CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
Why Can't There Be Limits to Your Second Amendment Rights?

Saturday, August 04, 2012

this entry brought to you by the dodos, "going under"


Most people would agree that our most sacred freedom here in America is free speech. Correct?

You would assume that other countries have free speech, and in a way, they do. But if you look at other countries, you'll find weird, inexplicable censorship. England would censor movies that had violence against children. This is a ban that sort of makes sense, except that you find out Stanley Kubrick's The Shining was originally banned there, and it's only been relatively recently that you could actually watch the movie uncut. And let's not even get started on Germany and Australia's weird censorship rules. You might say that here in America we have weird censorship rules, but you'd be wrong-- we have weird cultural censorship rules. Movies don't get banned here because there were too many Nazi flags in them.

Still, as much as we all love our free speech-- and we should-- we also understand that there are limits, specifically when it comes to speech that harms others. The classic example is that you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

But we also know that a rock star can't incite violence. He can't stand on stage and say "I'm not playing another song until somebody kills that guy wearing the red t-shirt." We know we can't stand outside somebody's house with a megaphone saying "Person living in 1213 Mockingbird Dr, I am going to set fire to your house in 30 minutes." We can't slander someone. We can't pull out a full page advertisement in a newspaper saying that John Smith is a rapist and a murderer when he's really not.

Reasonable people understand that Free Speech is our most sacred right and absolutely nothing can infringe on that, but we also understand that it has its limits.

How come reasonable gun owners will often argue that there should be no limits to what guns and how many they can by? Why will a person who is reasonable in most aspects of their lives say that it's an infringement of their rights if they don't get to have all of the guns?

There are some left wing people who will say that the second amendment really only is supposed to be applied to regulated militias, and I disagree with that. I think that the second amendment says that individuals have the right to own guns. But I don't see how banning specific guns is somehow an infringement on anyone's rights. It says you have the right to have guns. It doesn't say you have the right to own all of the guns. How in the world can any reasonable person say that the only way to exercise their gun rights is to buy all guns? Nobody would argue the same about free speech.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that while we have politicians saying that there should be more guns in the country, that somehow not only are all the guns not enough, that we should somehow have more, there are no left-wing politicians saying "When I'm elected, I'm going to make sure that there are no bans on slander or saying fire in a crowded theater! These Republicans have gone too far on their limits of being able to threaten someone in public!"
-------



with love from CRS @ 5:49 PM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment