This was discussed in a previous posting hereon as well.

It comes down to one of two conclusions. Either:

* The RKBA is Not the Fundament of Freedom that some folks say it is, or;

* We are Not in the process of bringing Freedom to Iraq.

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to watch the Gun Fondlers try to have it both ways simultaneously. Downright entertaining, in fact.

I hardly feel the need to remind anyone that a civilian holding a firearm in a war zone, under the Geneva Convention, is no longer a civilian but a combatant. I fail see how promoting as a constitutional right the ownership of firearms in Iraq will benefit the security situation. If, as you suggest, this gun-control policy leaves only bad guys holding AK-47s then surely that makes them easier to identify and neutralise? Anyone with a weapon is a bad-guy. End of story.

Maybe this attitude is born from being British. Here we don't even arm our police, sending them into harms way with a 1 foot club that John Peel would recognise. I make no apology for this attitude however - the gun related death in the UK versus the US makes my point adequately enough.

Civilisation is only ever three meals from anarchy. Giving half staved civilians the right to bear arms in a war zone strikes me as tantamount to lighting the blu touch paper and standing well back.

Simon,

I thought they had already called a halt to hostilities in Iraq. Bush even went on T.V. and pretty much declared the war to be over. That said, I wouldn't be so quick as to classify people carrying a firearm as a 'combatant'. Even if they are considered combatants, you have to ask which side they are on before you shoot them. Allied troops didn't shoot members of the French Resistance when they invaded France, did they?

Second, bad guys with firearms are never easy to see, or neutralize. If that were the case, there wouldn't be any civilians with guns in London, New York, Chicago, or Washington D.C. All of those places have effectively banned guns, yet they are filled with people with guns.

There are only two possibities which can exist in any society.
1. Guns are legal, and everybody has access to guns.
2. Guns are illegal, and only the criminals and the government have access to guns.

The third possibility "Only the government has guns" is not only impossible (because criminals will always have access to guns) but undesirable (because of an utter lack of trust in government). That goes double for middle eastern governments.

Folks, come on now. AUTOMATIC weapons are not allowed in the US without a special permit. Hand grenades are another item that regulated here in the states. Please stop trying to compare apples and oranges to make your point.

Simon, isn't your murder rate higher though, guns not withstanding? So your gun violence is lower, what good does that do people when they are being stabbed to death?

Incidentally, with your point on Iraq I tend to agree. The right to bare arms doesn't start from day one, wait until a constitution is in place and then talk about it. Right now its still a war zone.. Geez, talk about a straw man argument.

JR,
While automatics in the US do require a permit, they are still legal. They've only required a permit since 1934, and prior to that were perfectly legal. Since requiring a permit, only one murder has ever taken place with a legally owned machine gun. (And it was a cop who committed the murder.)

Ben,
I don't share your belief that the right to bear arms is a right granted by the government. Instead, it is an unalienable right that should be protected by the government.

It should be the government that gets its power from the governed, not the other way around.

Puhleez. Let's not compare the American Revolution to this war. Please. Several major differences:

1. We weren't liberated, we overthrew our administering government. In other words, once the "good guys" won, there was less worry about the victorious army getting shot by a sympathizer from the losing side.

2. We weren't made up of warring religious factions.

3. As far as I know, Barbara Tuchman has never mentioned warlords or clashing ethnic factions in her treatise on the american Revolution.

4. See JR's outstanding answer, which, if anyone skips over, is being intellectually dishonest.

And By the way, it really annoys me that we are once again being compared to a murderous totalitarian government that tortured and repressed its people for 30 years.
Saddam-like poilcies, indeed.

Ravenwood, put your idealism aside. Its just not the right time now to be allowing people to bare weapons. It's a war zone. That said, even here in the US where we have this right, its been structured through policies (some good, some bad).

Do you think it would have been the "right" thing to do if we enabled the Germans to keep their arms after the fall of Berlin? Get a clue, get practical.

I support their right to bare arms, but only once their people have a system for governing themselves.

