Reply #128: I believe the government definition of "assault weapon" is "scary-looking."

[sofa king]

That was my gripe about the original bill. It defined the weapons it was banning by how cool those weapons were. So silly things like forward hand grips and folding bayonets--most of which can be removed and later reattached, anyway--were what made weapons illegal or not.

I'll be the first to point out that if the Constitution mentions hunting and recreational shooting, I don't know about it. The purpose stated in the 2nd Amendment refers to the "militia," which at the time was every male citizen who could use a gun. The Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers both show that at least some of the Framers knew exactly why they didn't want to take away guns: because they didn't trust governments and wanted the power of government to spring directly from the people, and the way you guarantee that is to give the people at least the chance to come and take back their government back by force, if they must.

Now, I just spent the most miserable eight years of my life watching the most criminal Presidency in our history fuck up every single possible thing it could fuck up, make a mockery of every legal construct we had, scare the people into inactivity, and fill them with inaccurate propaganda. They did everything they had to do to build a Fourth Reich, except one thing.

And then they just walked away. Why?

I can guess why. It was because by 2008 three out of four Americans were ready to go and remove those bastards if they didn't leave peacefully, and we had a hundred million firearms--about twenty times what our armed forces can muster due to their manpower constraints--to make it happen. I don't know if we could have pulled it off, but it's pretty obvious the Bush Department of Defense didn't know, either, because I'm certain they would have tried it if they thought they could pull it off.

I don't much like guns, I don't own a gun and probably never will, and I have no plans to ever use a gun in anger or for coercion. But there is a gun already out there for every American who wants one, and while we pay a huge and tragic price every year for having them, we're not going to get rid of them. And they just may have saved our asses, again, from those who would wish to take away our power. I can't be okay with taking away our guns because I can't trust our government. And you shouldn't, either.