Should assault rifles be banned in the US?

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Sonarman

Here's another "foreigner's" view...

Why not ban all lethal guns and allow the use of tranquilizer weapons instead?That way you could still subdue a perpetrator and not open yourself up to a manslaughter/murder rap and hopefully stop these nutters getting hold of life ending equipment.

Because banning all lethal guns would require attempting to disarm a vast number of citizens who would rather be labelled outlaws than give up their guns.

As for the sport argument... I've never seen anything macho about hunting with guns a "real man" should surely be able to wrestle an animal to the ground and kill it with his bare hands instead taking the rather cowardly minimal risk/ hide behind a tree/sniper scope approach .

What you, or I, think is "macho" is irrelevant. What a gun owner uses the gun for is, within limits, his or her own business. The opposite argument would be to leave the guns alone but ban hunting. That isn't going to happen either.

On the other hand how "macho" is it to buy a steak cut from a cow that someone else clubbed on the head? It has nothing to do with anything.

As for the "inshrined in the constitution" arguement... Bush and his cronies were fast enough to bend the constitution to take away suspected terrorists rights but suddenly now it can't be bent to protect America's children?

And many Americans protested that, and still are.

You can't just remove something from the constitution. First a new amendment has to be proposed. Then it has to pass the appropriate committee. Then it has to be voted on by both House and Senate. Then it has to be ratified by two-thirds of the States. If the government tries to bypass that procedure then we no longer have a Constitutional government, and you will see an armed rebellion, which is the real reason the Second Amendment is there in the first place.

August's reply may have been cliched, but I feel the same way. If you want my guns, by all means come try to take them.

While people have taken August and Soopaman to task for the "Outlander" thing, I think Sonarman's post is a perfect example of that very thing. Opinion is fine, and criticizm is fine, but you obviously have no understanding at all of the way we think, or of the way things work here.