The problem is that when your spout stuff which isn't based in fact, someone can verify the information pretty easily on the internet as
this article points out:
There are roughly 30,000 deaths a year in the U.S. due to gunshots. As this week's news makes clear, incidents of children killing themselves or other children are appallingly common. They are also the types of stories -- compact, outrageous, horrifying -- that are readily transmitted through Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media. As such stories spread, they make it increasingly obvious to increasing numbers of people that American gun laws are uniquely insane.
The NRA has been remarkably successful in suppressing government research on gun violence and hindering dissemination of data on guns. Legislators in Washington and state capitals have been ghoulishly accommodating. The Internet, it seems, won't be so easily bought.
So when you try to lie about the meaning of the Second Amendment, say by using the quote:
The great object is, that every man be armed.
Realise not only can people get the quote in its entirety since Patrick Henry’s “That every man be armed” speech found at The Debates
in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal
Constitution (3 Elliot’s Debates 384-7), Virginia, Saturday, June 14,
1788. Page 386-7 (see also
5 June)
. . .
As my worthy friend said, there is a positive partition of power between the two governments. To Congress is given the power of “arming,
organizing, and disciplining the militia, and governing such part of
them as may be employed in the service of the United States.” To
the state legislatures is given the power of “appointing the officers,
and training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by
Congress.” I observed before, that, if the power be concurrent as to
arming them, it is concurrent in other respects…May we not discipline
and arm them, as well as Congress, if the power be concurrent? so that
our militia shall have two sets of arms, double sets of regimentals,
&c.; and thus, at a very great cost, we shall be doubly armed. The
great object is, that every man be armed. But can the people afford to
pay for double sets of arms &c.? Every one who is able may have a
gun. But we have learned, by experience, that necessary as it is to have
arms, and though our Assembly has, by a succession of laws for many
years, endeavoured to have the militia completely armed, it is still far
from being the case. When this power is given up to Congress without
limitation or bounds, how will your militia be armed? You trust to
chance; for sure I am that nation which shall trust its liberties in
other hands cannot long exist. If gentlemen are serious when they
suppose a concurrent power, where can be the impolicy to amend it? Or,
in other words, to say that Congress shall not arm or discipline them,
till the states shall have refused or neglected to do it? This is my
object. I only wish to bring it to what they themselves say is implied.
Implication is to be the foundation of our civil liberties, and when you
speak of arming the militia by a concurrence of power, you use
implication. But implication will not save you, when a strong army of
veterans comes upon you. You would be laughed at by the whole world for
trusting your safety implicitly to implication.
We can add in this gloss from an expert on Patrick Henry:
In this connection, however, I need to say something
about a recent popular misconception concerning Patrick Henry’s legacy
and the genesis of the Second Amendment, which states, “A well-regulated
militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of
the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Despite
efforts of a number of misguided scholars to construe this language as
justifying individual, unregulated gun ownership, I am firmly convinced
that the Second Amendment is concerned with the state’s power to control
its own militia as a civilian alternative to a professional standing
army. In raising the issue in the Virginia Convention Patrick Henry
several times pointed to Art. I, Section 8, Clause 16, as an example of
the potentially threatening effect of dual state and congressional
jurisdiction over the militia and the possibly dangerous union of the
purse and sword vested in Congress. Yet wielding the scholar’s power of
the ellipse several partisans of gun ownership have edited Henry’s
remarks about how best to regulate the militia into an inflammatory
half-truth “The great object is that every man be armed….Every one who
is able may have a gun.” The NRA has blown this up into a poster-sized
blurb embossed with Patrick Henry’s image.
This is not, I repeat NOT, part of Patrick Henry’s legacy. Clearly
speaking of the problem of militia organization, what he actually said
is, “The great object is that every man [of the militia] be armed.–But
can the people to afford to pay for double sets of arms &c.? Every
one who is able may have a gun. But have we not learned by experience,
that necessary as it is to have arms, and though our assembly has, by a
succession of laws for many years, endeavored to have the militia
completely armed, it is still far from being the case. When this power
is given up to Congress without limitation or bounds, how will your
militia be armed? You trust to chance….”
Not to belabor the argument, but cinch it, I would also remind you
that the liberty or death speech itself was in support of a resolution
to put the colony in a mode of defense, and the plan proposed by Henry’s
committee as a result of its passage included a militia law that
described in great detail not only the number of men, but the amount of
ammunition to be raised by a collective levy, and a very clear procedure
for maintaining county and provincial control over the militia system.
If Henry’s remarks were intended to cast doubt upon the adequacy of a
hypothetical Congressional militia law, they only affirmed his
commitment to the traditional method of state control over a militia
that, far from being a privatized collection of gun-toting individuals,
was a community temporarily called to arms and always subservient to
public authority and law.
from Henry Mayer, A Patrick Henry Essay (No. 5-98), THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF PATRICK HENRY.
And funny how it seems to back up the things I have been saying.
As I like to say, your arguments don't stand scrutiny--and the internet is extremely unfriendly to them.