PUHLEEZ?! Don!
Nice to see you woke up with a new little group to hang your very little hat on.
Now, I want to make sure I get this straight, so hang with me - Not only are small caliber weapons available on the street, RPGs are there as well. So, we have a range here that covers more than just 'personal protection', right? How many police? So far? Let's just for sake of being conservative (that's WAY too far right for me, but HEY...) put the number at 1/10th of what Saddam had, which was 20,000 in Baghdad. We're not goin' anywhere else for the moment, Don, so just hang. Have we put uniforms on these folks that we do have performing the function of police (is this country still under Marshall Law?), and have we armed them?
Now Don, let's move our little butts and minds eight time zones to the West (should be a comfortable direction for you, given your proclivity for portside puking) to NYC. Grab your trusty AK, and go for a walk in Times Square. Trust ME, Don. I'm one of your little buddies from the RKBA group.

GEEEEESH! How foolish of you, Don...

Do you understand where I'm coming from here? The point is not to take guns out of the hands of EVERYONE Don, but AKs and kids, or RPGs and kids, or ANYTHING THAT YOU CAN PUT A ROUND THROUGH in the hands of kids is not good, Don. Walking around brandishing the damned thing is tantamount to beggin' for a quickdraw contest at highnoon, much less after dark.

Chew on that for a few minutes, regroup, and for God's sake, don't shoot yourself in the foot. If the bad guys weren't so simply stupid, they'd leave 'dem WMDs under their freakin' pillows for awhile... We'd probably leave a lot sooner!

Just think, Don! With all 'dem soldiers gone, how long do you think the good guys would tolerate their BadGuyNeighbors in the GoodGuyNeighborhood?

Uh, just to interject some reality into this. Who do you think has guns in Iraq? The law abiding citizens who what to protect their freedom, and overthrow a tyranical government or the criminals and government thugs? Just asking.

I don't believe promoting a right to bear arms in order to raise a militia to provide for a common defense is a argument that one could reasonably make in Iraq. Instead, it would more likely start a civil war between Shiite, Kurdish, Turkemon, Sunni, and Kurdish factions that could spread to surrounding countries, whereas disarming and arming only the police and army who are being supervised by an effective international peacekeeping force is more likely to lead to stability, nation building, and a civil society. Furthermore, the Marshall Plan did not arm the Germans while marial law was in effect. Comparing gun ownership during the American revolutionary times to the current situation in Iraq is not a very good comparison. They are not hunting bear, rabbits, fowl, and deer to eat over there, just people.

for DaveD:

I invite you to peruse the several more extreme sorts of Gun Fondler web sites at your leisure. You will find thereon that these are folks who believe that Any limitation on "arms" is tantamount to tyranny!

Those are also the folks who define the whole Gun Control debate.

Frankly, I rather like the fact that FAWs are closely regulated in this country, that RPGs and other explosives are all but impossible to get hold of, and that there are many localities that require a permit to carry a firearm. Doesn't bother me one damned bit!

Which is Not Quite the stance of the more vigorous sorts of Gun Fondlers out there.

But ya still hafta admit -- if the RKBA is truly a Necessary Precondition To Liberty, then the twerp who posted the "Saddam-Like" discussion is waythehell off base on the matter. It is entirely possible to have your Liberty threatened by a non-gubmint entity.

Used to be, some time back, that one of the coal company CEOs (it might have been American Coal or one of its predecessors) made the statement "You can't mine coal without machine guns!" or words to that effect.

That sort of attitude we can get along without.

Completely.

This info came from the NY Times?

Has anyone verified it as real policy (even though it is common sense to begin with and probably doesn't need a policy).

"Simon, isn't your [British] murder rate higher though, guns not withstanding?" - No, that's a fallacy perpetuated by the US gun lobby.

"I thought they had already called a halt to hostilities in Iraq." The naivety of this comment leaves me breathless. To compare cops and robbers in London to the civil war waiting to happen in Iraq, with martial law in place and armed un-uniformed militia abroad, strikes me as deliberate obtusity to the realities on the ground.

Dictatorial? Saddam-like? Snap out of it dude. This is just about the silliest post I've seen on this site.

By the way, apart from the obvious practical lunacy of not disarming civilians under the present circumstances, which hardly need elaborating here, the fact is Iraq doesn't have a constitution (yet), never mind a Bill of Rights. Unlike Belgium, our laws don't have "universal jurisdiction".

That's why people risk hell and high water to get here.

Don,
Me thinks you post this shit to get those of us steering a pretty steady course (TRUE North) to run in circles like you do! I drew an analogy, buddy. If you have a critique of same, bring it on, but don't continue to yap about RKBA as the end-all of Liberty. It is not. AND, that is NOT what this post is about. If you want to argue gun rights, go find a blog devoted to it, will you? I ain't learnin' nothin' from this line you're draggin' in the water.

