its defensive because it requires it to be thrown from cover.
Yeah, it's probably better to parse it as "grenade that is used from a defensive position."
Grenade makes a wonderful deterrent. Who wants to press their luck against somebody so clearly dangerously insane?
Personally I have to wonder how many folks like our friend the truck salesman there want people to be able to own heavy military hardware, not for home defense in the "burglar" sense, but in the "government police state/Communist revolution/some other political bugbear we're all convinced is coming" sense.
Look, guys. It's just a tea tax. It's not a big deal, it's not a sign of things to come, and the
only people talking about revolution are the tinfoil hats and extremists.
It's fun to joke because everything's going our way now, but weren't we talking about secession from the south three years ago? My fellow democrats who want to take away our gun rights really aren't considering 3/4s of the last century were under progressively more extremist republican rule and our last republican president actually thought he was
mandated by god to be the president of the united states.
They will get back into power again, and an electorate that allows their progressive leaders to take away the tools to fight their government has noone to blame but themsleves when the shoe ends up on the other foot and they fall under the rule of tyrants. Furthermore, there is no reason - whatsoever - we should be restricting the use of
any firearm, other than the simple acts of liscensing, registration, and qualification (eg. not a convicted felon) because there is no correlation whatsoever to a reduction in crime when gun laws get stricter, and people do not typically commit crimes with firearms that belong to them, let alone expensive assault weapons such as AK-47s. (While I will not argue an AK-47 has never been used in a crime, I will argue that 99% of crimes committed with assault rifles were done using illegally modified stolen AK-47s, or AK-47s that were shipped into the states after the iron curtain fell.) I think the best possible compromise is to treat everything like a handgun - waiting period, serial numbers, on the books as registered - and then lift the bans. On everything. Including fully automatic weapons. Top of it with a unified, national law on open and concealed carry that streamlines the process and makes sure the right, responsible people obtain those liscenses. The problem with laws as they stand is the more liberal the state the more difficult (or impossible) it becomes to obtain the right to carry a firearm. On the other side, the more conservative a state is, the more ridiculously easy it is to get access to those firearms. The end result is that the crazier your state is the more irresponsible the gun owners are. We need a middle ground. We shouldn't be telling an uneducated, mentally ill person he can wave a gun around in public. But we shouldn't be telling an educated, responsible, hard working adult that he can't carry a firearm to defend himself when he walks through the worst neighborhood in downtown detroit when he goes to church every sunday - a walk that has put him on the wrong end of a gun or a knife, as the victim of muggings, multiple times. Unfortunately, as things stand, this is the system we have.
"We don't need that for hunting" is an irrelevant argument that will never hold any weight, because the 2nd amendment was not about hunting and most of the people living in civilization - including the founding fathers - were craftsmen and tradesmen, not hunters and trappers and furriers. Keep in mind that at the time hunting was a profession, not a hobby. It's a pretty safe bet that every man had tried it, but I highly doubt benjamin franklin had shot a deer within 20 years of the revolutionary war. They wanted the right to gun ownership to protect themselves from "domestic threats" (then indians, today terrorists) thieves, foreign invaders, and of course, their own government. Just because there is a thick layer of beauracracy and a military too principled to attempt a coup these days does not mean that the threat of tyranny will ever be gone for good, it does not mean that our children or our grandchildren will have no need to pick up a weapon in defense of their freedoms.
And let's write that off as an impossibility - despite the fact that 8 of the last 9 years have been under the rule of a leader put in power by an activist supreme court, who belonged to a party that recently attempted to take the new york state congress in what they called in their own words a coup, a member of a party that has been in control of the government for the majority of the last century, and that unlike us can actually achieve party unity and get things done when they set their minds to it despite idealogical differences, and that will almost certainly get back in power again and retain it - again, we will pretend that a revolution will never, ever be necessary, and we need not worry about the future.
Well, now you have the issue of having an ocean - with a series of islands that can function as ports - between us and a major world power, with an army that outnumbers ours ten to one, that is an economic superpower that devotes much of it's money to military research and development, that will surpass us technologically in the next twenty years, that has spies and subversives in every branch of the military, law enforcement, and have been rooted out in places like
the pentagon and as
operators aboard AEGIS cruisers, who have gone to great lengths to research and steal information our missle and sub defense systems, and in the absolute best case scenario considers us a rival in the world, militarily, technologically, idealogically, socially and otherwise - and in the worst case scenario, considers us a hated enemy. While an invasion from China is hardly imminent or likely, it IS a possibility - a very real possibility - that we will see a chinese invasion or at the very least a war with china in the next 40 years. If we are not armed, who is going to save us? Our vastly outnumbered, and comparitively undertrained army? What if we station most of them overseas, and using the information they stole from us, defeat our radar and defense systems and stealthily invade california? We employed militias during World War I and World War II in the united states who never saw combat. They sat on standby, in case the germans invaded. It didn't happen, but it could have, and if we had planned for the future like we are today, we would have been in pretty dire straits if it had.
You might think my tinfoil hat is firmly affixed now, but let me get this straight - I don't believe that honestly any of this will ever happen during my lifetime. But it COULD. And if having the guns isn't hurting anyone - and it really isnt', because again, the overwhelming majority of gun crime - 90%+++ - is committed with guns that were illegally brought into the united states in the first place - then why is it an issue to keep them around "just in case"? Noone expects the worst case scenario, but not planning for the event is really, really stupid.
Also: Before anyone brings it up, if we were invaded by a foreign power I find it exceedingly unlikely the military would arm anyone until it was too late. The downside to having checks and balances is that even when there is an overhwelming support and need for something, getting congress to pass it without bickering for six months is impossible. See: Healthcare.
Edit: I also want to note, I said
any type of gun, not
any type of ammunition. Cop killers are called cop killers
for a reason. In the event of an actual ground war with China, insurgents can easily fashion armor piercing ammunition if it became necessary, which is unlikely given that kevlar isn't super effective against assault rifle ammunition to begin with. The only reasons to have armor piercing ammunition is to have a concealable weapon capable of piercing bulletproof armor (which isn't necessary for self defense) or to defend yourself while operating in a tank crew, neither of which seem particularly pertinent...