Reply #131: they all are fair game to be debated if a compelling problem exists

[leftofthedial]

Even though your examples have *nothing* to do with this discussion, they do not disprove my point.

All other western democracies guarantee the right of habeas corpus and varying degrees of privacy protection. Globally, there is no evidence that police states (or proto police states like ours) are any safer from "terrorism" than are freer countries. We stand alone among democracies in having abdicated these basic rights.

We also stand alone in allowing, in effect, absolutely free, unregulated ownership of weapons designed to kill. Any weekend I want, I can go to a gun show and buy anything or everything there. I can buy guns by mail. Guns are *easy* to obtain. We have millions of unregistered, unregulated guns in private hands; we have more gun murders than any country on earth. We have an anachronistic clause that, when written, guaranteed male citizens the right to keep and own a musket so they could protect themselves from native americans on the frontiers of our budding empire. Something has to change.