Joining an opposing army automatically removes your citizenship. Any American who joins Al-Qaeda automatically ceases to be a US citizen. That's been standard practice since the US was created.

Technically, they're owned by the federal government, with certain public use requirements attached to it. But yes, they are an example of practical commons.

In his defense, there are plenty of instances across the world where while land was practically owned - i .e., it was obviously used by someone, and their use made anyone else's use of it difficult if not impossible - there was no legal documentation of ownership. Mexico explicitly ran into this issue in the mid 19th century, Germany had plenty of this in the middle ages, and Russia was the poster child of "you only own what you can defend". In short, the middle ages had plenty of declarations of ownership, but the only time those declarations actually mattered is when someone could defend their claim via arms.

Now, as for actual "commons" - that again was more a result of commonly agreed-upon practices than any legal documentation that a tract of land was explicitly not owned by anyone. The only place that I can think of where that is actually the case is Antarctica - and I expect that to stop as soon as anyone finds oil and gas there, or the place becomes inhabitable.

Wait wait wait - it's leftist BS to argue that drone killings are unconstitutional? You might want to inform Fox News and the entire set of commentators on there that they're now just one hair short of growing a Lenin mustache and singing The International.

I think it's worse than that... they actually think that these killings are the proper way to deal with terrorists.Quite frankly, at this point, the American public deserves the authoritarian government, because they're actually clamoring for it. The Fox News crowd is just disappointed that the wrong guy is being authoritarian, and the anti-war crowd is so tiny to be pretty much irrelevant.

Beat me to it. But yes, the rage over drone killings is nothing but rage against the wrong person wielding the power granted by Congress in the aftermath of 9/11.

This type of logic was a guaranteed end-game once we declared War on Terror. After all, in a war, no one asks courts whether the military can take out some high-level commanders, who the troops can shoot, or even what to do with anyone taken from a battle field. Seriously, this should not be a surprise.

The only thing that can change this if we ramp down our rhetoric, and turn the War on Terror into a basic police action against criminals. Then we can go to courts to ask for oversight, request due process for any type of action against any target, and complain that drones really are creepy tools to use.

So you have a choice: start writing to your congress critters and complain about the War on Terror. Tell your friends what the logical consequence of this kind of war is. Lobby right and left to have terrorism be treated as a criminal event, and to have the FBI go after it - not the CIA. Or, you can put up with things like drone-killings done without over sight. Your choice. Will you actually do something about this issue, or will you just complain on the Internet that the War on Terror isn't quite turning out to be as clean as you hoped?

Excellent example. We didn't ban cars. Instead, we have tons of regulations applied to cars, require a driver license and insurance to operate, and you can be cited for operating an improperly maintained vehicle. Where's similar legislation for guns? Are cars actually more deadly than guns? And don't go by body count, because utility is a factor there too - unless you want to argue that nukes are some of the least dangerous things out there.

I'd love to start with some proper funding to actually study the question. Unfortunately, thanks to some wonderful budget decisions by republicans, there's no money for studies, there's no money to even collect data, and because there's no money, all research would have to start from scratch if there were money to be found. In the meantime, we're left with shitty data from countries that barely resemble ours.

Erm. Get your definitions straight. We ARE a democracy. Look up the word in an dictionary, encyclopedia or even sociology or history book. A republic merely means that the government is a public affair, not a private, i.e., autocratic affair. Democracy is merely one way to implement a republic, and a pretty popular at that. After that, you can quibble about representative versus direct democracy, but those are still democracies
Oh, and before you start talking about the Federalist papers - actually read them. They are explicit about referring to a direct democracy being unwieldy, not democracy in general.

Of course. But you're still missing the point. You need to be able to justify your right from a philosophical perspective before you can expect me to endorse it. Since you brought up Rosa Parks elsewhere: that black people should have the same rights as white people was, at some point, not self-evident. As a matter of fact, it took about 100 years of discussion and violence to make that seem self-evident in retrospect. You don't get to short-circuit the discussion about the right to bear arms with a "because we're born with it". Either you can support the notion, or you can keep shouting in the desert.

