At the time, it was assumed that all males of military age would show up to repel an invasion. Those males were the militia, and the founders thought it wise that they be competent in the use of their weapons.

So they made clear that the rights to keep arms and to practice with them (bear arms) were explicitly defended. And they used the strongest possible language. Not "Congress shall make no law", but "Shall not be infringed".

"Shall not be infringed" is not qualified in any way. The second amendment is not a grant of rights to the people. It is a command to all three branches of government to defend a pre-existing right of all free citizens against any and all that might try to infringe upon it.

English tradition was that the Lords had a right, and a duty, to be armed. In America, every citizen is a Lord. The right to be armed is in the constitution. The duty was in the Militia act from 1792 until 1903.

See Assize of Arms and English Bill of Rights (1689) for English context. And Militia Act for the US.

There are a number of incorrect claims wandering around. Rather than answer each post, I'll summarize.

Like most machines, a gun is a collection of parts. For various reasons, one of those parts must (legally) be the gun itself, and the rest are just parts attached to the gun. For guns similar to (or clones of) the AR-15/M-16, the gun is the lower receiver.

The other parts are not restricted at all. Anyone can buy barrels, springs, sears, stocks, triggers, hammers, whatever they want, off the street, over the internet, or mail order. No ID, no registration.

If a dealer is selling a receiver, either alone, or as part of a completed firearm, they have to do the background check, fill out the paperwork, etc. A non-dealer doesn't need to do any of that, but the ATF will consider you to be a dealer if you act like a dealer.

The receiver is a complicated part. It takes a lot of work to turn a piece of metal into a receiver. At some point during that work, it changes from "piece of metal with some cuts" into a receiver.

Pieces of metal that have had some work done, but not enough to become receivers, are sold as "80% receivers". These are subject to no more regulation than any other random block of metal, because it is the end user that actually manufactures the gun.

Building your own gun is perfectly legal, by the way, as long as you are doing it for yourself. If you intend to sell it, or give it away, you need to get licensed and pay for a tax stamp. If you decide later to sell it, or give it away, that is perfectly legal too, but you need to make sure that you don't do anything that would make a reasonable person think that you had intended to pass it on when you made it.

The Ghost Gunner ONLY works on these 80% Receivers. They are not capable of milling a receiver out of raw billet. Nor could they work with a raw casting or forging.

Desktop milling machines don't have the power to spin up a heavy chuck, nor, generally, could they manage enough axis velocity to keep the feed rate up when using a large diameter tool. That means 1/8" or 1/4" chucks and tools. That limits the milling depth two an inch or two. That's plenty for milling out the trigger pocket, but nowhere near enough for the magazine well.

And if anyone is interested in the topic, there is a forum thread somewhere showing a guy making an AK receiver out of a shovel. The same technique has been used around the world. The Afghans made their AKs in caves, with hand tools.

The constitution charges the government with protecting the people's rights to keep and bear arms after noting that a free people need to be well practiced with their guns.

The Supreme Court has been upholding the plain language reading all up and down the country lately, much to the annoyance of those that wish it said something else.

It can be given away, and it can be sold. You just can't intend to do that when you make it.

Or, more accurately, you can't do things that would make a reasonable person think that you intended to give it away or sell it when you made it.

Do you want to come here and tell that to the president of the small local ISP that has been deploying its own fiber network in my area? I'm sure he'd get a good laugh out of it.

Before they showed up, the old cable company sucked, and charged an arm and a leg for coax service. One of the towns here got fed up and stopped providing an exclusive monopoly to the incumbent. A new company was formed and installed their new fiber network right alongside the old cable plant. After losing customers for a few years, the old company dropped their prices and upgraded their plant to match. Now, all of the towns in the area are dropping their monopolies, and everyone has the choice of at least 2 cable companies, both running fiber networks and providing great service at reasonable prices.

I live several miles outside of a small town (~3000 pop), and I've got three fiber networks in my front yard, all fast and reasonably priced.

So please tell us more. I'd LOVE to hear more about how no one can possibly deploy a competing cable network without more regulation.

Ahh, but delays actually make a huge difference.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...

