Two days ago, the Supreme Court finally entered it's decision in the landmark case, Washington DC v Heller. declaring DC's ban on gun ownership to be unconstitutional.
This is a landmark case for a variety of reasons, first and foremost being it solidifies the Second Amendment granting gun ownership to the individual who is not affiliated with law enforcement or the military.
For those who haven't read much about this, Heller is a security guard who applied for a permit to keep a gun at home. He was denied and attorney Robert Levy from the Cato Institute, an organization committed to preservation of small government, took up the charge, going so far as to bankroll the lawsuit. Mr. Levy has been interviewed heavily these last couple days. In one interview, located here, Mr. levy is quoted as saying he doesn't own a gun and that this lawsuit was never about gun ownership but about personal liberties. CATO is a libertarian group and they support small government. Republicans also support this but not to the extent Libertarians will. Democrats are all about BIG GOVERNMENT and they aren't afraid to use any means necessary to obtain this.
Nancy Pelosi, a high ranking Democrat out of California has already made an announcement that Washington DC should continue its gun ownership laws under the guise of strictly enforcing the Supreme Court ruling. Nancy Pelosi is anti-gun ownership but she is also anti-personal liberties. Given her stance on this I wonder if she'll be re-elected when the time comes.
I was reading another blog that gave the statistic that 70% 0f the time, an attacker doesn't even have a gun. (I won't give you the link to the site because I don't want to dignify it by diverting traffic there) While this statistic "might" be true, I want to have the comfort of knowing I'm protected the 30% of the time the attacker IS armed. I don't like these odds. People make bigger decisions in this life with shabbier odds than the one given, so why would any intelligent thinking adult willingly put their family's life in danger simply because they can? (This statement is assuming Dems actually know how to think for themselves.)
The point is often made that guns kill people. I stand fast in the belief that it's not the gun that kills anyone, it's the intent of the person holding said gun. I gun is an inanimate object, completely harmless in every way. What makes it a harmful weapon is someone picking it up with evil intent. People will use events such as the Virginia Tech massacre from 2007 as an example of tighter gun control laws. The kid that shot up the campus was supposed to have had "legally obtained" guns. Okay, he bought them at a gun shop but he had to lie to obtain them, thereby making them "illegally obtained" guns.
To further illustrate this point, the argument can be made with regard to illegal aliens running amok throughout our nation. Quite a few of them have papers showing they are legal immigrants. The papers they hold will have a social security number on it, not theirs but "someones". They papers they hold will, for all intents and purposes, show them to be legal immigrants. However, this isn't true. If you have to lie to obtain legal paperwork, it's illegal ownership. The kid that shot up Virginia Tech was operating outside of the law BEFORE he got off the first shot simply because he lied on the form necessary to conduct the background check. Also, if there had been just one student present who had a gun, legally obtained, how far would the Virginia Tech shooter have gotten? We'll never know because Virginia Tech has law banning guns on campus, a law which was faithfully followed by people who obey the laws, including the ones pertaining to gun ownership. How many lives could have been saved but for one well-trained gun owner, obtained legally and through the correct means?
My son takes issue with liberals making the statement, "I don't believe in guns." He's heard it in the news and on television more times than I can count. His response is always, "What's not to believe? Guns are real and we have proof of their existence. They're not ghosts that appear and disappear."
A gun simply WILL NOT discharge unless something tangible happens to cause it to discharge. There is a human element involved, 100% of the time.
I could inundate you with a bunch of facts and figures and quotes but I won't. I simple search in Google for "gun rights ownership quotes" will give you page after page of quotes from history's great leaders, including some from Lenin where he says that it's the removal of guns from the hands of the common man that allows Communism to succeed.
I will, however, close with this quote, which I find to be more than apt:
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764).
