Full Agreement

There is in 2nd Amendment circles a continuum amongst the true believers. It starts somewhere around the concept of reasonable regulation and moves on out to die-hards like me. The majority of people cluster around the some regulation point. The details of the precise regulatory scheme are subject to debate. I full well realize I’m an outlier on the bell curve.

So for people like me, it’s always nice to see someone who agrees. Vin Suprynowicz has a column up about what weapons are covered under the 2nd amendment. I am in full agreement with him. I’m one of the people who thinks that I should be able to have any weapon I can pay for and store safely. By store safely, I don’t mean securely. I mean that if I decide I want a Patriot missile launcher, I don’t get to keep it in my backyard. If something goes wrong, the blast radius will take out my neighbors’ homes as well. They didn’t sign up for that, so I don’t figure they should have to deal with the consequences. On the other hand, if I have 10,000 acres in the Hill Country and I blow something up, oh well, too bad for me. I’m also bright enough to realize the changes in law necessary ain’t ever gonna happen. Still, I don’t see that giving up my rights does a damn thing to deter ne’er-do-wells and miscreants.

In a similar vein, Matt Welch calls bullshit on the notion that restricting our liberties makes us safer in any fundamental way. I’m not going to repeat hoary old quotes that everyone has heard and ignored many times before. I’ll just point out that any liberty surrendered to the government is only rarely given back, and then only with great struggle. This applies to any liberty, not just gun rights. It’s important because the executive branch is currently claiming a whole lot of power on some pretty thin justifications. The entire idea behind the Constitution is the restricting of the power of the federal government to prevent tyranny. Giving more power to the government is not conducive to that end.