My Gunt Rant in Response to a Former FB 'Friend'

[derby378]

23. Viruses are not "arms"

There have been a lot of people on DU trying to frame the discussion on military weapons as one of "want" or "need" or even "obsession," and most of them cringe at calling it a "right." That, however, is the angle from which I enter the debate. Either we have the right to keep and bear arms, or we don't.

I'm one of those people who has a semi-automatic rifle with 30-round magazines. I will not go into detail as to the means of storage, but I assure you that it's very safe. It is an excellent self-defense weapon considering my personal activities and needs - granted, there are many case where I do not need access to it, but when I do, it's available.

True, the Constitution was written before the discovery of microbes and the invention of the Kalashnikov, but many of the Founding Fathers (including Ben Franklin) were also men of science or at least aspired to be. Without trying to get all originalist (which poses its own set of problems), I think they would be more leery of a collection of Petri dishes labelled "Ebola" and "H1N1" than they would of a rifle that is, unlike those viruses, an inanimate object that just sits there until utilized.