In keeping with my new practice of posting only a snippet of an article or commentary, here is a bit of a 'moderate' piece by Mr. Conservative on the fact that 'gun control' is off the table, for at least a while!

"The learned arguments go on and on. The gun-control lobby has suffered two severe blows in the recent period. One of them is that Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard, much esteemed by American liberals, in part because of his enthusiasm for abortion rights, having examined the historical documents, opines that indeed the people who framed the Bill of Rights intended to guarantee individual, not merely collective, gun-ownership rights. And the Fifth Circuit ruled in the same direction in [i][b]United States v. Emerson[/b][/i]."

See article at:[url]http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley.asp[/url]

Not as strong as I would like it, but not bad for a wealthy fellow from the Northeast.

Eric The(AtLeastHe'sNoGoldwater!)Hun[>]:)]

Buckley writes some interesting stuff and I often agree with him.  But somehow I can't get the image out of my mind that every morning he sits at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a portable mirror and admires himself while he wakes up.  I do believe he'd marry himself if it were not genetically unsound. [rolleyes]

Not bad for Larry Tribe.

I can read Buckley but not follow his verbal output.  Perhaps because I'm soon asleep.

Hmmmmmmmmmm....[thinking]

I remember an interview he had on Book Notes with Brian Lamb of CSPAN.

He mentioned that he did not learn to speak English until he was about six years old. He spoke Spanish only!

His parents basically left him with his Spanish-speaking nurse for the first five years of his life, and on the rare visits they made, the family spoke Spanish with each other.

He was a young fellow in England in those days, and his father took him to see Neville Chamberlain getting off the plane at London's Heathrow (?) Airport after his doomed meeting with Herr Hitler in Munich and giving the short 'peace in our time' speech complete with umbrella.

So next time you see that clip, just remember a young William F. Buckley, Jr., was just off the camera shot.

So the Spanish for the first six years of his life might help explain a lot!

Eric The(Trivial)Hun[>]:)]

Good info Mr. Hun

I like Mr. Buckley.  Mr Buckley has a nack for annihilating liberals with just a few well chosen and placed words. Where most debaters attack from all angles Mr Buckley finds the one structure that supports an entire argument and removes that one. It is fun and exciting to watch him.

Benjamin

I get the distinct feeling that, like much of the "intelligentsia" Buckley refers to in this article, he himself neither owns guns nor particularly cares about the ultimate fate of the 2nd Amendment. He's a spectator in this debate, nothing more.

[i]"The assertion of a right at ridiculous lengths — the absolutization of it, in the manner of the American Civil Liberties Union — is a way of undermining it. If the Constitution says you can say anything you want under any circumstances, then you can shout fire! in a crowded movie theater. If you have the right to remain silent in all circumstance, then you can decline to give testimony vital to another citizen's freedom and rights. If you insist that a citizen has the right to own a machine gun, you discredit his right to own a pistol or a rifle."[/i]

Hmmmm. Does it sound like he's equating simply owning a machine gun with shouting fire in a crowded theater?

How can merely [u]owning[/u] an object be equivalent to outwardly [u]taking action[/u] to cause immediate public panic and turmoil?

I think he's wrong on that particular point.

Yeah, that sounded like flawed logic to me, too.

Speaking of movie theaters and fires, I like this fellow's analogy much better:

"Taking my gun away because I might shoot someone is like cutting my tongue out because I might yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." — Peter Venetoklis

At a Federal level I would agree, but at a state level the Caliban are hard at work.  Oh those busy little beavers...

Help fight the .50 cal ban
[url]http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?id=104610[/url]

Here is another vote for the "uninterested spectator" theory.  Gun control is just too plebian an issue to him.

I saw him speak at our university about 10 years ago.  I thought he was senile, and I think most of the folks around me thought so too.  There was that unsettled worry in the audience instead of boredom or disdain.  I later heard that he was just not a very inspiring public speaker, unlike the magnificent and unelectable Alan Keyes.