> So you and your nominees get to pick and choose which of the
> Amendments suit you and should be kept?
Well, I think we all have our personal preferences among the Amendments -- I definitely prefer the First to the Second. But then, I never got any closer to having a weapon in my hands than a bit of archery at Boy Scout camp when I was a little shaver, and chopping vegetables with a rather large knife in my kitchen.
On Jul 17, 2004, at 11:46 PM, joanna bujes wrote:
> That's the ones about guns....right? That's easy. If the cops have
> guns, I want one too.
Very understandable sentiment, but not the way for radicals to go, IMHO. If we are going to have police, which apparently we need to have, short of the utopia we all crave arriving, then the important thing is that they be trained to use the least possible amount of violent force, and that they be under effective community control, so that they don't become a pretorian guard for the ruling class (a role they sadly play all too often).
What we should be aiming for, IMHO, is not a balance of terror between the cops and the community, but communities which are controlled, in their economics as politics, by the working class, with the police as an integral part of that community system. I don't want to live in a country like Iraq, where every family is armed to the teeth and 3/4 of them use their heat rather regularly, apparently. If that's the kind of country you are working for, then I would prefer to go somewhere else -- Scandinavia, perhaps?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile