Email in response to my discussion of the theater shooting: "Okay. The first point is that he shouldn't have any guns in the first place because he is being treated for a severe mental illness. And the second point point is that nobody needs to have an AK47 except the military and the police".
My response:
I agree that he should not have had a gun...he was clearly psychotic. The public, if not constrained by the disease spread by the politically correct liberal, should be allowed to enforce the laws that currently exist in that regard. As to the AK47, I would suggest you reread my previous. I would also suggest that all sane and able citizens of Switzerland have by law been trained in the use of such weapons and are furthermore required to have them in their homes. There are almost no reported home invasions in Switzerland. An armed society is indeed a polite one.
The AK is NOT a fully automatic "assault weapon"...it is simply a semi-automatic rifle similar to many hunting rifles. The much larger magazine would seem unnecessary unless your rulers would try to prevent your ownership of a weapon, at which time that weapon might well have its proper use. It is entirely reasonable to assume that the public should have the right to protect itself from the military and/or the police when necessary (as it was in the War of American Independence). Here I quote Thomas Jefferson: "The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." -- (Thomas Jefferson)
And others:
"...to disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." (George Mason)
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. – Mahatma Gandhi, in Gandhi, An Autobiography,
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." (Tench Coxe in 'Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution' under the Pseudonym 'A Pennsylvanian' in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 at 2 col. 1)
So, let us not make general laws to the detriment of society as a whole based on the relatively infrequent aberrations that occur, particularly since those are usually caused by lack of diligence on the part of the very authorities that are tasked to prevent them.
John