:cheers:
No harm is done in possessing twenty loaded 20-round magazines, for and with a selective-fire assault rifle, with a silencer on it, and a flash suppressor and a collapsing stock with a pistol grip.
There's no harm in owning a bazooka. The laws that allow any reasonable, law abiding person to own and use any of that without harming a soul also allow those who would or will use them to harm a great many. And the question becomes one of cost/benefit analysis, along with a serious look at the changes between the less fettered inception of the idea and our current state.
You miss my point, which is that we recognize speech of any type isn't responsible or permissible, and yet too often refuse the same consideration when it comes to guns. At least we limit that understanding to the most extreme and absurd, where any effort to defend the possession would be so patently ridiculous few attempt it. So we do recognize that a bazooka isn't something we should allow people to own and carry about while pretending that silencers, large magazines, and bump stocks are somehow different. But they only differ by degree and so the degree is our real consideration in that balancing act. What do we gain against what we lose and for what larger purpose in justifying the line. Or, we have to consider the use, the benefit, and the danger when making sensible law that respects the right, but not as something unrestricted.
Since none of us are arguing for RPGs and bazookas, we all understand that argument is meritorious on its face. Those who don't won't be a part of the conversation because they don't speak the same rational language. It's as pointless as arguing property lines with a communist.
, 100 percent guaranteed every time, because otherwise it’s not libel, libel’s a crime, and there’s no right to commit a crime, it’s not an infringement on your right to speak freely, it’s an infringement on a fictional right that you seem to think you have to libel people.
Rather, we made it a crime. Speaking your mind freely would involve uttering any thought you desired to voice. The law followed the ability and/or right. And were there no law we could (and many likely would) speak any manner of vileness without regard for much more than its efficacy. That's the danger in any unfettered right. It assumes a virtuous intent absent in too many. And so the law restrains.
Pointing a gun at a person should be a crime, if it's not already.
It is, absent cause or assumption of risk (and only the latter with a great many caveats). It would be putting them in reasonable apprehension of your working a harm to them.
That's also one of the NRA's handful of gun safety rules, that we haven't talked about yet, is the NRA's primary purpose, which is to promote gun safety.
As far as I'm aware, they have rejected any effort to mandate safety courses as an obligation of ownership.
Libel's a crime because it harms. Pointing an empty gun at someone isn't a crime
Pointing an empty gun at someone can harm them as well, can induce everything from fear to a heart attack, to a violent act in response. That's why cause is important. If I am in reasonable apprehension of harm the person who puts me there is guilty of an assault.
, self-evidently, so we'd be sometimes making people criminals, like hollywood actors, who have to sometimes point guns at other people, because it's part of a scene sequence, to outlaw pointing a gun at someone.
Different animal, because the people engaging in role play understand that the weapons used aren't presenting a danger of serious harm and because they've accepted by contract a degree of risk involved in their endeavor.
" . . . like slavery. There was a time when the nature of civilization largely required it, but this isn't that time."
That's completely wrong. Slavery was always immoral.
I didn't speak to the morality, only the necessity, the institution of it in one age that cannot be seen as justification for it in any, though depending on what we mean by the term (distinguishing the Biblical from what Western civilization and other civilizations did with it) there's an argument to be had on the question of morality.
I want to talk about whether or not there's a right to possess any weapon, for anybody, and analyze why it is so, because either it will be fruitful, or we'll learn that perhaps the whole notion of right, is wrong.
An inherent right to a weapon? No. I'd say the need for weapons came with man's fall and that it is an expression of his sinful nature as a moral examination. As a construct of law? Any compact can decide what constitutes the rule of law and provide for the ownership of weapons for some legitimate function.