US firefighters shot dead at blaze

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

Really? I've been beaten half to death by mentally healthy people. What if they had had access to firearms?

If they beat you half to death, they weren't mentally healthy.

Although, when our hypothetical angry-healthy person is walking or driving to their ex's place, they probably would've calmed down.

Using hypotheticals to support an argument only makes you look like you don't have any real arguments.

Anyway, if the American people vote on wether or not to change the second amendment, the people's choice should determine it, not the government's.

And again, you speak out on things you know less than nothing about. The Constition was specifically written so no one, neither government nor people, can change it on a whim. Any such change requires a majority vote in both houses of Congress, then ratification by 2/3 of the States.

The Constitution itself took months of debate to put into place, and many more months of arguments to convince the States to accept it. The New York ratification arguments for the Constitution were published in a paper called The Federalist, and are today contained in a volume known as The Federalist Papers. The arguments against were published in a variety of papers, and those that have survived are collected in a book called The Anti-Federalist Papers. If you haven't read and carefully studied both, you have no idea of what our Constitution means, and are in no position to say what should determine anything.

There were originally twelve amendments to the Constitution. Only ten of them were passed by Congress. Since 1791, when the first ten were ratified, seventeen more have been added. More than one hundred new amendments are proposed in Congress every year. Thirty three have passed Congress, including the twenty-seven existing Amendments. There are six more that have passed Congress but never been ratified by enough States to become law. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment, passed in 1992, was actually one of the original twelve, which means it took 202 years to come into effect.

No, the people don't vote on Constitutional Amendments. It is put into the hands of our elected representatives to start the wheels in motion, and it is the elected legislatures of the States who are tasked with making it binding law.