I was trying to find where Ravenwood discovered that "we have the God given right to self defense". I'm not a theologian, but I don' t remember that one carved into stone.

I'm all for having the freedom to own guns and have a number of them myself. To compare how and why we got that freedom here in the USA, to what is going on in Iraq is absolutely unfair and dangerous. Unless I missed the announcement, I believe we still have a boatload of US and allied soldiers in harms way in that country.

Try to pile your extremist RKBA views on a marine that is being fired upon by a civilian with an AK47... then duck and run!

The right to defend yourself is not something that is granted, or written down. It is inherent. Granted by God, if you will.

If you look at nature, creatures all over the planet exercise their defensive instinct. If you go to pick up a snake or a rat or anything else, and it bites you, do you blame the thing for biting you? Do you say that it had no right to defend itself? Do you ask what government or societal entity granted that creature the right to defend itself? Why should humans be any different?

A person has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While that may be a right that we "protect" here in the United States, it is NOT a right granted by government. The founders of this nation recognized that those rights were inherent to all men. So much so, that the Amendment IX was included in the Bill of Rights to say that the "enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Samuel Adams wrote, pertaining to Amendment IX, that: "Among the Natural Rights of the Colonists are these First. a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can--Those are evident Branches of, rather than deductions from the Duty of Self Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature--"

And that, my friend, is where I "discovered" that we all have a natural right to self defense.

Sorry, Ravenwood. I respect the RKBA (now that I know what it stands for), but you're going to have to try harder than the appeal to nature.

http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#natural

Personally, I'd run the argument like this.

It having been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history that the few will, given the opportunity, oppress the many, often with delusions of ethical superiority. By Occam's Razor I must assume that no subset of humanity has sufficient information, education, and insight to know what is best for the entirety of humanity for more than brief periods.

While it is necessary to put small portions of humanity in charge over larger portions for logistical reasons, the ability for humanity as a whole to decide that their superiors have stopped supporting their best interests and replace them must remain intact.

It has also been shown innumerable times in history and in modern psychological experiments that clever words, bread, and circuses can delude humanity as to their own degrading state far past the point where the superiors are so ensconced in their own power structure that violence is the only means of escape.

To insure that this avenue of final resort remains open in the direst emergency, the citizens of the world must have access to sufficient force to upset the power structure with a sufficient number of dissidents (say, a 90% or more majority, just to pick a number out of thin air). Several wars have occurred that have, to me, adequately demonstrated that ranged projectile weapons -- firearms -- are necessary to maintain a presence on the battle field, even when one outnumbers the opposition 10 or 100 to 1. Hence, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed, lest the populace be denied its final resort.

But who wants to listen to all that? Religion is so much easier. "God said so." "It's the natural way."

Gentlepeople:

IMO; a single drop of blood shed by a Pole, Australian, Brit or servicemember of the United States of America is not worth all the Muslims and/or Arabs, etc., etc. that are in Iraq or in the entire Middle East. Saddam-like policies; indeed!......well, again, IMO why don't we just kill them all and let allah [capitalization ignored] sort 'em out. Guns don't kill people; people kill people and rumor has it, there's a lot of that going on in Iraq by the very people that we collectively are trying to help. [The fact (as probably reported by the NYT; is that Uncle Saddam freed a 100,000 or so criminals, thugs, etc. from his prisons just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was beginning and these fine folk might be in the forefront of the armed "opposition."]

Given the above; I personally would rather have the war-fighting and terrorism stopped in their sand box than on the streets of Des Moines, Tampa, Miles City or any other city, town, village in the United States. It also seems that Stalin Hussein used the vast areas of "his" country as a graveyard; so finding a place to "store" the "armed citizens" once relieved of their weapons and their sad attempt to blame everything on the Allies from lusting for their oil to why their toilets won't flush, could be "dispatched" and lay awaiting their virginal reward beyond the clouds [or wherever it is that they think they're going]. If they want their AK-47; make it unuseable and bury it with them. [I can suggest where one might put it!]

Getting these "infidels" before they get us seems to be a reasonable tact in this convoluted Century that is called the 21st. Those that have served and are too old to take the place of servicemembers of the Coalition so that they too might grow old and have a life free of terror might feel the same way. I'd go in a minute; if I could serve any useful purpose.

