Mr. Cardarelli and Mrs. Mailhiot, thank you for your responses.

Please correct m e if I misrepresent or ignore certain of your justifications for a prohibition o n private ownership of 'heavy weaponry' (which you did not define and I must thu s infer to include weapons that the government makes extremely difficult to impo ssible to own, including machine guns, rocket launchers, rockets with explosive warheads, grenades, bombs, and cannons-guns w/ calibers larger than .50), but yo ur salient points appear to be that, firstly, these ostensibly 'especially dange rous' weapons might easily be acquired by those of ill intents and thus pose gra ve danger to innocents, and, secondly, that self-defense through force of arms i s neither morally permissible nor [presently] necessary. Let us first consider the especial dangers allegedly posed by each class of weap onry prohibited in the US (and indeed in nearly all other countries save Switzer land and a few Asian city-states like Singapore if I recall correctly). A partic ularly useful subject of inquiry will be into hand grenades; you are not likely aware of this, but it is perfectly legal to sell deactivated (that is, free of e xplosive) hand grenades (they cost well under $20 each usually), and it is a sim ple matter indeed to reactivate them, although to do so is of course illegal wit hout securing the permission of the BATFE (nearly impossible for a law-abiding c itizen to attain, though private military companies like Blackwater AKA Xe can p rocure such items with impunity, though there are restrictions on their storage in the US). As a private citizen could expect to face 10 years in prison and a c onsiderable fine were he convicted of manufacturing a functional grenade, it is understandable very few Americans who have not committed actual crimes against t heir fellow man presently possess illegal grenades. However egregious an honest person may find the penalties for manufacturing a grenade, a person who intends to use that grenade to kill others will scarcely be deterred by it, neither will be prevented from acquiring a serviceable weapon (considering the ease of react ivation of inert grenades). Now let us suppose that the conspirator wishes to to ss a fragmentation grenade into a crowd of people and thereby kill at least 5. B ecause hand grenades are time-fused (rather than impact-fuzed; such grenades are impractical and require electronic fuzes), if he tosses the grenade immediately upon pulling the pin (and lighting the timed fuse), the grenade will explode in 4.5-5.5 sec.; this affords the intended recipients the opportunity to throw the grenade to a relatively safe area (given presence of mind and, more importantly , familiarity with grenades likely to be acquired only through practicing with t hem!). (The criminal might also "cook off" the grenade by allowing the fuse to b urn for ~2 sec. after igniting it by pulling the pin, which assaying to do he wo uld nonetheless be far more likely to kill himself than cause the grenade to det onate immediately upon landing at its intended destination.) In turn, considerin g the danger posed by illegal reactivation of grenades that even the most indole nt and uneducated criminal might easily execute, we must ascertain the proper me thod of preventing 'grenade mayhem'. I think it patently obvious that the intend ed murderer would be quite terrified to attempt to 'frag' a group of adults carr ying handguns inasmuch as his grenade might not kill any of them whilst they wou ld have a good chance of spotting the conspirator as soon as he began to throw t he grenade (especially since a throwing motion would likely attract attention) a nd then killing him. (I apologize for the length of this response but think it e ssential that y'all appreciate the necessity of an armed citizenry. My reply wil l continue below.) Now that we have concluded upon the inability of prohibitions on private ownersh ip of grenades to prevent their nefarious uses, we conclude our investigation in to the example of grenades (among all 'heavy weapons') by asking, 'wherefore the necessity of private ownership thereof'? The answer admittedly touches upon the second of the important points y'all raised, which I will address below; privat e ownership of grenades, for instance (and, as we shall see, ANY weapon that one may obtain without violating the Torah by stealing it or defrauding its manufac turer), is essential because certain tactical situations might require grenades for one's personal defense against either common thugs or government-sponsored d

