None of the things you refer to, with the possible exception of robot technology, has to do with the direct ability to kill people. And if you want to insist that there is no difference between owning a single-shot musket and a semi-automatic gun with a telescopic rifle, I really do not know what to say to you. As well to argue that the existence of the atom bomb - or, for that matter, of the million-man conscript army - makes no difference to warfare, so that we can consider it in the same spirit as a border raider from the fourteen hundreds. But while countries have become more responsible - so that we will not see a war of great powers again, because every side knows that it would not have winners - it seems to me that the rhetoric within countries is growing ever more irresponsible.
As for legal precedents, I could not possibly care less about what I argue is a misreading of a late-eighteenth-century document built with both eyes on contemporary European practice. Illustrious legal precedents include Dred Scott, Plessy vs.Ferguson and Wade vs.Roe, and all they prove is that a sufficiently determined, ingenious and perverse group of lawyers can find anything they want in the Constitution - that skin colour can mean radical exclusion from citizenship (and Justice Tawney was a Catholic, God forgive us all!), that radical exclusion is no proof of inequality, or that humanity does not exist until the moment a child has exited the womb. I am not a lawyer, and I will always try to be good and do right so that God will not make me one; I am a historian, and I proposed a historical thesis I believe to be correct. I add that I repeatedly said that I do not see the least hope of seeing the false interpretation of the Second Amendment repealed in my lifetime (if nothing else, the Pentagon would not like it).
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Date: 2008-03-22 02:10 pm (UTC)As for legal precedents, I could not possibly care less about what I argue is a misreading of a late-eighteenth-century document built with both eyes on contemporary European practice. Illustrious legal precedents include Dred Scott, Plessy vs.Ferguson and Wade vs.Roe, and all they prove is that a sufficiently determined, ingenious and perverse group of lawyers can find anything they want in the Constitution - that skin colour can mean radical exclusion from citizenship (and Justice Tawney was a Catholic, God forgive us all!), that radical exclusion is no proof of inequality, or that humanity does not exist until the moment a child has exited the womb. I am not a lawyer, and I will always try to be good and do right so that God will not make me one; I am a historian, and I proposed a historical thesis I believe to be correct. I add that I repeatedly said that I do not see the least hope of seeing the false interpretation of the Second Amendment repealed in my lifetime (if nothing else, the Pentagon would not like it).