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Old February 6, 2013, 11:11 AM   #6
Frank Ettin
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Join Date: November 23, 2005
Location: California - San Francisco
Posts: 9,471
Here's the counterpoint and the reality. We live in a pluralistic, political society, and in the real world there is going to be some "gun control."

There are a bunch of people out there who don't like guns (for whatever reason). There are also a lot of people who are scared of guns or of people who have guns or who want to have guns. Some think guns should be banned and private citizens shouldn't have them at all. Some may be willing to go a long with private citizens being able to own guns as long as they were regulated. And these people vote.

We may think these people are wrong and that they have no valid reason to believe the way they do. We might think that many of them are crazy (and maybe some of them are). Of course some of them think that we have no valid reasons to think the way we do, and some of them think that we're crazy. But they still vote.

Of course we vote too, but there are enough of them to have an impact. They may be more powerful some places than others. But the bottom line is there would always be some level of gun control.

Of course there's the Second Amendment. But there is also a long line of judicial precedent for the proposition that Constitutionally protected rights may be subject to limited governmental regulation, subject to certain standards. How much regulation will pass muster remains to be seen. But the bottom line, again, is that we are unlikely to see all gun control thrown out by the courts; and we will therefore always have to live with some level of gun control.

How much or how little control we are saddled with will depend. It will depend in part on how well we can win the hearts and minds of the fence sitters. It will depend on how well we can acquire and maintain political and economic power and how adroitly we wield it. It will depend on how skillfully we handle post Heller litigation.

So whether or not we like it, whether or not we think the Second Amendment allows it and notwithstanding what we think the Founding Fathers would have thought about it, we will have to live with some forms of gun control. We're left with opportunities to influence how much.
__________________
"It is long been a principle of ours that one is no more armed because he has possession of a firearm than he is a musician because he owns a piano. There is no point in having a gun if you are not capable of using it skillfully." -- Jeff Cooper
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