From: Jasper
Date: 10/14/03
Time: 6:52:20 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.207.154
Charlie,
I think Margaret Carlson was wrong. ANY U.S. President would have done exactly what Bush did in the wake of 911 or he would have been impeached and his party might have been weakened to the point of political irrelevancy for generations. Gore was a politician first, a Democrat second and a dove third. Even Carter sent a military rescue team into Iran and Clinton FINALLY (and cowardly) sent American war plains (instead of American ground troops) into Bosnia to bomb the bad guys into submission.
When Truman ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he did it not only to end the war quickly with as few casualties as possible, he did it to send a message to Joseph Stalin. The message was: “We’ve got the big one AND we will use it against you if we have to.” You always have to make sure that THE NEXT GUY gets the message.
Military credibility is essential to staying out of wars. If your potential enemies don’t believe you will use decisive military power against them they will attack and keep on attacking until they win. At least they think they can win if they inflict enough American casualties. In the Western press, our military casualties and the casualties we inflict on civilians are the only ones that count.
The Chinese would have been foolish to attack us on our own soil for the same reason in would have been foolish to attack them on theirs. A ground attack on us would also have been an attack on Canada and the continent is too damn big. Moreover, our military has always been far superior to theirs despite their great3er numbers. They couldn’t concentrate their forces anywhere. We would simply kill a hell of a lot more of them.
The gun issue is where we might never agree because of our personal histories in arriving at out positions. If what we say to each other about “war and peace” issues is like preaching to the choir, what we say to each other about personal gun ownership is probably like bashing our heads against opposite sides of the same brick wall.
Nothing in the Constitution permits individual ownerships of handguns. Semi-automatic weapons didn’t even exist when the Bill of Rights was adopted. The Second Amendment speaks only of the right to keep and to bear arms in the context of “a well-regulated militia.” The historical context for that provision is the British refusal to arm American militias (militiamen had to have their own) and the individual colonies’ fear of attack by other colonies. The member states of the Confederacy considered themselves free and independent states (counties) and the invasion of the North a violation of their territorial sovereignty. The second Amendment gave them their Constitutional right to rebel.
I won’t trot out a bunch of statistics to support my position on guns. It is not an intellectual issue. It’s an emotional one. In the ’80 my house was burglarized many times by junkies looking for valuables to sell. The most prized item was a gun. My brother’s house was burglarized specifically because he was a cop and the burglars knew he had guns in his house. Then there were the murders. I knew seven people personally who were shot to death. My sons knew more than that. How many did you know? -- Jasper