Quick question on gun confiscation.

[GUBU]

How many of you actually had your guns confiscated during the last eight years? Show of hands, please.

I once shot my neighbour's rifled shotgun at a broken water butt (he was a member of the shooting club at the time), and have gone clay pigeon shooting as part of a stag do. I've never actually owned a gun to be confiscated, though.

Oh, and I did also get to practise loading and cocking a Steyr AUG (with blanks, don't worry) when I was thinking of joining the Free Clothes Association (the Irish version of the Army Reserve), but as my night job paying for rent during college conflicted with training times, I couldn't join.

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Yup.  They were men of their own time, they left no shortage of material as to the contents of their imaginations.  What's the problem?

The Second Amendment is probably one of the two most shortsighted things the founding fathers did vis a vis the constitutional framework (and no I'm not talking about the very recent interpretation of it that gives free reign for all Americans to bear whatever arms they wish). The wording of the clause is clear in that what the Founding Fathers wanted to do was to set up militias within each state responsible for the defence of the nation, i.e. leave the job of the army up to weekend warriors (I actually have great respect for reservists, on top of their every day jobs, they do give up a significant amount of their free time in an effort to make themselves ready to defend their country during a crisis). At a time when the rest of the world had copped on to the problems of having their armies being largely made up of part-time soldiers, and were either going professional or levée en masse (or in Prussia's case shortly after, a combination of both).

The folly of such a choice was actually seen in the War of 1812, when smaller British forces were able to easily defend Canada and enact an invasion of the US, in the face of the much larger, but largely militia, US army.