Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Snit Newsgroups: sci.physics,comp.os.linux.advocacy,alt.checkmate,talk.politics.guns Subject: Re: Slaughtering concert goers. Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 22:05:51 -0700 Lines: 50 Message-ID: References: <4LMPC.193817$nq5.73490@fx36.iad> <6do2hd5r2qhecatrtqfo403pju3prjdrg5@4ax.com> <9vn3hd9cli0mqgcqjd3c9kin2e5ckq44ck@4ax.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net yxn2ChqORQcvSzyJZFA0uQ0MdYZitBcJLg/SdvfZxz+AwwJvSS Cancel-Lock: sha1:C6PfbMH3aZcq8iYlTIdfstOXtBg= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.8.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Xref: csiph.com sci.physics:688231 comp.os.linux.advocacy:453212 alt.checkmate:170267 talk.politics.guns:1089929 On 6/1/18 9:47 PM, Scout wrote: ... >> Sounds like you are using the phrase "bear arms" to mean to defend >> yourself personally... a non-standard form. > > No, you can bear arms for any number of reasons. > You can bear arms against the king. > You can bear arms for the king. > You can bear arms against an adversary. > You can bear arms to hunt. > > Simply bearing arms, means nothing more or less than you have weapons > with you. > > > >> Or do you mean it in a different way than that? > > No, I mean it exactly the way it was properly used. So your view is tied to twisting the meaning of "bear arms" to a non-standard use. Fair enough. ----- A search of Brigham Young University’s new online Corpus of Founding Era American English, with more than 95,000 texts and 138 million words, yields 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” BYU’s Corpus of Early Modern English, with 40,000 texts and close to 1.3 billion words, shows 1,572 instances of the phrase. Subtracting about 350 duplicate matches, that leaves about 1,500 separate occurrences of “bear arms” in the 17th and 18th centuries, and only a handful don’t refer to war, soldiering or organized, armed action. These databases confirm that the natural meaning of “bear arms” in the framers’ day was military. But we shouldn’t need big data to tell us this. “Bear arms” has never worked comfortably with the language of personal self-defense, hunting or target practice. ----- -- Personal attacks from those who troll show their own insecurity. They cannot use reason to show the message to be wrong so they try to feel somehow superior by attacking the messenger. They cling to their attacks and ignore the message time and time again.