Your simply wrong.
Presser: (Obviously the last sentence is invalid with the 14th and incorporation)
We think it clear that the sections under consideration, which only forbid bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law, do not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms. But a conclusive answer to the contention that this amendment prohibits the legislation in question lies in the fact that the amendment is a limitation only upon the power of congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state.

Miller:
"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense.

Guns can be used for good or ill and yes have at times been used for oppression. They have often been used to defend against oppression as well. My own state fought a literal shooting war to free itself from the oppression of a corrupt state and it's corporate owners. Gun control in this country however has been historically rooted in racism. Most early gun laws only gained traction because of a fear of "Them" having guns, who ever them may be at the time.

To address two of your posts. First the supreme court has recognized the 2nd as an individual right since at least 1857. It was always an assumption but that assumption is documented in the majority opinion of the Dred Scott case in which the court reasoned that Mr. Scott did not enjoy this constitutional protection to own and carry a weapon because of his race. In 1886 presser vs. Illinois the court explicitly ruled that the 2nd was an individual right and in the 1939 miller case the court only limited this in saying that protected weapons should be of military value. The 2008 Heller case affirmed this historical interpretation and farther left out the limitations from the Miller case, likely because it makes no since to protect M-16's but limit hunting riffles.

As to your earlier point, you are correct the constitution is not sacred. The institution of the constitution must however be held sacrosanct. If we want to limit gun ownership we must update or repeal the 2nd. Pretending away it's protections only servers to weaken the rest of the amendments. Just look at how willing sitting US senators where to eviscerate the 5th amendment with the no fly no buy idea. Do you really doubt that without strong constitutional protection the Republicans would hesitate to outlaw abortions again or to try and restrict the practice of Islam?

If that's the world you want then please keep working toward it as you have been. Otherwise educate yourself and act from a position of rational thought instead of emotional outrage.

You can't walk into a store (or a gun show even though that's a popular misconception) in the US and buy a gun without a background check. All gun dealers in the US are required to perform a NICS background check before the sale. There is only one exception to this rule and that is in some states a private individual selling his gun to another private individual is not required to perform any sort of background check. He is still responsible for only selling to someone who can legally own a gun. In fact no federal mechanism for them to do so currently even exists.

As to the car analogy, that's pretty much how it is. In the US you can own a car without any testing, licensing, or registration. You can drive that car on your own property and in fact many farms do just that with trucks that are "Farm Use Only". What you can't do is drive a vehicle on public roads without the testing, licensing, and registration. Depending on the state/city there may be additional tax issues at play. The gun control equivalent would be carry permits not ownership. Gun laws are currently very similar to the aforementioned car laws in that you can own a gun, keep it in your house, and shoot it on your property (assuming you have enough property) without any sort of permit (in most states). You may need to have a license (constitutional carry states not withstanding) to carry it in public.

In the end the biggest issue is that we are running into the limits of what the constitution will allow. If we want to enact actual gun restrictions the 2nd amendment must either be repealed or updated. Many experts believe the 1994 gun ban would have been overturned by the supreme court had it been left in place long enough. Fear of that precedent is one of the forces that kept it from being renewed. The lowest hanging fruit still available to us is to enable and require background checks for private sales and perhaps to improve reporting from states and the military to NICS. That would require some sort of publicly accessible background check portal for NICS or a requirement that FLL licensed dealers support checks on private sales for a minimum fee.

Mental health checks will be a no go because of a fear that they would be abused to limit ownership for political reasons rather than actual mental health concerns. This sort of abuse has been documented by some police with broad control over carry permits. They refuse to sign off on anyone because they are politically against private gun ownership. Likewise registration will never happen because of a prevailing fear of the sort of abuses California and New York perpetuated after their registration efforts. First they registered, then they banned. I don't think I'm overstating the issue when I say registration at a federal level would likely cause a civil war. Just look at the mass non compliance in Vermont for an example of peoples reactions to it since CA and NY.

Beyond closing holes the background check system there simply isn't much left that can be done without constitutional changes.

My dad used to manage a homeless shelter. He dealt with a lot of people who had mental illness. They would get on a regimen, start feeling normal, get back to some semblance of a normal life, and then decide they didn't need the medicine any more. It happened over and over to the same people. Get better, Convince yourself your healed, Fall back in the hole. It's a symptom of their illness and It's these type of folks that this would likely be most useful for.

I don't want to be overly critical because honestly I'm not certain what your trying to argue but I'm not sure why you think there is a difference. I'm not exactly ringing the dooms bell but even I can see the faulty logic in this statement. If you take a window of time and have warmer lows during that window the average temperature for that window will be warmer than previous years. If over the course time this trend continues you will be demonstrating that additional energy (in the form of heat) has in fact been added to the system. This doesn't really change anything. In fact it's what you would expect. Higher average temperatures.

I'm born and raised in WV. The people of Appalachia had their culture and economy destroyed long before Johnson entered into the picture. In fact it was the startling poverty and deep despair of the region that led to the social projects in Appalachia. Especially during the new deal era but also with Johnson. From the moment the first logging companies bought nearly every available scrap of land and latter sold the land back to the citizens without the mineral rights our area was finished. The money from logging, coal, and natural gas have been drained out of the area and into the hands of large corporations in wealthy north eastern states while the people lived like indentured servants right into the mid 1900's. The wealth from resource booms other areas would have used to modernize infrastructure and educate the population was stolen from Appalachia. The social programs of the 30's, 40's, 60's, and latter had little culture left to damage.

The irony being this is the exact attitude I'm talking about. You live in an area where the money made on the backs of these states has allowed your state to move forward. Now you are free judge the very people those states are responsible for holding back for continuing the only opportunity available to them. Enjoy your superiority.

