the 2nd amendment clearly requires membership in a well regulated militia.
Um, No.
You're completely wrong.
Read the actual words in the amendment and parse the syntax correctly (any good geek on this site should be able to do this).
The correct interpretation goes something like this: "It is an unfortunate necessity that a state must have a well regulated militia to preserve itself, therefore, the people shall be afforded the right to have weapons with which to defend themselves from the state."
Remember, the people who wrote this very simple code had very recently fought against a state that had used its very well regulated militia against the people. Of course that does not preclude reasonable regulation of citizen ownership of weapons to keep them out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them (crazed wackos, criminals, children). Criminals, of course, can be expected to ignore any restrictions and regulations that law-abiding citizens would observe. (They are criminals, after all.) For my own part, I'm happy to have the option of using a completely legal shotgun to defend myself against an armed criminal invading my house, rather than only being allowed to dial emergency so that the police can show up twenty minutes later to look at my bullet-riddled corpse. For the state to have any chance of protecting an unarmed citizenry from violent criminals, they would have to station police everywhere and constantly monitor everything all the time. (How's that working out for you, England?) I'd rather not live in a police state thankyouverymuch.
I've been running Ubuntu on this laptop for over two years now, maintaining a dual-boot with Windows Vista the entire time. (Vista came preinstalled on this PC.) After the first few weeks of using Ubuntu, it became my preferred OS/desktop environment (No small credit due to the utter sucktacularness of Vista in comparison to... just about anything else, ever.) I've maintained this HD hogging partition for these two years for only one reason - failure to be able to use Photoshop or iTunes in U
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones