There are methods you can use when you know the other guys are going to play by the rules, and you understand them. And then there are methods you use when the other guys know no rules at all.

Unenlightened as usual, I see. To enforce and secure rights regardless of the situation, you need the means to do so.

It would be invidious of me to suggest you make this a frequent and regular practice.

I'm glad i don't live in a society where one must carry a gun to feel one has rights.

Actually, they made it possible to own guns.

Yeph. Both are even defined in the simplest of military doctrine. It's called talking. Amazing how everything can be solved without using guns. Amazing how a minority (described as 'big dics') don't understand. Amazing how that minority so fears as to always need a gun.

Unenlightened as usual - just like King, Ghandi, and Mandella. Not that I expect one enthralled by power and Cheney to understand such complex men. But is does explain the blind support for George Jr and contempt for the American soldier.

It's hardly a case of "must," Aliantha, but it does help. It is after all the expression of the proper distribution of power in a Republic.

I disagree with that UG, but I'm not getting into a gun debate again. I've said my piece on it. If you want to see my arguments, you can just look up my old posts. ;)

Page 446 of most editions of Gandhi's biography includes a remark, noted by the biographer as a Gandhian effort at having it both ways, to the effect of "Among the worst crimes of the British Raj on the Indian people was denying them guns." The quote and the page number come up in the sigline rotation in the Cellar.

And my views haven't altered since that time, either: an armed people is a free people, and that is the only sure path of freedom.

Have you ever seen the looney tunes cartoon where one character takes out his fists, so the other takes out bigger ones, then they move to axes then handguns then machine guns then a bomb? It all happens in about 5 seconds flat, but that's how I see this race to have an armed public.

I've got a gun and it's bigger than yours. Why do you have to have a bigger gun to feel safer?

I have no guns and I feel safe. My father has a dozen or more and he feels safe too.

Of course I've seen it; Warner Bros. cartoons are my favorite of the old school -- funnier and smarter than everyone else's.

The "public arms race" is really just a boogieman and it's the kind of scare story the hoplophobic try and keep current. It's sufficient to alarm the ignorant, but that's about it. A truly scary arms race requires government-size funding of government-size weaponry. What's the man in the street packing, if it's more lethal than a cell phone? It ain't no MP5 submachine gun, I'll tell you that. All said and done, it's still just pistols, was pistols before us, and isn't likely to be anything but pistols in future times. Limited lethality, high convenience compared with the weight and size of an Uzi or MP5.

the government is the man in the street UG.

Yes. And so long as the electorate can turf the government's staffers out by any means effectual, that state remains a republic, and its government the servant of the people.

You know UG, sometimes I think that if brains were dynamite you wouldn't have enough to blow the wax out of your ears.

I mean that in the friendliest way possible of course. ;)

Doesn't seem to work in Iraq. Perhaps humanity is more complex than a simple logical single premise-single conclusion.

UT, how can you possibly come to that conclusion? Those people are now a LOT freer than ever they were under Saddam. While free isn't automatically either happy or peaceful, for they have some few troublemakers to get rid of, the situation is not at all without hope, except for the naysayers who've never been comfortable with America's role as a striker-off of a people's chains.

Look to the Kurds in the north: are they unfree now? And they are most certainly armed. Eventually, the idiots elsewhere in Iraq will have grown tired of cutting each other's throats and all of Iraq will settle down and behave a lot more like Iraqi Kurdistan.

Certain fundamentals are indeed simple. A full understanding of them requires that the implications and ramifications arising from those fundamentals be known as well. I think I manage such understanding pretty passably, thank you. I can't say the same of certain of my opposition.