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Also, all the rights listed in the first ten amendments are limited to the point at which you're infringing on someone else's rights. The threat of death or injury, such as it is, would seem to be a pretty clear reason to limit that right.
If you fail to operate it properly, I could be struck by a bullet fired by you at somebody else.
2nd Amendment absolutists love talking about their rights, but spend precious little time talking about the responsibilities that come with them. Which are (or should be) significant, when the right you are talking about is the right to wield a lethal weapon.
I'm not a "2nd Amendment absolutist" as you put it, no more than I am a free speech or free press absolutist. I have no problem with licensure or registration so long as it's not prohibitive, and you will be hard pressed to find gun owners who say there are no responsibilities associated with gun ownership. To get a license to carry a concealed firearm in my state requires $20 and a few weeks while they do a cursory background check, depending on the county. To get a handgun or rifle takes half an hour for a phone call background check.
If politicians like Sen. Feinstein would stop talking about banning weapons wholesale that had nothing to do with any recent tragedy, and instead talk about a national level of firearms reciprocity (while requiring locations like NYC, Chicago and DC to come up to par), you'd see folks on the Right move quickly and decisively to supporting more common sense gun regulations.
"for some reason gun advocates think that the right to bear arms is the only constitutional right that is virtually without limit. You have the right to practice your religion, but not if your religion involves human sacrifice. You have the right to free speech, but you can still be prosecuted for incitement or conspiracy, and you can be sued for libel. Every right is subject to limitation when it begins to threaten others, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that even though there is an individual right to gun ownership, the government can put reasonable restrictions on that right."
>Also, all the rights listed in the first ten amendments are limited to the point at which you're infringing on someone else's rights. The threat of death or injury, such as it is, would seem to be a pretty clear reason to limit that right.
Apparently, if someone legally owns a gun, this presents a "threat of death or injury" to others. Of course, if the gun weren't legally owned by an individual but still existed, it would either be illegally owned by an individual or be legally owned by the government or by some other exempted institution. You might feel safer with only the government and criminals owning guns, but many others would feel less safe. What makes your fear more legitimate than theirs? Other rights are restricted only when exercising them would directly infringe on the rights of others. You can't demonstrate that you would be safer if a particular gun owner with no criminal record were forced to turn in his gun. You can't even demonstrate that you would be safer if all law-abiding gun owners were forced to turn in their guns. Even if you could, you couldn't demonstrate that your increased safety wouldn't be more than offset by the decreased safety of the gun owner(s).
The comparison between gun ownership and first-amendment rights is not a good one, because there are already restrictions on gun ownership comparable to the restriction on first-amendment rights. True, you don't have the right to practice human sacrifice--you also don't have the right to murder people with your legally owned guns. True, you can be prosecuted for incitement--and also for waving your gun around in public. True, you can be sued for libel--and you can be prosecuted for brandishing.
EDIT: The word I used was threat, which, if arguing in good faith, you would have read as "actual risk", rather than "angsty feelings".
I also qualified it with the phrase such as it is. Which, again in good-faith discourse, means "if it exists" or "whatever form it takes".
But do continue to tell me more about how I feel.
