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Originally Posted by ratbastid
How about: "A person's life and health being of greater value than another person's rights to property, the privilege of owning firearms of any type shall be reserved only for those who have demonstrated the ability to use them safely and responsibly. Crimes committed with firearms will be punished especially strongly."
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who determines the qualifications for safe and responsible?
this is the problem with rights being reserved for those who 'qualify', much like what happened to freed blacks in the jim crow days.
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Originally Posted by ratbastid
This thread is interestingly tautological. We're dealing with a MAN-given right, given by the MAN-written 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. We're talking about rewriting it completely, and yet there's this concern here for preserving some big fancy Right? That makes no sense, if we're chucking it and rewriting it from scratch.
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The framers believed that the right to bear arms pre-existed the constitution, not granted by it.
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Originally Posted by ratbastid
God didn't give anybody the right to have guns. Thomas Jefferson and his buddies made sure Americans could keep and bear arms, given the necessity to a newly-formed and fragile nation of a well-armed military.
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they learned first hand that governments with strong armies could deny and remove liberties and freedoms and that the only true and final protectors of our rights would be us, we the people.