts, my judgment, or my flourishes. A little clarity there might help make me a better researcher, thinker, or writer, but I'm not sure which is being rebuked, or whose sore is being rubbed.
Jock,
美国的暴力远不止枪支的可获得性，尽管如果诱惑更少，情况肯定会有所改善。
Mike,
I actually am sympathetic with your first assertion, but a new Constitution would suffer the same roadblocks and corruption that the rest of our political debates run into.

Well said Jock,
但是军事武器呢?
America distributes death when in sells its arms to the rest of the world. And as for bombs, the day Brussels was bombed a US military official was apologizing in Afghanistan for blowing up the hospital killing forty one innocent people one year ago that day. Who is the terrorist, them or us?
As for amending the right to bare arms bill, not to cross the religion state line, what about something simple like "thou shall not kill"? I think everyone would understand and benefit from that! =

奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯在1897年的《哈佛法律评论》上发表了一篇文章《法律之路》，彻底驳斥了严格建构的概念。他指出世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区，根据这一原则，在法律案件中代表客户是一种职业渎职行为，律师在案件中必须提出的法律概念是法官头脑中的法律概念。对于最高法院来说，法律不是一个抽象的概念，它是决定真实的人的真实问题的具体陈述。它不是圣经。枪支游说团体(它就是这样，不只是枪支爱好者自发组成的国会)，如果它坚持把《第二修正案》作为反对枪支管制的武器，就必须证明，宪法意味着维护和肯定私人拥有枪支是一项基本权利，而不是一种有价值的或原始的消遣，甚至也不是一种安全或保障措施。个人拥有枪支的好处或乐趣与此无关。古老的盎格鲁-撒克逊原则将选举权扩展到任何可以展示武器的人，这是这种假定权利的明显衍生，但在这种情况下，这是一种义务，而不是权利，这将是一个非常难以在今天的现实中做出的情况。所以，当我看到迈克的文章时，我几乎想要同情他，但这其中的关联是难以捉摸的。如果真的要建立国防，我们很难看到否认拥有武器是一个多么现实的选择。对于任何熟悉美国历史的人来说，战争中无能的领导和不道德的行为是显而易见的。 But it is hard to see what fundamental rights apply either way. But there is a relevance. If you do indeed mean to elevate the law of Moses to Constitutional authority you have a hard row to hoe, since it has long since been established in Constitutional law that the "Ten Commandments" is a religious icon not to be supported or displayed anywhere by the public sector. Besides, the law of Moses is a much longer list than the usual shortened version, and many of its provisions have long since been repudiated by most Americans, who eat pork, cut their forelocks, and mix beef with milk or cheese, let alone barbeque, or work, of a weekend. The first law of Moses is, after all, keep the Sabbath. But as to atrocities in war, the relevance is that it raises the matter of an assumption that killing can be, not only justified, but doing justice. This is where everything goes wonky. Killing may sometimes be excusable, but it is never doing justice. In order to justify war or to support a fundamental individual right to own guns, you have to assume a duty to kill. The principle of self-defense does not measure up to the mark. That principle contributed to the birth of modernity by giving evidence that the law cannot regulate such a primordial urge. The ability to defend oneself, even against lawful arrest, cannot be wholly suppressed by reason. It is not reasonable, therefore, to suppose the law, of men or god, can cancel it. The burgeoning Enlightenment relied on this fact to demonstrate, not that reason has limits, but that the laws of nature are independent of the laws of god. But if there is no sense in which the raw instinct for self-preservation is the basis of the rational act of self-defense, then, as fundamental as that instinct may be, it cannot serve to support a fundamental right to prepare so rational a defense as owning a gun.

"The militia" was basically synonymous with the people back when the Constitution was written. All able bodied men who were not already government employees were expected to be ready to be called up for militia duty by the state or the federal government at a moment's notice. And to bring their rifle with them. Because the founders were opposed to maintaining a permanent, professional standing army. Because such an army would be dangerous and likely become its own power center or constituency with the ability overly influence Congress and/or stage a coup and take over the government. This is why there is a constitutional ban on any congressional appropriation for the military lasting more than two years.
A well armed citizenry was considered to be the last resort fail safe against a foreign invasion, or against a takeover of the government by a dictator or demagogue.
Therefore it stands to reason that the right to bear arms should include at minimum any rifle that would be similar to what would be standard issue to a soldier in the army.

So, the Second Amendment covers only military style weapons and sporting guns and pistols, for only personal recreation or protection, can be prohibited?

This Wikipedia page clarifies things a bit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792