Licenses to exercise constitutional rights

if a huge fleet of North Korean nuclear submarines suddenly appeared in New York harbor, the US military would be expected to roll in and lock down the city. this activity would no doubt amount to some significant abridgments of the normal rights enjoyed by NYers, but wartime is by definition an exceptional setting.

Granted, but they would most likely announce this situation and attempt to evacuate. In the event of an invasion (highly highly unlikely) the citizenry would be called to form militias as well to reinforce our military.

so it's not at all apparent why civilians should be able to claim the right to own and use military weapons for their own private purposes.

Your last statement is exactly why. If you are free you should be able to do what you want for your own reasons in private as long as it doesn't violate anyone else's rights.

i don't think that limiting civilian populations to some lower threshold of firepower than what we arm our military with naturally equates to an indictment of the citizenry as inherently bad or untrustworthy as you suggest.

We are already limited with an increasingly large gap. This would just be closing the gap a little. Bridging the division so to speak. This "trustworthiness" doesn't carry over when ex-military are rotated back stateside. Not to mention there are some people that cannot serve due to medical conditions. Maybe firearm education classes for people that wished to purchase such weapons. One of the Nordic countries (sweden or switzerland, I can't remember) allows full auto purchase by civilians and they don't seem to have a problem with it.

therefore denying civilians the high firepower that we equip our soldiers with is not a moral judgement made between the two, but simply an acknowledgement of their differing purposes. and also that war time, by definition, carries with it the unfortunate but generally agreed upon necessity of temporarily limiting certain rights to a degree. and so to demand access to war time weapons, and to underpin that demand with a claim to a peacetime right, seems logically awkward at best.

There are already differences in provided equipment, training, but most of all their day to day job. You cannot argue that someone shouldn't have something because they have a different job or purpose, that logic doesn't hold any water. That's like me telling someone that they can't have a computer if they aren't in a related field.. And I already know you're going to point out the (But computers aren't dangerous!) well, then apply the same logic to chainsaws and non-loggers. The fact of the matter is that if I haven't done anything wrong, there is no reason to make it prohibitively expensive to have one (I'll assume you know its legal to own one, just an old one and its like 7-25k$). While its true that you must temporarily limit some rights, other rights must remain intact no matter what. And I think that disarming the populace is one of those because in the event of foreign invasion, you have more helping hands, and in the event of a coup or hostile takeover, people can protect themselves.

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