So what?

The point is this: the person I was responding to claimed that the English Civil War demonstrated that the origin of power in the United Kingdom was just as rooted in rebellion as the origin of power in the United States is. And that's simply not true. Elizabeth II (who is not a figurehead monarch: she is the only person in the UK who can authorize war or declare peace, and that's one hell of a power; further, she can unilaterally block Parliamentary attempts to limit the Crown's interests or royal prerogatives -- a monarchial benefit that I find hard to believe still exists today in the UK) traces her right to rule back to William the Conqueror, not William Who Ended Oppression. Elizabeth II's authority derives from a long-ago act of conquest, not a long-ago act of rebellion.

With respect to "I think I disagree with you that it's a good thing," I never said I believed the US's national-origin story was a good thing. I only said that it was ours. I'm not saying the UK national-origin story is bad because it's rooted in conquest, nor am I saying the US national-origin story is good because it's rooted in rebellion. I'm only saying they're different and shouldn't be expected to be the same.

Although I agree that the UK is a model system for democracies everywhere, that's not the point. The original poster said that unlike much of Europe and Asia, America traces its origins back to the overthrow of absolute rule rather than someone's imposition of it. A respondent argued that modern-day Great Britain was obviously an exception to that, due to the English Civil War. I don't buy that. If you trace Elizabeth II's ancestry back, you reach William the Conqueror. The entire reason Elizabeth is monarch is because she happens to be the descendant of someone who imposed absolute rule. The basis for Elizabeth II's monarchy rests in William the Conqueror's invasion of England, whereas the basis for Barack Obama's presidency goes back to the overthrow of George III's rule.

Sorry there are plenty of examples either way, where this happens. Very recent one's, even ongoing one's. You are just cherry picking.

If I'm cherrypicking, then it ought to be easy for you to find five clear counterexamples for each of my examples. After all, I'm cherrypicking. I invite you to do this. If I'm in error I'd love to be corrected. The requirements are simple:

• It must be state-sponsored, or at the very least state-condoned, domestic oppression
• It must involve large amounts of lethal violence
• The enforcers of the state must be willing participants
• The oppressed must be in a disarmed state
• The oppressed must overcome the oppressors.

Nelson Mandela and the ANC doesn't count: he started his career in armed insurrection. Suu Kyi doesn't count: the Burmese military rank-and-file were passively refusing to enforce the junta's orders. (For instance, allowing visitors to come and go from her place of detention pretty much at-will, and turning a blind eye as she talked to the media.) Ceaucescu's Romania doesn't count: the enforcers were defecting to the protesters in record numbers. Honecker's East Germany doesn't count: when the Berlin Wall fell East German guards were among the most enthusiastic participants. Gandhi doesn't count: he was depending on English decency and sense of fair play to keep his followers alive. (Had Great Britain handled Gandhi the same way they handled 19th-century uprisings in India, Gandhi would have been strapped to a cannon and executed long before he made it halfway to the sea for his salt.) Yeltsin doesn't count: when the KGB ordered their elite counterterror forces to take back government, the counterterror forces refused.

When the people with the guns refuse to use guns, yes, unarmed protest movements can have stunning successes. I'm all in favor of them. But when the people with the guns are willing to use them to ensure their continued rule, unarmed protest movements turn into massacres.

If I'm cherrypicking, then show me five counterexamples for each of the large-scale massacres I showed. Just make sure they pass the requirements, because otherwise you're moving the goalposts.

Of course only an American would think that they are unique in overthrowing tyranny.

He never said we were unique. He only said that in comparison to Europe and Asia, our country was not founded by a conquering king. You hold up Great Britain as an example of a country that's thrown off tyranny, but I suspect you never quite passed your A-levels in history. Queen Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William I, after all, a guy better known to history as William the Conqueror. So, no, I'm not going to accept Great Britain as an example of a country that avoided being founded by a conquering king, given a conquering king is in the direct ancestry of your current monarch.

We also find some sections of the American populace self centered, selfish.