It's easy to argue against a point neither I nor anyone else is making, isn't it? There are two ways to "add law" to a problem. You can make the penalties harsher, or you can make certain aspects of a problem illegal that are currently legal. Like, I don't know, making it illegal to sell a gun privately without a background check. Both add laws, but are certainly more nuanced then "it just makes x illegal again".

Again, I think you might want to stop with the strawmen. It's really, really hard to take you seriously.

The guy stole guns from his mother who kept them barely secured. Why are guns the only dangerous tool that people can just leave lying about? You can't leave TNT out on a front porch, and you can't leave uranium lying around. There are plenty of ways to make the problem of people illegally acquiring guns harder. What you're doing is to argue that because there is nothing that will fix the problem 100%, there's no point in even reducing the problem.

Ok, fair enough. So I'd like two to see two things from you:
1) What is it about semi-automatic guns that is so important that mass-killings (which at this point are so frequent that I don't even blink an eye at them - then again, it might have to do with the fact that I live near Oakland) are a valid trade-off?
2) If not via gun-control, how do you propose to approach the problem of gun homicides?

No, I understand rights perfectly fine. You, on the other hand, don't seem to understand what it takes for rights to actually exist in a society. It's the basic difference between philosophy and politics. Furthermore, merely yelling "it doesn't MATTER WHY I NEED IT" does very little to advance your position. All that it tells me is that you think your philosophy should need no explanation, and should be implemented above all others. That's a dangerous road to go down - one which you seem to be blissfully unaware of.

Very true. However, it also makes no sense to argue that because there are law-breakers, there's no point to laws. The idea is that there are different angles of a problem that can be covered by different laws. Example:
Law 1) it's illegal to kill anyone.
Law 2) it's illegal to shoot shells from a tank outside of military exercises or missions.
Law 3) it's illegal to dump cyanide into a river.

You can start at Law 1, and realize that it's a lot easier to prevent deaths from occurring by reducing the occurrence of certain events. The reason that additional laws do work is because there's a cost to purely act after a catastrophic event has happened, and that that cost is generally much higher than a bit of prevention.

Except that I'm talking about something that actually happened, and that that event was facilitated by the existence of semi-automatic weapons. You can't just wish reality to go away.

Interesting. However, if we go by the idea that the constitution enumerates specific powers of the federal government, and that all laws that cover topics that aren't explicitly listed in it are unconstitutional.... well, I think that ship sailed about 6 months after the signing of the constitution. Granted, there is an interesting concept in there of what kind of government you can have with that interpretation, but somehow, I think that is either a minority opinion in the US (just judging by what laws ARE being passed and supported by the population), or focuses that interpretation exclusively on the topic covered by the 2nd Amendment.

Opening your argument with something that is so wrong it either requires an active avoidance of facts or an active decision to distort the truth doesn't really encourage anyone to take you seriously. Once you make an argument that doesn't fall into either category, come back and we can have a discussion.

You haven't been paying attention in history class. Nor to the things like the shooting of a prosecutor in Texas.

Wow - maybe all hope isn't lost. An actual point of discussion.

At the core, the reason is because these people are professionals. This implies background checks, tracking of their tools, and the ability to remove them from their position if they are not capable of performing their job. Furthermore, because they're government workers, it also implies a final oversight by the voters. Don't like the legislation covering the Secret Service? Vote out the legislators who did a bad job, and vote in those who will provide it.

Note that I don't mean that because carrying guns is their job, that they will never abuse them, or that because they're government employees, that they are somehow better than other employees. But instead, that there are processes and checks in place to minimize abuse, and that there is an express ability by every person in the country to influence how those jobs are carried out.

The very short answer is no, they should not. The slightly longer answer is that if every civilian is subject to the same checks and regulations as the non-military government personnel, then every civilian should get the same level of access. Note that this implies that said access can be revoked in a similar fashion. Abuse your gun, lose your right to use it. There's an even longer response that would go into what constitutes proper regulation and checks, but that's too much for a post on a website. However, I'll leave you with this: why restrict your question to non-military personnel? Could you see a situation where any citizen could gain access to any type of military hardware?