It sounds like the European anti-nuke nutjobs have been paying attention to how the American crazies killed off the American nuclear industry.

They didn't back down, they lost the vote, 3-2.

Enjoy your $60,000,000,000 in new taxes.

No snowflake believes that it is responsible for the avalanche.

Vaccines have a non-zero risk. Not vaccinating one child has very little risk to that one child. The risk of not vaccinating is mostly in the aggregate, rather than the individual. I suspect that some fraction of the people not getting vaccines for their children are hoping to be free riders, trading one tiny risk for another.

I don't know how common it is, my point is just that not wanting your kids vaccinated isn't necessarily the same as thinking the earth is flat. On a related note, not wanting to meddle in other people's decisions about their children makes you "not-a-statist", not anti-vaccine or anti-science.

In the end, I think the real problem is that we have unions running our schools for the benefit of the union members, rather than for the children. Plus, math hasn't been cool for decades, not since the end of Apollo. If kids don't want to learn math, and if the schools aren't pushing it hard, you end up with an innumerate population.

If you can't do math, then Nullius in verba is just a bumper sticker, not a reminder. Certainly not an order.

Next, we have all manner of quackery on parade. Psychiatrists and psychologists with opposing, but equally untestable, views in criminal trials. Fat, cholesterol, salt and other nonsense warnings from the USDA while they create a diabetes epidemic. Economists pushing more debt to cure our strangulating debt problems.

Those that practice scientistry do not have a good track record when they try to pass off their non-scientific ideas as scientific ones, and the people have noticed. They may not be able to do science, but they can tell when the other guy can't either, or just hasn't.

Which isn't a dig against their work ethic. We know that the climate model circle jerk crew runs nonstop, validating their models against other models instead of against nature. And the Ministry of Truth is tirelessly adjusting the historic data to fit today's fashions. And I hear that Mann is again defending his secret program that turns arbitrary data into hockeysticks.

(For those that are wondering, Briggs has a climate model that you can run on a pocket calculator, and it has more predictive skill than any of the autoregressive abominations being passed off as "science" these days. And the plots of corrections to the temperature record, made by people with the good sense to download and keep old copies for comparison to new editions, are hilarious.)

If you want to see people that can't listen to reason and accept evidence, head over to realclimate and ask why the past keeps getting colder every year. Or why people that have received billions (with a B) in government money are trying to refute a paper by flinging poo over one of the authors getting around a million in private funding.

By context, would you perhaps be talking about all of the quotes and video clips of the bill's authors, consultants and supporters in congress saying the exact opposite?

I'm tired of all this bad news about Obamacare. Could we maybe just all agree not to talk about it any more until there is some good news to report?

Mexico is now keeping track of vaccinations for every illegal that crosses the border into the US? The ones from Honduras? The ones from Yemen?

My hat is off to you sir. You managed to troll me. For a while there, I was seriously thinking that you were honestly failing to understand the difference that I have now clearly described three times.

You still don't get the distinction, do you? You are still turning adjacency into participation, and confirming that he was adjacent into confirming that he was participating.

Do you have anything that contradicts the version of the story where he gave a speech to a group that was unaffiliated with (but also had some overlap with) the EURO convention? I'm looking for a quote, or something written by him or his staff that unambiguously states it, not just an article where the author (like you) misrepresents his statement.

I once "appeared" at a comic book convention. I gave an informal talk in a hospitality room in the same facility, the same day. I was actually there for the bitcoin conference next door (the non-floor spaces were shared between the two portions of the facility), but by your logic, I just "copped" to being part of the comic book industry.

My first thought is that this is based on information.

** Crackpot speculation alert **

c seems to be a limitation on the speed of information more than anything else. When a random photon comes in, the information arrives at the same time as the photon. If the photon has been selected in some way that allows you to make predictions, the information would arrive slightly early. To prevent this, the photons need to slow down so that the early information doesn't arrive before it should.

I don't think it does.

The Lorentz equations use the constant c, which happens to be the same as the maximum speed of light in a vacuum. Tricking some light into going slower doesn't change the constant, and it isn't a big deal to go faster than some particular light (see Cherenkov Radiation), but it would be a big deal to go faster than c.