I actually think the economic and moral divides that drove the last election are surprisingly comparable to the societal changes which led to the civil war. America had prospered greatly on the backs of slave labor and the largest percentage of those profits where amassed in the north. The industrial revolution allowed northern states to use that wealth to divest themselves of the morally repugnant tradition of slavery. This freed people from needing slavery to maintain their way of life leading to the abolitionist movements and eventually to the civil war. Outlawing slavery in the north was low hanging fruit with little cost to society at large.

The southern states which had a far smaller share of those profits couldn't invest in that same Industrial infrastructure and so couldn't move past slavery without sacrificing their quality of life and destroying the southern economy.

In much the same way profits from coal, oil, and gas have been concentrated mainly in the north eastern cities while the Appalachian states with those resources have no real profit to show from a century of extraction (both of the resources and the profits). They have been unable to leverage the extreme profits from those resources to modernizes and have been left in a place where loosing coal jobs will likely destroy what economy they have left.

This creates a divide where wealthy areas are able to see how damaging coal can be and move beyond it with little cost to themselves and are trying to push coal states in the same direction without any thought to the human cost in those states.

If we learn any lessons from the civil war and the last election it's that we must as a country provide the resources those states need to move past their (literal) dependence on coal or we will face farther division and possibly in the end civil war.

I started to write a longer explanation but the stupid started making my head hurt. The more concise answer is that at one point environmental movements where heavily tied to progressive politics in the US. One such environmental movement of the 80's and 90's opposed all nuclear development. The term NIMBY in the US rose in popularity at that same time to label home owners who also opposed nuclear plants in their towns, though for different reasons. Through some long strange contortions US progressives are routinely mislabeled as liberals in this country. There for NIMBY's are liberals.

Now where did I put my aspirin?

truecrypt, tinfoil hats may be needed.

A couple of foot notes. Miller would likely not have won his appeal either way because he was dead and his lawyer didn't bother to show up. Had he presented an actual defense to the supreme court it would have been trivial to point out that sawed off shotguns are in fact a militarily useful weapon in both trench warfare and close quarters urban combat (Though I'm not sure how that last bit would have been phrased in the vernacular of the time).

The Miller decision as it stands is the result of the court not being presented with a defense and not being familiar enough with military tactics to interpret the usefulness of the weapon on their own.

I get really irritated with 2 dimensional party line thinking and the political compass is a good tool for helping folks understand why. Your falling back in to that old 2 party way of looking at things though. Anarchist are the extreme left wing opposite of authoritarians (the extreme right). Traditionally Libertarians fall some where center left. The reason people often confuse them with right wingers is they are tend to not be progressive. Progressive/Conservative politics fall on a separate spectrum from Right/Left politics. I'm not certain how the UK parties fall but in the US the Democrats are a largely right leaning socially and economically progressive party. The Republicans are a largely right leaning morally progressive and economically conservative (although this is a split in the party) party with strong corporatist tendencies. And yes they are morally progressive regardless of how we view their definition of progress. US Libertarians tend to be left leaning, economic and socially conservatives.

You can think of it like this. An extreme Democrat will want a law mandating that all institutions must provide marriage services to same sex couples. An extreme Republican will want a law forbidding the same. Both right wing solutions intended to use the force of law to farther their respective agendas. An extreme Libertarian will want all laws allowing the government to exercise power over marriage revoked. A left wing solution intended to provide everyone freedom of choice and individual liberty. Obviously reality lies somewhere between the extremes.

That reasoning may resonate as a political talking point but it's factually flawed in a number of important ways. The US was a massive exporter during it's heyday of C02 emissions. To accurately calculate a countries individual historical impact you would need to account for all of the goods and advances they imported from the US. This line of reasoning seeks to force western nations to absolve their advantages through the use of guilt.

Beyond that western nations obviously didn't have modern alternatives available to them when they where industrializing. That's not the case today. We have both the science to explain the issue and technologies to help alleviate it. Knowingly ignoring the issue to leverage economic advantage on the world stage is not morally equivalent to the western worlds build up over the last couple of hundred years.

We should work on the issue from the realistic stand point of where we are. Anything else isn't attempting to solve climate change it's attempting to speed up redistribution of western wealth and power to developing nations. Fairness doesn't enter into it because the conditions are not equal.

P.S. None of that's to say I think the US should have pulled out of the agreement, if only because it cost us little beyond our current trajectory and provided motivation to other countries.

We'll have to agree to disagree then. I can't define exclusive franchise agreements as anything other than a government sponsored monopoly that needs to end.

My last comment was perhaps a bit of an ad hominem but I usually only see the semantic argument that exclusivity agreements aren't a government granted monopoly coming from people who have a vested interest in maintaining said monopoly.

Franchise requirements are part of the price cable companies agreed to in order to access public right of ways. They did so happily at a time when it saved them a great deal of money and allowed them to expand their subscriber base. I'll gladly forgo those franchise requirements and start charging them rent for the pole in my yard.

It's fully past time that they had to face competition. The form of that competition is irrelevant. I happen to live in an area where companies are unwilling to make the infrastructure upgrades needed to bring us anything approaching modern internet service (Let alone reliable television). The one company trying to do so (who happens to be in another city all together) is stuck in regulatory hell at both the state and city level. The only way I'm ever getting decent internet that doesn't cost more than some folks car payment is if my city creates their own service.

Perhaps you live in some utopian city (though I suspect your just defending your employer) where a dozen companies vie for your money but a lot of us don't. A lot of us live in areas where you have no choice but to do things yourself because no one else is ever going to.