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Health & Fitness

Repeal the Second Amendment

Let's keep guns for hunting. Let's keep the revolver in the nightstand drawer, but let's also get more public control. It's time for the moderate majority to override the hardcore zealots.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Today, one of the most popular claims for the Second Amendment is that it will protect us from government tyranny.  I say that's not true.

Zoning laws are kind of tyranny.  You can't do whatever you want with your own private property, and the Supreme Court says that it's not unconstitutional to restrict you.  Your neighbors can vote in new zoning laws and you'll have to comply or else face sanctions.  Isn't that tyranny?  What good are your guns for that?

You own the house.  Why can't you turn it into an operating sawmill?  It's your property, but your neighbors want to protect their investments so they restrict yours.  Or this: Let's say you want to take a natural plant and possess it briefly enough to put it into a pipe and smoke it, but, because people voted in a law against it, you can't do with your body what you want or else you could get arrested and thrown in jail.  That's tyranny, but potheads don't have a Second Amendment right to defend their liberty and shoot cops.  We already accept degrees of casual tyranny in order to safeguard our security.

There must be a way for Americans to be able to legally own firearms for conventional purposes like hunting and personal defense but repudiate the dangerous notion that firearms are necessary for freedom and useful as a safeguard against tyranny.  That's neither automatically nor universally true.

Many places with strict gun laws have personal and civil freedoms comparable to those in the United States, even surpassing them in a number of instances, and modern communications are a better safeguard against tyranny today than firearms were in former times.  Mubarak's dictatorship in Egypt was overthrown with the internet and protests.

So I postulate that guns are not necessary for the defense of our liberties.  Not only that, but, in a real "tyrannical state" scenario for the U.S., they'd be completely useless.  If a group of amateurish gun enthusiasts grew confident enough to rebel, the Pentagon would obliterate them to smithereens.  Modern techniques of warfare are way beyond the capacity of homegrown "patriots" to effectively confront.  There would have to be a rebellion within and among the armed services first, and the Second Amendment does not apply to the armed forces because they have no need for such a guarantee.

And there no longer is any such thing as a free state.  Abraham Lincoln proved that in 1865.

Repeal the Second Amendment.  Replace it with something that guarantees a right for hunting and personal defense, but also eliminates any kind of paramilitary application.  After the election of 2008 and all the threats of rebellion then, it's time the gun zealots got a dose of reality.

But we won't get that from them.

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