How can we regulate guns ... ?

The Constitution guarantees the "right to bear arms." It does not say what those arms are, or limit Congress from making laws limiting the types of arms that can be owned.That's why it's illegal to have weapons like RPGs or armed tanks (you can own a tank, but the gun must be disabled).It would be perfectly fitting within the Constitution to ban all guns and limit the arms that can be borne to escrima sticks. The government would simply need to assert a State interest in limiting the destructive power of various and sundry weapons to preserve the public safety - it's all just a matter of determining where that line should be drawn, not whether any line can be drawn.It's somewhat like limiting free speech by making it illegal to scream "fire!" in a crowded place, or to incite violence, or to conspire to commit a crime, etc.And of course, in the end, our laws and rights are not simply inherent, written in stone by some imagined deity. It's all just words on paper, held in place by the force of communal agreement that it is so. We have the freedom of speech because we all agree that we have the freedom of speech. The Constitution can be altered, limited, or even replaced given sufficient public and political support for doing so. We've been re-interpreting and even re-writing it for the past 200+ years. It's something a lot of people forget about, since we haven't made an Amendment in a while.

I didn;t say that was my interpretation. I was simply pointing out that "limitations" are acceptable already, and the debate is really simply a matter of where the limiting line is drawn. That location is determined by public and political consensus - and I agree that right now the consensus and legal precedent are in accordance with allowing firearms.That doesn't mean that the consensus cannot change in the future, or that the precedent can be overturned. Which was the whole of my point. The interpretation of law, and even the laws themselves, change over time.

Indeed. Firearms did not protect us from the PATRIOT Act. No armed revolts occurred when it was revealed that the US participates in torture, and indefinite detention. I mean, "tyranny" is happening and has been happening for some time, and guns haven't stopped it. Not even a little. Corporations are people now (who cannot die or go to jail...). The FBI can read your email without a warrant if it's stored by a third party. Multiple states have outlawed gay marriage. Texas has stopped all funding to Planned Parenthood and Mississippi (I think) is about to close its last abortion clinic and remove the freedom of choice from women within its boarders due to regulatory asshattery. Guns don't seem to be helping "preserve freedom."The biggest weapon in the preservation and expansion of freedom these days seems to be a good lawyer and a whole lot of money, as nothing else seems to get anything done. Mostly the "whole lot of money."Of course, this isn't surprising, as we don't actually live in a cheesy old western.

Congratulations on your hero worship and appeals to authority.But name-dropping the authors of the Constitution does not have particular relevance to the argument. They lived in a very different time, with very different problems and solutions.

"In context" is not the same as "furthering your argument." You've dropped some quotes - those quotes are meaningless, because they do not actually further your argument, and because you're simply appealing to the authority of men two centuries dead. The Founding Fathers were smart men, but they weren't gods. They weren't perfect. They even knew it - that's why the Constitution was made to be alterable. So we could undo their mistakes - like slavery, or suffrage for women. You act like the Constitution is writ in stone, and the Founders some sort of infallible deities - it's rather akin to a form of ancestor worship, really.Arguments that might have been valid in 1776 are not necessarily valid today. The purposes behind legislation or even basic rights that were valid in 1776 are not necessarily valid today. Which is why you cannot own a slave. Personally, I think it;s a good thing to periodically re-evaluate the Constitution and determine what is or is not working today as opposed to 200+ years ago.Amusingly, the Founders agreed with me on that, and that's why they added the ability to amend the Constitution.

I rather think that in many ways it already has and guns didn't stop it.The PATRIOT Act, as just one major example, trashes the Constitution...and guns didn't stop it or reverse it. Indeed, nothing has been done to undo it, with or without guns. You can't go much further than National Security letters that allow a person's rights to be simply ignored with no court oversight and a legal penalty for even seeking recourse or informing the target. And that's just for starters.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Reset signature formatting after touch up.

I think that depends entirely on the threshold for acceptable usage of the rather vague term "tyranny." I tend to define "tyranny" as a government's systemic removal of rights like the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure or the right to due process. That includes concentration camps, but also includes lesser offenses like the PATRIOT Act. I agree that the US will not likely experience a "purge" or any sort of tyranny on that scale. But that doesn't mean that extraordinary rendition or torture are not forms of tyranny. They are. And as you yourself mention, it's the people with guns (the military, CIA, NSA, etc, in this case) who are doing it. And the citizens with guns are unwilling and unable to prevent it, because in modern America political change can only be achieved through the political and legal process, not through violent revolt.

