Senate report concludes: no proof of contact between

[Lissa]

Hi,
Just what do you mean by "military grade hardware"? I believe that owning fully automatic weapons by private citizens has been under some strict restrictions for quite some time, going back to the the Tommy Gun days. And, frankly, neither rate of fire, nor caliber, nor energy matters a whole lot in the lethality of a firearm compared to the skill of the person using it, so the whole "military grade hardware" is, in my opinion, a big fat red herring.

To take it one step further, using "military grade hardware" as a synonym for military issue small arms is ludicrous. "Military grade hardware" can and does include everything up to aircraft carriers, ICBMs and nuclear weapons. The Second Amendment does not specify small arms, it just refers to 'arms'. At the turn of the 19th century, everybody could, and many did, own small arms that were better than the state of the art military arms (the military used Brown Bess, a hundred year old design). But few people then owned their own cannon or mortars. Once again, we see the failure of the drafters of the Bill of Rights to make their full intentions clear. If the purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable the people to overthrow a government that has become oppressive, and if that government has a strong control of the military (which would appear to be the only way such a government could take and maintain power), then the difference between a pea shooter and an Uzi is insignificant when either is compared to a battle tank.

". . . why does John Q. Citizen need military grade hardware?", is the wrong question. The right question is whether the Second Amendment entitles him to have it. And that can, and has, been argued from both sides, and has been compromised so that the average citizen cannot have such weapons and collectors, after jumping through many hoops and under a number of restrictions, can. If the population wants to change that, then let them use the mechanism built into the Constitution for that very purpose. And, depending on what they want to change it to, they might have anything from my complete support to my complete opposition.

--Pete

To answer your question Pete, it's weapons that are known to be issue by the military that are allowed either burst fire or fully automatic fire. The weapons I stated, the AR-15 and the Uzi, are capable of fully automatic fire if someone tampers with them and has the knowledge of what it takes to make them fire automatically. (The AR-15 is the police version of the M-16, it has various controls built into it to make it fire single shot, but those controls can be removed by someone with the right tools and the information on which parts to remove.)

As I have stated several times now, I have no problem with John Q. Citizen using handguns or hunting rifles, these two items are plenty lethal enough to defend one's self, it is weapons like the AR-15 that I take issue with.