Wonder If Chimpy Ran THIS By The NRA?

[MrBenchley]

Article 17 of the new Iraq constitution says: "It shall not be permitted to possess, bear, buy, or sell arms except on licensure issued in accordance with the law."

Wonder why we can't get that here?

Here's the actual Constitution text...

http://www.oefre.unibe.ch/law/icl/iz00000_.html

For some more discussion of what else is in the Constitution of Iraq, go here:

"Are you sure we have a Republican administration in the White House? Check out the following provisions:
Article 14.
The individual has the right to security, education, health care, and social security. The Iraqi State and its governmental units, including the federal government, the regions, governorates, municipalities, and local administrations, within the limits of their resources and with due regard to other vital needs, shall strive to provide prosperity and employment opportunities to the people.
My goodness, what do I see? A social rights provision? Constitutional protections for health care and educational benefits? How did this one get past Grover Norquist?"

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_03_07_balkin_archive.html#107895302507510431


Some earlier fun with guns in Iraq and this unelected drunk....

http://slate.msn.com/id/2083734

http://slate.msn.com/id/2083998

"In the March 11 New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar notes in passing, "Most Iraqi households own at least one gun." This comes as a shock to those of us who've been hearing for years from the gun lobby that widespread firearms ownership is necessary to prevent the United States from becoming a police state."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2080201/

[grannylib]

1. I remember Chimpy talking about this stuff in a press conference back

in October 2003; the same one where he stated that 'free societies do not develop weapons of mass destruction..."
He said that part of the Iraqi constitution would include these things, because "free societies provide health care for all its citizens"

So thanks, W, for pointing out that we here in the US do NOT live in a free society apparently, since we DO have (and have used) WMDs and we do NOT provide health care for all our citizens.
But then we knew that, didn't we, when the Constitution went pretty much on the scrap heap as soon as the fucker took the oath to preserve, protect and defend it...

[MrBenchley]

2. Appalling, isn't it?

Far as I can see, Kerry was being both polite and accurate when he called the GOP "lying crooks".....

[Young Socialist]

5. just exactly what is it that makes you think

bush is pro-gun? gun ownership gives the common man true freedom and he is definitely against the common man being anything but a wage slave.

[MrBenchley]

8. Who the hell are you trying to kid?

"During his keynote address at the recent annual convention of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Orlando, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush thanked members for helping to elect his brother president in 2000, CNN reported April 27.
"Were it not for your active involvement, it's safe to say my brother would not be president of the United States," Bush said.
He added that he and his brother both support the NRA's argument that the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment makes bearing arms an individual right with few restrictions.
"The sound of our guns is the sound of freedom," said Bush."

http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/summaries/reader/0%2C2061%2C563037...

Funny, when Jebbo or any member of the Bush Crime Family opens his fat yap, most sane people don't hear "freedom" coming out.

[FeebMaster]

9. That doesn't show that Bush is pro-gun.

It just shows that people who think he is are gullible and possibly stupid.

Also, your link doesn't work.

[-..__...]

10. Gun humor.

"Looky over yonder thar Gee-dub-ya". "That thar a lib-er-al I spy hiding in the bushes?" :7

[FeebMaster]

11. That picture always makes me think

of the Saturday Night Live sketch where Father and Son Bush go hunting.

[MrBenchley]

12. Yeah, surrrrrrrrrre....

You keep right on trying to peddle that theory, feeb.....

[Young Socialist]

13. name one unjust gun control law that he

has repealed if he's so pro-gun and so in the pocket of NRA? he could have started with that POS his daddy enacted in 1989, or that other pantload that reagan did in 1986. it's like he doing us a favour not pushing for the renewal of AWB.

[FeebMaster]

14. You don't understand.

He's so pro-gun, like all Republicans, that he'd love to do it, but he wants to get reelected and the public is against all that, so he can't do it. :eyes:

[MrBenchley]

15. Says it all...

Even Chimpy and AshKKKroft aren't gun-crazy enough to suit some people...

Good thing you still got Roy Moore in the race for president, guys.....he's so pro-gun he was playing kissy face with the racist Militia of Montana a couple weeks ago....

[iverglas]

17. yeah ... freedom ... dubya's favourite

The right wing can delude a lot of USAmericans with that crap, but the rest of the world tends to see it for what it is.

So, who writes the script for "John R. Bolton, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security"?

http://www.state.gov/t/us/rm/janjuly/4038.htm

Small arms and light weapons, in our understanding, are the strictly military arms -- automatic rifles, machine guns, shoulder-fired missile and rocket systems, light mortars -- that are contributing to continued violence and suffering in regions of conflict around the world. We separate these military arms from firearms such as hunting rifles and pistols, which are commonly owned and used by citizens in many countries. As U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said, "just as the First and Fourth Amendments secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms." The United States believes that the responsible use of firearms is a legitimate aspect of national life. Like many countries, the United States has a cultural tradition of hunting and sport shooting. We, therefore, do not begin with the presumption that all small arms and light weapons are the same or that they are all problematic. It is the illicit trade in military small arms and light weapons that we are gathered here to address and that should properly concern us.

Thank you, Dubya. From all the civilians and children killed around the world by small arms trafficked into their countries and used against them.

http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0108arms_body.html

They may be called small arms, but they're big business. In Latin America, the problem of small arms trafficking extends from Mexico, where guns smuggled from the United States fetch prices three to five times higher on the black market than their original cost, to Colombia, currently embroiled in a long running civil conflict, to Brazil, which has one of the highest gun homicide rates in the world.