I'd be quite surprised if you didn't. In a nation of over 300 million people there are going to be large portions of it that you don't like. There are large portions I don't particularly like, either.

I honestly think your founding fathers is they could see what you have become as a nation would disown you.

Of course they would. "Wait, you gave the vote to women, people without property, and the darkies?!"

In the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., one of Jefferson's finest writings is engraved on the wall in huge letters for the world to see.

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

So, yes, we would definitely be disowned by the Founding Fathers. But that's okay. Thomas Jefferson himself gave us permission to improve upon the model they left us. The Framers were horribly flawed human beings. Their great triumph was not that they gave us a Constitution, but they gave us a process: not a law fixed and unchanging for all time, but a means by which we could gradually make our country a shining beacon upon the hill. Rather beautiful, really.

Ah, I see. You were actually meaning to imply they'd be ashamed of how we conduct ourselves because we don't happen to agree with you? Well. Speaking as a Virginian, which is to say a member of one of the original Colonies that rebelled against George III, let me give you the traditional Virginian response to foreigners who want to tell us how we should rule ourselves: go away.

Maybe our system is correct, maybe it's not. Either way, we're not going to pay your opinion about how we should live the slightest tinker's dam of attention. Instead we'll talk with each other, our communities, our neighbors, and we'll fumble our way forward into the future together.

This idea that an unarmed populace couldn't fight a tyrannical government is pretty weak to be honest.

I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the death-knells of the millions of oppressed North Koreans, over the conflagration of the Jews and the Romany and the homosexuals and the dissenters in German-occupied Poland, over the cries of hunger of the one million Ukrainians who died in the Holodomor, the terrorized shrieks of the Armenians who were pursued by the Turks. We can go back even to the Mongol era, where the great Khan put large parts of Asia and Europe to the sword and unleashed a campaign of rape and terror the world had never seen before.

If you really think that an unarmed populace can quickly organize to resist an armed oppressor, then you are living in a state of utter delusion. In the Katyn Forest a few thousand unarmed Polish soldiers were mercilessly executed by Stalin's troops. They were unarmed, but trained and organized and brave and courageous and they died like vermin.

My original remark about how you didn't pass your A-levels in history was sarcastic, I admit. But now I'm thinking that maybe I'm right. Your grasp of massacre and oppression seems extraordinarily weak. Read The Gulag Archipelago or A Day in the Life of Alexander Denisovitch. Why didn't those oppressed peoples rise up? Because Stalin's thugs were the ones with the guns.

Your example about the Spanish Civil War is also kind of ... have you ever heard of the POUM Militia, the Workers Party of Marxist Liberation? They're one of the factions you talk about in the Spanish Civil War. Your countryman George Orwell fought briefly with them and wrote movingly about their courage. They died, horribly, for many reasons -- a lack of firearms being one of them. Go read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

Time to evolve and change?

It's always time to evolve and change, but I don't trust your judgment in how we should evolve and change. Not even a little bit.

When talking with a prosecutor, you should never say absolutely nothing. If you remain silent in the face of an accusation, your silence can be entered into evidence against you under the rules governing adoptive admission. If someone asks you, "So why did you kill him?" and you remain silent, your silence can be considered by a court to be an admission that you killed the person in question.

Not every instance of silence is admissible as an adoptive admission -- but the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure are complicated and varied and unless you're a criminal defense lawyer you probably have no way of telling when silence is a good policy and when it will get you in trouble.

So, instead of being silent, you instead say, "If you give me your card, I'll have my lawyer get in touch with you to answer your questions." You take the card, you give it to your lawyer, and you follow his or her advice.

A good overview of the law regarding adoptive admissions and your potential risk when facing prosecutors: How To Avoid Going To Jail Under 18 USC 1001 For Lying To Investigators.

A good rule of thumb is that in a self-defense shooting scenario, 4 of 5 rounds fired will miss. (These numbers are born out by the historical record, BTW: they're not made up. Consider when the NYPD shot Amadou Diallo. Five officers, part of a highly-trained unit with advanced firearms training, opened fire on an unarmed and harmless Diallo from a range of under five meters. Despite the tactical environment being perfect -- the officers were at point blank range, they all had the time to make a proper firing stance, etc. -- of the 41 rounds fired, 22 rounds missed. That's over a 50% miss rate under perfect conditions by well-trained personnel.)