As an aside; all the weaponry could be collected, made inoperable and placed on eBay to pay for the liberation of these turd bandits. I'd buy that for a dollar!

I show the sole of my sandal to these ingrates and offer my left hand!

Peace

//If they want their AK-47; make it unuseable and bury it with them.//

When I first read this, I thought, "Oh no! Zombie Iraqis with assault rifles! Where's my boomstick?"

Then I realized someone could dig them up.

I have to disagree with your assessment as to the relative worth of us vs. them. These people have had no say in their own governance, their only role model for the past 35 years has been Saddam Hussein. After watching armed forces sweep through their country, if a few (or many) should take it into their heads that the only way to power is violence, we cannot fault them for it. The onus of education is upon us, and we must refute their mistaken belief, not confirm it.

Of course, another lesson we must teach them is that people will defend themselves if attacked, especially our people.

I've expressed my thoughts about this extremely stupid discussion a few days ago. But here it is again:

Iraq is under military occupation. There is no government there ruling with the consent of the people of Iraq. They are under "lifeboat rules". In the lifeboat, you obey orders and you don't get to talk back about it, because you are in a dire emergency. When you get back to land, you have your rights again.

When civil society is reestablished in Iraq, I would expect them to have the same rights we do. Until then, it is perfectly reasonable that they don't.

Why not complain about the fact that Iraqis are being denied their 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendment rights as well?

Why not complain that nobody currently in charge of Iraq was elected?

This is very stupid even for an antiwar stance.

Gabriel! Welcome back! Pass has passed. You're left with Don, and turnip... Don't eat the turnip. He's got wormies.

Incidentally, while it is true that homicide rates are still higher in the US than in the UK, other violent crimes rates are higher in the UK and property crime rates many times so...

What happened to PtG?

I'd expect Don to stick around... he's like genital warts, he just doesn't go away.

(I'm not actually back yet...just stealing some time between seminars...)

Oh, PtG took his toys and went home...

Let me back my last statement...

"Robbery, sex crimes, and violence against the person are higher in England and Wales; property crime is twice as high; vehicle theft is higher still; the British are 2.3 times more likely than Americans to be assaulted, and three times more likely to be violently assaulted. Between 1973 and 1992, burglary rates in the US fell by half. In Britain, not even the Home Office’s disreputable reporting methods (if a burglar steals from 15 different apartments in one building, it counts as a single crime) can conceal the remorseless rise: Britons are now more than twice as likely as Americans to be mugged; two-thirds will have their property broken into at some time in their lives. Even more revealing is the divergent character between UK and US property crime: In America, just over 10% of all burglaries are “hot burglaries” - committed while the owners are present; in Britain, it’s over half."

http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=22

You will still be able to defend your house in Iraq with your AK. You will not be able to openly carry on the street.

I'm sure the rules will get more nuanced as order is restored.

Don, I'm a "gun fondler". They are usefull tools, plus, just fun to shoot. And, they help keep idiots like you off my property.
it's really hard to go moose hunting without a gun, deer, elk, bear, etc.
Although I do use a bow as well.
We do have silly "gun control" laws here, but all they really do is make it hard for honest people to aquire guns legaly, while the crimminals have no trouble at all getting guns, they just don't worry about having all the permits and papers in proper order.
Now, in respect to iraq, which at the moment is an UNCIVILIZED place, The post above was right, it's still a war zone, so anyone walking around with a gun in potential enemy.

Even in the USA, you don't see people driving around with rifles in the gun rack on their pickup trucks anymore. Washington has some strick laws about transporting guns. so do other states.

Gee, I wonder what would happen if some idiot started shooting of an uzi in the air in down- town NY? Bet ya he'd be shot by police.
So why is it OK to do this in Baghdad?

These people should be shot by either a legal gun or an illegal gun for their spelling/English.
"The right to bare arms" posted by Ben Noah
and "under Marshall Law" posted by: Dave Dube .

I try to wear a shirt when firing at the pistol range. My arms are covered or I get sunburnt in this Texas heat. As for the Marshall Law, I think that Mr. Dube has been watching too many episodes of Gunsmoke. It's martial law when a Military is providing it. James Arness is too old now to maintain the peace in Baghdad.

KavJack - Point well taken. I wonder if Sheriff Martial's available for active duty?