Americans haven't shown a willingness to actually participate in large-scale civil disobedience like that in...do the 60s even count? The government did use some rather heavy-handed tactics on anti-Vietnam protesters (a massacre of unarmed college students comes to mind)...but of course guns didn't prevent any of it. Nor would they have. They simply would have guaranteed that more of the nonviolent protests escalated to armed confrontations - because soldiers are not trained to let people point guns at them and then not open fire.The closest we've come in 50 years to the sort of protests you're talking about would be the Occupy movement...and we did have some heavy-handed arrests, even tear gas canisters causing skull fractures. But do you think guns would have helped? if the Occupiers had pulled guns, don;t you think the cops would have simply opened fire on the crowd, and/or called int he National Guard?Guns are no longer an effective means of political change or resistance in the US, or the rest of the First World.Nowadays you stop tyranny in the voting booth and the courtroom. Personally, I like that method better anyway - fewer people wind up dead.

Are you enjoying your misrepresentation of your opponents? I know I am - it's always entertaining to watch you have a meltdown into Founding-Father-Worship hysterics. Hey, aren't you supposed to be a monotheist? Why do you keep worshiping the Founders?And why do you only prop them up on an altar when you agree with them? I mean, you don't have this same reaction when we bring out Founder quotes about how America is not a Christian nation, or just about anything Jefferson said.But seriously, nobody is saying that the Founders were morons, or that all of their work should be thrown out. They were smart men, but they were just men, and they were the product of their times. Re-evaluation is not the same as throwing it all out - it just means that sometimes, as with slavery or women's suffrage, we do find ways to improve upon what the Founders set down...and that's why they included the mechanism for change, because even they acknowledged their fallibility.It's really entertaining that you get so worked up in your agreement with the Founding Fathers that you disagree with them. It's like you talk about how wonderful and awesome and practically God-inspired they were, and then in the same breath say something that runs counter to everything they did.

The Occupy movement was rather large on the national level (though individual locations were mixed - some very large, some very small). When is the last time that any First-World nation saw a protest of that scale? The massacres of the 1960s did not provoke a bloody revolution, though. And those protesters were unarmed kids. If the government can't provoke a bloody revolution through the outright murder of a bunch of teenagers, I'm not sure they can provoke a bloody revolution no matter what they do.They did serve to increase the negative sentiment toward the war, of course - a bloody sacrifice to galvanize public opinion. But guns would have lessened the impact, as we would no longer be talking about the massacre of a bunch of unarmed kids, but rather a valiant defense against treasonous rebels. Public support tends to go more toward the girl who sticks a flower in the barrel of the gun of the soldier who's about to shoot her, than the guy who points a gun at a soldier and expects the soldier to back down.I just don't see guns preventing tyranny here in the US, ever, under any circumstance. In ever scenario I can imagine, the government wins, of the political change is effected through voting and legal action. Take gay marriage for example - this is a fight about a basic right, and I would argue that denying someone the right to marry on the sole basis of their gender and sexual orientation is a form of tyranny. We aren't solving that problem with guns - we're solving the problem with politics and the law.First World democracies have more sophisticated ways of keeping the populace under control, and more effective countermeasures against armed revolt or even just armed resistance. In most cases, when they want to shred the Constitution, they just do it in plain sight through Congress and just say that they're only targeting "terrorists."Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix a quote box.

I think the concept of a national military force as envisioned by the Founders was immensely different from the realities of today. They envisioned a militia-style force, with common citizens armed and at the ready to be mustered up in case of need. Today, those militias don;t really exist - they became the National Guard and we also created the national services, and we no longer have average citizens with guns at home ready to be called into action.It's a natural consequence of the evolving nature of war, and a much higher, denser, and more diverse population, as well as modern transportation and other logistics. It's simply easier and cheaper and more effective to keep the military "centralized" (as in National Guard and the Army/Navy/AF) than to keep many local militias organized and supplied.It's become something like a "what's further North than the North Pole" sort of concept - the things the Founders were talking about when it comes to militias and resiting tyranny just don;t make any sense in a modern context.

Funny, isn't it?

I don't think the distinction existed in 1776. The Federal army was comprised of militiamen who were also individual private citizens who would ideally form a resistance if necessary.The distinction only exists today because warfare has significantly evolved in the past two centuries. You can't run a global superpower-level military as a consolidation of local militias.

Interpretation of the Constitution has been less than consistent on that point. The Fed asserts the ability to regulate intrastate commerce on several items, most notable various drugs. If a given substance is grown and sold within a single state, the Feds should not be able to regulate it under this interpretation of the Constitution...but try telling that to the DEA.

The state would not be required to make any sort of compensation like that. The state can make a law outlawing the manufacture of a good, and is not obligated then to pay compensation for what has been banned. That would only apply if the government were confiscating something under eminent domain.