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mary_bobo
Guest
Can legal residents without citizenship purchase a gun in every state?
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dessert
Guest
A legal resident can do just about everything a citizen can except collect social security, thus they don’t pay into SS. Don’t you know that is why they come here 
Their born here children are born American.
Sorrow looks back.
Worry looks around.
Faith looks up.
Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12;2 (NASB)
I pray for those enduring their cross this week. Dessert
Their born here children are born American.Sorrow looks back.
Worry looks around.
Faith looks up.
Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12;2 (NASB)
I pray for those enduring their cross this week. Dessert
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LeahInancsi
Guest
So what does the tragedy a Virginia Tech have to do with abortion? That’s where you’ve gone overboard.
One very troubled young man could not get the help he needed because no one wanted to be bothered.
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Montalban
Guest
I have. Given that the army attacked a group involving women and kids, and they were slaughtered, then ‘massacre’ fits. A *battle *would have been between two armies for a start.
Thanks for your contribution though.
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Legal_Eagle
Guest
There are numerous powerful interest groups that have hijacked our government. I’m sure that you and I could sit here all day naming them.
And like I said, those are the exceptions. Not the rule.
Thomas Jefferson was certianly a brilliant man. But he also subscribed to slave holding, and “edited” his copy of the New Testament taking out the parts he didn’t like, including the entire book of The Revelation. Those were bad ideas too. Just because Thomas Jefferson thought something was a good idea, doesn’t mean that I’m bound to agree with him.
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Montalban
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When was Lincoln killed? McKinley? Kennedy?
Roy Rogers obviously never met you.
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Legal_Eagle
Guest
Well, first of all the Federalist Papers are merely an expression of the opinions of the authors. They have no force or effect as law. We’re not talking about Scripture and Tradition here. It’s not as though the Federalist Papers represent some infallable understanding of the Constitution. It’s more like taking an article from “Human Events” or “Common Dreams” and then arguing that we should interpret the law based on that writers opinion.
More importantly, one thing that most Constitutional scholars agree on is that the 2nd Amendment is far from clear. Let’s look at it.
As with any statute or Constitutional provision, you can’t just read the parts you agree with and disregard the parts you don’t. Most “gun rights” advocates tend to simply ignore the first clause and focus on the second. If we read the two clauses together it’s clear that whatever right the people have to keep and bear arms, that right is somehow connected to a “well regulated militia.”
Thus, a reasonable understanding of the 2nd Amendment could be that only members of well regulated militias (e.g. the national guard) may keep and bear arms. Another equally reasonable reading could be that the people have a right to keep and bear arms so long as they (the people and the arms) are properly trained and fit for military service. At the very least, the 2nd Amendment clearly indicates that the government has the right, and responsibility, to ensure that firearms, and the owners thereof, are “well regulated.”
To argue that the 2nd Amendment gives every Joe Blow from Kokomo the right to keep assault weapons hidden under his bed is to ignore the plain wording of the text.
BTW, I find it interesting that everyone who disagrees with you is guilty of “acts of moral turpitude.” Your not seriously suggesting that in order to be a good American I have to agree with your particular interpertation of the 2nd Amendment are you?
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Legal_Eagle
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I’m sorry, dessert, but I really can’t follow your logic here, so I can’t respond directly to your post. Sorry.
But if you want to see what a modern pluralistic society looks like where firearms are regulated go to London, England. If you want to see what a modern pluralistic society looks like where firearms are not regulated go to Jackson, Mississippi.
In one city it makes national news when somebody is shot. In the other city, people sleep on their floors at night so they don’t get hit by stray bullets. I’ll let you guess which is which.
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Legal_Eagle
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wabrams
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I could really care less what Wikipedia says since it is the furtherist thing from a scholarly source. Women and children getting killed in a cross fire is different from directly targeting & killing civilians.
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wabrams
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The only thing you leave out is that what doesn’t make headlines: when people are bludgeoned with pipes, bats, stabbed with knives, etc. b/c they have replaced the handgun.
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Legal_Eagle
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Solutions are obviously difficult and multifaceted. If you will forgive the pun, there is no one bullet answer. Poverty leads to crime. Poor education leads to crime. Addiction leads to crime. Fatherless families lead to crime. Lack of moral foundation leads to crime. In the case of Virgina Tech–mental illness leads to crime. Access to guns gives that crime the opportunity to turn deadly.
Again, I think this is probably a discussion for another thread. Sticking to the topic, one step in the right direction would be limiting access to the tools of murder and violence we have been discussing.
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vern_humphrey
Guest
You should have thought of that when you called me “bro.”
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mapleoak
Guest
It is usually hard to tell what the media means whenever they say anything. It is filled with spin doctors. If we reason that it meant “shooting massacre”, then we have to consider what it defines as a “shooting massacre”. Does it exclude all wars fought on U.S. soil? Certainly many of those were larger massacres. Does it exclude any incidents in which people died by other means and not guns exclusively? That would rule out such incidents as Waco, Texas. Does it mean an incindent where one person did ALL of the killing. Rule out Columbine, old west gun fights, etc. Of couse the media can call it the deadliest whatever if it excludes enough criteria.
