Originally Posted By: King Brown
Not legislated as the will of the people as the Patriot Act in the US. My question is not of comparisons. It was 911 provoked for sure but why did the US of all places permit such an unprecedented (some say unwarranted) intrusion and now make a national debate of background checks, magazines and registration, citing a slippery slope to slavery?


As with the current hysterical rush toward diminishing the Second Amendment, the Patriot Act was quickly proposed and passed with minimal debate and maximal emotion. Even still, there was and remains a great deal of controversy and disagreement over it. But to answer why there is less protest about the Patriot Act, you only have to look at the numbers of affected persons. The Patriot Act certainly has the potential to infringe upon various Constitutional Rights, but most Americans who don't wear turbans or worship in mosques don't see any clear and present danger to their own personal freedoms or any real intrusion into their lives. So far. For most of us, the biggest deal is the fact that we have to arrive at airports earlier and undergo a more thorough security check before boarding a plane. We shrug and say that if the FBI wishes to waste time looking into our library book choices, we have nothing to hide or nothing to fear. We understand that there are countries where there is way less personal freedom in the name of perceived security. Still, a lot of us are concerned that, in the name of political correctness, the rights of the many had to be infringed to contain the bad actions of a very few. I was very pissed when I watched my elderly parents and my 8 year old daughter go through a very rigorous search at an airport shortly after 9-11, while an obviously Arabic family in robes and turbans with enough luggage to outfit a caravan whizzed right through boarding.

To me, if the government feels it absolutely feels it needs to infringe upon someones rights, they probably should narrow it down to the group that is actually causing the problem. Similarly, most of the violent crime and murder that goes on in our cities is perpetrated by a certain ethnic group of a certain sex and a certain age range. Yet Obama and crew are centering their crosshairs on law abiding citizens who are not, and never have been the problem. If you gave most of us here a choice between Obama's Gun/Magazine Ban/Universal Registration scheme, and rounding up all gangbangers and summarily deporting them, I think you know which we'd choose. And I think you know which choice would have the most positive effect on reducing gun violence. There is more protest about the current proposals simply because we know it will have a more direct effect on more of us, and we've spent decades actually seeing the toll gun control has taken on gunowners around the world without tangible net benefits.

But certainly, you already knew that.

A true sign of mental illness is any gun owner who would vote for an Anti-Gunner like Joe Biden.