re: #156 Renaissance_Man

If your Constitutional rights are designed to protect the rights of any fool to arm themselves any way they please over the common sense of not having kids shot, then your Constitution is morally and ethically wrong.

No document is perfect. While overwhelmingly worthy of praise in aggregate, the original Constitution was morally and ethically wrong in a number of ways, not the least of which was its grudging acceptance of slavery. 625,000 Americans later died to fix that mistake.

I can accept that the Constitution grants a right to bear arms while simultaneously believing it was a fundamental mistake to do so.

There was a very well-intentioned theory, informed by the reality of the situation when the Constitution was ratified, that only a well-armed populace could prevent a government from oppressing its own people.

That hasn’t turned out to be the case. The current US federal government has more firepower than the rest of the world combined, plus enough cruise missiles and nuclear weapons to blow up the planet several hundred times over. It is not fear of crazy Uncle Jerry’s .22 and closet full of ammo that’s preventing them from going full Stalin on us.