Actually it seems very convenient that the media has little story to divert almost 100% attention to just as another issue of actual importance was about to grab U.S. attention in a controversal way.
In Christ - J.M.J.
Mapleoak
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vern_humphrey
Guest
Much of that is due to the failure of our education system. The failure of that system leads to poor education, which leads to poverty. Welfare has driven out the father, so we have many single parent homes. People on welfare, with nothoing to do and no hope of better conditions are naturally attracted to drugs and alcohol.
Lack of access to a gun resulted in the death of some 32 people in this case, and the wounding of many more.
More victim disarmament, eh?
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Rach620
Guest
The Federalist Papers aren’t just like Human Events articles at all; they are foundational documents of American political thought, written by some of the same men who wrote the Constitution. Wouldn’t they have the best insight into what was meant and intended by the various articles of the Constitution? Better insight than some old hack who wrote a Human Events article 200+ years later, whatever post-graduate degrees they might have had?
I agree. There are a variety of ways of interpreting the 2nd amendment today, and I think it is a faulty assertion to say that any kind of gun control is unconstitutional. The degree of gun control is what is debatable.
At any rate, gun control/lack of it is really not what is at issue here. The man who committed this crime would not have been stopped if there were a few more laws in place to restrict his ability to buy a gun, but at the same time, nor would he have been stopped if students on VT’s campus were allowed to concel & carry.
I don’t think you can make that case at all. Who is to say that he would have been stopped if someone in Norris Hall had been armed? Really…who is ever to say?
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vern_humphrey
Guest
You’re advancing the Post-Modernist argument – that we cannot know anything.
Who is to say there would have been more survivors of the Titanic, if they had had more lifeboats with properly-designed davits?
Who is to say there would have been more survivors of the Donner Party, if they had stayed with the Great Russel train, instead of following Lansford Hastings’ trail?
Who is to say there would have been more survivors of the Handcart Brigade, if they had had wagons instead of trying to push and pull their equipment across the plains and mountains?
The answer is, experience. People in similar situations with the proper equipment, taking the prudent course of action have generally survived.
Modern ships have more and better lifeboats and lanuching equipment and a higher passenger survival rate in a sinking.
The Great Russel train did not get snowed in and its members were not forced to resort to cannibalism.
And people with wagons generally made it to Salt Lake with little loss of life.
And there are a myriad of well-researched studies showing that in deadly confrontations, armed people have a much better chance of survival than unarmed people.
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luvmykids
Guest
The tragedy at VT has one thing in common with abortion…innocent people being murdered! The reason it was brought up is to make a distinction here. The point is that there has been HUGE coverage by the media of this horrible tragedy. At the same time, they are calling it the worst in U.S. history, but in the mean time no one seems to care about the children being killed every day by abortion. It just seems kind of sad since this is a tragedy going on everyday with the death toll exceeding VT in MUCH greater numbers! In a country where murdering innocent human life occurs every day on a VERY large scale, (legally might I add), a tragedy like this shouldn’t be surprising.
Attempts were made to help this very troubled young man. Mental health care is a very touchy thing. It’s hard to get a person help sometimes, because of confidentiality laws and many other things. He didn’t want help and probably wouldn’t have complied with it. There were people that tried to reach out to him. There are plenty of mentally ill people out there that could probably use help and aren’t getting it for the same reasons. Lucky for us, most of them won’t ever kill us.
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vern_humphrey
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Actually, there is a way he could have been helped. The university could have brought criminal charges against him – for some incident like the fire he started in the dorm. Had they done that, two good things would have resulted. First of all, he would have been prohibited from legally acquiring a firearm, and secondly, he could have been given psychiatric care against his will.
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Rach620
Guest
. Where did I at all imply that I believed that all truth is unknowable?This situation is fundamentally different from that. It’s not like there’s even a truth of the matter to be pursued here, like somewhere we can finally come to grasp exactly how this event might have been stopped, in the same way that we can come to understand how the soul ought to be properly ordered or some such thing. Apples and oranges.
Is there a similar experience with which we can compare this event? One in which a disturbed attacker, armed with semiautomatic weapons, stormed a building with the intent to kill as many people as possible, and was stopped because some person was armed with a handgun?
This isn’t like taking another trail or using more lifeboats, things which we can be positive would have saved more lives. It’s enormously debatable whether it would have been more prudent for some of those victims to have been armed. Perhaps that person would have just become more of a target for the shooter, and would have been killed before being able to do anything.
You just cannot say absolutely that the outcome would have been different if students on college campuses were allowed to conceal and carry. Just like I cannot say absolutely that the truth is unknowable.
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