... At the UN conference, the United States opposed any language in the program of action that prevented the sale of arms to non-state actors. John R. Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, flatly said that the United States could not be part of an agreement that "would preclude assistance to an oppressed non-state group defending itself from a genocidal government." While the United States wants to keep the option open to aid insurgents battling oppressive regimes around the world, this policy can adversely affect legitimate governments battling insurgencies.

The United States must also acknowledge its role in global arms trafficking. The United States is the largest producer of small arms in the world, with more than half of the world's producers based in the United States. Many arms traffickers buy relatively inexpensive firearms in the United States and resell them on the black market abroad because the penalties are relatively light compared with the penalties for smuggling drugs--and the profit margin is high. Arms brokers bypass regulatory norms and facilitate weapons transfers from states to non-state actors and buyers who could not otherwise obtain them.

The United States chooses to ignore the extent of this dynamic and sees any effort to address the matter as potential infringement on the rights of U.S. citizens to own firearms. At the UN conference, Bolton assured that "the United States will not join consensus on a final document that contains measures contrary to our constitutional right to keep and bear arms."

... In pandering to the gun lobby, the Bush administration showed what little regard it has forstrengthening international efforts to deal with trafficking in small arms. ...

It's just bleeding hilarious to see anyone whine that the President and his boys do not support individual freedom, and then jump on the their bandwagon when it comes to all this idiot noise about the poor downtrodden foreign masses not being able to rise up against their oppressors if someone in the USofA doesn't make a hefty profit selling everybody in sight weapons.

.

[slackmaster]

3. Article 17 seems to run against the interests of the gun industry

It places hurdles in the way of Iraq buying military weapons wholesale.

So to answer the original question, if we take the viewpoint that the NRA acts on behalf of gun manufacturers I'd say the answer is no.

[natasha1]

4. Having them is no gaurantee...

"In the March 11 New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar notes in passing, "Most Iraqi households own at least one gun." This comes as a shock to those of us who've been hearing for years from the gun lobby that widespread firearms ownership is necessary to prevent the United States from becoming a police state."

Having firearms available is no guarantee that you will be willing or able to resist tyranny.

Having no firearms available is a guarantee that you will be unable to resist tyranny.

Nat

[slackmaster]

6. OTOH

Having firearms doesn't reduce your ability to resist tyranny.

[MrBenchley]

7. Actually, all it shows

is that another gun nut argument is a steaming pantload.

[iverglas]

16. just funny coincidences

Having firearms available is no guarantee that you will be willing or able to resist tyranny.

The folks who had firearms and were governed by murderous dictators, well, they all just liked it that way.

The folks who didn't have firearms and were governed by murderous dictators, well, they would all have overthrown the SOBs had they had guns.

Revising history is such a fun hobby!

Speaking of coincidences ... visitations by a Natasha and a Karenina so coincidentally simultaneously, and saying such coincidentally similar things; wonder whether they're related?

.

[natasha1]

18. I think you missed my point...

I was agreeing with you.

Having firearms available is no guarantee that you will be willing or able to resist tyranny.

But if you have no firearms, your chances of resisting are virtually none.

I have no idea who Karenina is.

Nat

[iverglas]

19. nope

You weren't agreeing with me. Nice try.

Having firearms available is no guarantee that you will be willing or able to resist tyranny.
But if you have no firearms, your chances of resisting are virtually none.

History shows you to be speaking nonsense on the second point.

And on the first point, let's not forget that having firearms available is no guarantee that you will not BE tyranny, hm?

Nor, of course, is it a guarantee that you will be tyranny. Having a monopoly on military force really just doesn't make a government tyranny.

There is no need for a population to be armed against a government which is the expression of its own will, and in this century there is little possibility, apart from that imperialism stuff, that a government that is the expression of a people's will is going to become "tyranny" if the people doesn't want it to. And if the people want it to -- if they vote it into power -- who the hell are these people who are going to be resisting it? A nonsense, that's who they are. A fiction.

And there is little possibility, in this century, that a population would ever be sufficiently well armed to overthrow a government that is "tyranny".

Your government IS "tyranny" as far as much of the world is concerned; and yet none of you seem to care particularly. Hell, if any of you were proposing to use your weapons to end that very real tyranny, you might get me listening. Not that I'd have any notion you'd be remotely successful, it would just be interesting to hear you people talking about somebody other than yourselves for a change.

Your government is, and arms, the tyranny that is what people elsewhere in the world suffer. Remove your government, and its profiteering friends in the arms industry, from the global equation, and you'd be making a start.

And, just too obviously, the way that YOU do that, in the USofA, is with ballots, not bullets.

Not that the US Democratic Party has ever been shy about installing or propping up tyrants abroad when it was in power ... but nonetheless, you can perhaps imagine how impressed those of us who REALLY oppose tyranny in the world are by people who plan not to vote for that party because of their fraudulent concern about the "tyranny" of firearms control.

Not.


edit: I do beg your pardon; my earlier query related to you and KatrinaK, not Karenina (who is of course someone else of much longer standing hereabouts, and who would never say the things KatrinaK says).

And if you hadn't noticed the 1/6 of the posts in the hokey email thread that were hers, well, who am I to wonder?

.