> What were Delaware and Nevada thinking when they further specified, "A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and State, and for hunting and recreational use." RECREATIONAL USE??? Taking your older kids out for a friendly session at the local shooting gallery, and mowing down targets with a lethal weapon whilst possibly damaging their eardrums and poisoning their lungs with metal combustion gases, is supposed to be FUN?

So? This is an argument of taste. You don't find such recreation appealing, and you certainly have the prerogative not to, but what's that got to do with the basis for a law restricting their use? Actions should be legal by default and made illegal only by a law that is instituted with a SOLID rationale. By default, guns should be legal for ANY use, and Delaware's and Nevada's specification on how guns are used serve to elucidate the preservation of the right for these uses of firearms, NOT to explicitly ALLOW them. Finding the recreational use of firearms distasteful shouldn't and doesn't have any bearing on their legality. Furthermore, although the only gun I own is an antique .22 rifle currently stored at my parent's house and hasn't been fired for ten years or more, I do find shooting at tin cans and targets and stuff fun and would resent it if I weren't able to do that. What difference does it make to anyone but me if I go deaf and inhale gunpowder fumes, never mind that I can't imagine either being so severe as to affect one's health in a significant manner -- driving to work in a car every day is bound to be much more harmful.

At any rate, it is for the reason that freedom is the default that I call gun control laws unconstitutional and, in fact, immoral.

> Personally, I would like someone to please explain gabby's interesting claim that "Gun control, historically, leads to the slaughter of a group of people who are unable to defend themselves. Look it up."

Almost every government in the history of the world that has ever gone bad has started by gradually restricting private citizen's right to bear arms. What if the Jews in Germany had firearms? I think the Nazis would have thought twice about mowing them down in the ghettos and in concentration camps. If there was a war against Jews at all, at the very least it wouldn't have been worse in terms of numbers of deaths than it was anyway, and the unjustly persecuted would have had a fighting chance. This is an extreme example -- the most notorious, probably -- but there are countless examples across the globe. Gun control laws sacrifice a little security for a little safety, and as Benjamin Franklin correctly stated, those who would do that deserve neither.

Frankly, I think the basis upon which gun control laws are instantiated are disgustingly immoral. Just as it is wrong to ban alcohol because it can lead to drunk driving, wrong to ban unsavory books in libraries because of the fear that they'll brainwash people into having unsavory ideas, it is wrong to ban firearms because they can be misused to kill someone. We've had this discussion here before, though, so I refer followers of this discussion back and will not say anything further in this one.