What's worse about this entire thing... is that by doing this, they're actively ignoring the Constitution.
Only for US people, I think. The rest of the world doesn't count.
Considering most laws, by law, are ILLEGAL if they counter the Constitution in any way, shape or form (Yes, including Obama's Gun Laws that he wants to put in), it means that they're knowingly breaking the law.
Well, yeah, but to determine that it is unconstitutional, someone has to complain about it, and since no-one knew it was happening....
Plus, the court is horribly politicised
anyway, so what decision you get mainly depends on who managed to appoint the most judges (plus, of course,
all judges are appointed by some president or another, which hardly seems to me to be the best way of limiting the government's power...).
And flaunting that fact, too. This, honestly... scares me a lot. A LOT of things that people do are illegal, even if we don't realize we're acting illegally, with how screwed up the law has become.
Yeah.
Although, at least you guys
have a constitution to protect you somewhat, even if the government is getting good at ignoring it.
And realistically, it's not a democratic republic, it's a CONSTITUTIONAL one. NONE of this crap should have happened in the first place, if they had followed the Constitution first, and the bullshit laws second.
Well, that is true, but in this case it's not even
democratic. For it to be democratic in a meaningful sense there needs to be a public debate about what the government is doing, and secret actions deny us that.
Thankfully though, they've not managed to gut the Second Amendment as well as they wish they could, which was put into place to ensure would be tyrants and corrupt politicians all have something to fear. The people uprising against them and shooting them for making stupid laws.
Well, except that people never focus on that aspect. They always focus on the aspect of wanting to be able to defend theirselves from criminals. Which, frankly, is
not a good reason to have a gun. The government is here to protect people from criminals, what people need is a way to protect theirselves from the
government.
And, honestly, I think it has been gutted somewhat, because by the point that it becomes necessary to rise up against the government, the government will have taken weapons from anyone who is even
remotely likely of doing so. All they have to do is call them a "traitor" or a criminal and that's it.
I'm always a bit torn on gun control laws. On the one hand, they make
massive amounts of sense, because there really is no reason to possess a gun 99.9% of the time (aside from for hunting or the like), and most of the time it seems to me that guns do more harm than good. However, if you allow the government to disarm the population then it becomes very difficult or impossible for an unpopular government to be overthrown (look at Syria, for example), and that possibility does really need to be there.
Although, honestly, what I
really do not like is stuff like this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23304198It seems pretty clear to me that these "stand your ground" laws are
far too lenient and broad. What appears to have happened is that some idiot vigilante decided that, because some guy was black and wearing a hood, he obviously
must be a criminal, and decided to chase after him. The kid then defended himself quite reasonably, but because the other guy was carrying a gun, he got shot and killed. I do accept the concept of "self-defence", but I don't see how that should apply to a fight you
started, against someone who was clearly unarmed. At very least he should have been convicted of Manslaughter, but because Florida's law is ludicrously biased towards people fighting back even when they
really shouldn't, he got away with it.
I know ALL too well about how they've screwed things up, Mike. I've read books and history on the fact, myself, as has my father. Osama Bin Laden became an enemy of America because we withdrew all funding to support the hospitals there after we helped them kick Russia out... when they needed medicine and food the most.
Yeah, exactly.
Frankly, if you look at history, basically every problem in the world today can be traced back to either something the US did during the Cold War or something that European Colonialists did to maintain control. Most of the sectarian tensions you get now are there because the British spent most of the 19th and early 20th centuries getting them to hate each other so they wouldn't ally and attack
us.
And don't even get me started on the bullshit involved with 9-11.
Eh, what?