Another good rule of thumb is that you need to place a minimum of two rounds into your target to have good -- not necessarily great, but just good -- odds of stopping the threat.

Do the math and you quickly discover that to place two rounds on target, with each round having an 80% chance of missing, results in you needing 14 rounds in the magazine. That means that with a 15-round Beretta 92, a 17-round Glock 17, a 16-round FN FNP-9, a 13-round Browning High-Power, etc., you can be relatively confident of having enough ammunition in the magazine to stop one -- one -- attacker.

There's a reason why cops carry high-capacity magazines and at least two spares, and it's the same reason why civilians who use pistols for self-defense need high-cap magazines and at least two spares.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/windows.asp

Per Snopes, although it is true that Romney made that remark, it was clearly told as a joke meant to lighten the mood. It was not a serious comment.

Sorry: I'm not going to join an argument about that. I will only reiterate what I said: our rights exist independent of the technologies used to implement those rights. If we have the right to freely communicate with other human beings, then we also have the right to put up web pages: the technology exists to facilitate our right. Too many people in these debates focus on technologies rather than principles.

Yes: and in a very real sense, you've got the facts exactly right and the conclusions exactly wrong.

You have the right to keep and bear arms. That right exists independent of technological developments. If you had instead, say, the right to keep and bear a flintlock pistol, then the instant cap-and-ball revolvers were developed you'd be unable to use them. Flintlocks, cap-and-ball, semiautomatics, the whole nine yards, are technologies that implement one of your natural rights: but your right is to keep and bear arms, not to keep and bear only the technologies of a given time.

In a similar vein, you have no right to a secret ballot. Your right is to have a say in participatory democracy via the voting process. The secret ballot, like the absentee ballot and the public ballot, are all technologies that exist to implement your right. You really don't want a Constitutional guarantee of a secret ballot, because then you'd be unable to use absentee ballots, nor would you be able to use new technologies yet to be developed that are superior to the secret ballot. Requiring, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a secret ballot," is really not that far from, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a flintlock pistol." It confuses a technology meant to facilitate the exercise of a right with the right itself.

Read up on the secret ballot, please. Just because nominations are made secretly and in writing is insufficient for them to be considered secret ballots. I'd suggest starting with the Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot ), myself: it has an excellent overview.

You already can prove who you voted for: use an absentee ballot. If your boss is offering you $1000 to vote for his candidate, give your blank absentee ballot to your boss, let him fill it out how he wants and let him mail it in.

The entire State of Oregon has moved to absentee ballots. It's not possible to file a truly secret ballot in Oregon any more. The residents of Oregon like it just fine, and they haven't reported any significant hike in vote fraud.

It's quite possible -- likely, even! -- that yes, we have discovered better ways. That doesn't mean those better ways are Constitutionally required, though.

If you go to the Jefferson Memorial in DC, carved on one wall is a speech from Jefferson in which he declares that he knows the Constitution to be an imperfect document, and that he entrusts future generations with the task of correcting it by the process of amendment. If you believe the secret ballot is a fundamental right, then you need to acknowledge the absence of that as a flaw in the Constitution, and seek to correct that flaw by the process of amendment.

No -- the Supreme Court gets the last say.

You're right that the Supreme Court has the right to declare that the secret ballot is now a Constitutional requirement. There are many ways they could do this, the most obvious being to incorporate it under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of substantive due process. (SDP guarantees "those things inherent in the very concept of ordered liberty". If SCOTUS decides the secret ballot is inherent in the concept of ordered liberty, bang, there you go.)

However, given the absence of SCOTUS precedent stating that the secret ballot is a fundamental right, the judge is absolutely correct to say there is no fundamental right.

What the French considered to be a "secret ballot" would not be considered one by today's standards. See Wikipedia's page on the secret ballot for a good overview of what a secret ballot requires, and why.