Dean Forster wrote:
> You must have missed my long explanations about the
> copious legislation already in place. We already have
> our guns registered and felons and violent offenders
> can't have them. If you're suggesting other
> restrictions on who owns a gun, what are they?
I think most of the existing laws are more than adequate,
if they're enforced. The main change I'd make to the law is
requiring the states to keep the same sort of information on
gun owners that they do for drivers. Unfortunately, the more
paranoid gun... uh... enthusiasts ;-) ...are convinced that
if the government gets a list of all gun owners, they'll
eventually turn totalitarian and use the list to round up
all the guns.
> I think it's safe to say that the framers of the constitution
> did more with their lives than argue points of law.
Obviously.
> They were creating something, they weren't trying to pick
> something apart to further their own ends. Shall we debate
> the use of commas in other documents now? please say no.
What they were creating was a legal document, one that had
to be the basis for all future laws in the US. In order for
a legal document to be useful, it has to be able to stand
up to nitpickers trying to interpret it. That meant paying
attention to each phrase, word, and even punctuation mark,
to make sure the document said exactly what they wanted it
to say.
A law has to be written very carefully. If it's too vague,
it's useless. If it's too specific, there is no room for
interpretation, making the law too inflexible to last. The
US Constitution manages to sit in the useful range in
between those extremes, but it only got that way thanks to
the nit-picking founding fathers who very carefully designed
and wrote it.
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