eath squads. Grenades are militarily useful primarily because they (1) allow for indirect fire (that is, they permit one to engage opponents whom one cannot sho ot due to the presence of an obstacle) and (2) may permit a single person to inc apacitate multiple adversaries without endangering himself unnecessarily bu atte mpting to shoot them piecemeal. Now permit me to posit an example of the moral use of grenades by a private citizen: suppose you are awake at midnight engaged in reading when you chance to observe a squad of apparently hostile, armed men a pproaching the window whence you are observing them (these men might be SS soldi ers coming to deport you and your family to a death camp whereat to be tortured and murdered, or they might be drug dealers who have entered the US illegally wh o wish to similarly mistreat you and your loved ones). Praise the Almighty YHWH , you manage to attain your safe and withdraw a rifle and grenades without even being observed, however; when they break the floor-to-ceiling window through whi ch you first espied them but a minute ago, you, hidden behind a wall/inside a ne arby room, bounce a grenade off of another wall and into their midst, and, since the grenade is unnoticed in the commotion until it is detonated, four of your a dversaries are shredded by shrapnel travelling at ~700'/s. With the odds thus e vened somewhat, you have a distinct possibility of surviving the encounter if al one, whilst the presence of a comrade of yours capable of suppressing the invade rs (perhaps with machine gun fire!) would likely enable you to 'frag' the remain ing conspirators, assuming they do not immediately flee or surrender. Admittedl y, only a tiny fraction of Americans in general (and those disposed to procure g renades were it feasible _to do so legally_ in particular) have yet been in such a situation. However, considering the facts that (1) we have already establish ed that bans on grenades do nothing to prevent criminals from acquiring them and (2) individuals, not groups, possess rights, we cannot but conclude that (in th e absence of the moral concerns you two have raised that I will address below) l aw-abiding citizens do possess the right to own grenades even now. Moreover, ou r government is run by very wicked men who desire to establish a socialist world government. Is it not conceivable that they might directly target those who wi ll not submit using military force (or, alternatively, that they might enact pol icies intended to encourage a rise in the incidence of violent crime, like, say, leaving our borders wide open!)? Is it not also pertinent that every tyrannica l government has denied its citizens the right to own any type of weapon for sel f-defense? Did the National Socialists encourage Jews to procure hand grenades or machine guns? No! In fact, the greatest heroes of the era were those of the Jews who resided in the Warsaw Ghetto who stole MP40 submachineguns, MG34 mediu m machine guns, hand grenades, Kar98k battle rifles, &c., &c. from their oppress ors and fought valiantly for their lives! Note that they did not procure the gr enades to fight one another! Similarly, did the Soviets permit the residents of gulags hand grenades? Was a law-abiding citizen of the Soviet Union or its sat ellites allowed to own so much as a semi-auto Makarov pistol? No! (This discou rse will continue below.) Now we attempt to extrapolate from our discoveries co ncerning the necessity of legal ownership of hand grenades to other weapons curr ently forbidden us. Mr. Cardarelli, I am afraid that your characterization of s uch 'heavy weapons' is but hyperbole; after all, if surface-to-air missiles, gre nades, machine guns, &c. are inherently evil, why are not revolvers equally so? After all, they are as much weapons as the former (and I would rather try to de fend myself from a common criminal with a revolver than with a Strela). Rather, these weapons all have special tactical purposes for which the semi-automatic / repeating (i.e. bolt-action, lever-action, revolver-action, break-action, &c.) rifles and pistols we are allowed to own are not particularly well suited. In t he case of Strela or Stinger shoulder-launched anti-aircraft heat-seeking missil es, you might understandably fear that the weapon could easily be employed by an evildoer against a civilian airliner (instead of against the military aircraft of a corrupt foreign or domestic government that was engaging in close air suppo rt against innocent Americans, for an instance of the moral use of such a missil e). However, since such a missile would be quite expensive to purchase, either legally in the US were the laws altered, or alternatively on the black market in a foreign country, a criminal who managed to obtain one would almost certainly

be possessed of great wealth (else he would spend his money on tools of thievery to augment his wealth, not on murder from which he would scarcely profit moneta rily). Would it be difficult for him to smuggle into the country such a missile were it illegal for him to obtain it here? Probably not, considering the poros ity of our southern border (there are vast stretches whereat the only deterrent to invasion is afforded by rusty fragments of barbed wire!). Also, since the ai rplane would only be vulnerable when it was at an altitude of under a few thousa nd feet above the surface (since one must be able to easily see the target in or der for the warhead to lock onto it), the man desirous of bringing down a jetlin er might instead choose to prepare an ambush from which he could shoot the engin es with a rifle once the plane was in motion. He might even convert an AK-47 to full-auto firing capability (easy but illegal to do) and then create a "curtain of fire" in front of the flying jet immediately after its takeoff (small arms h ave actually been used to great effect against aircraft in recent engagements; t he British managed to use light machine guns in the Falkands War to take down tw o Argentinian fighter jets!) that could easily cause a conflagration that would result in the deaths of all passengers (while necessitating a far less considera ble expenditure of money upon weapons; AK-47s are far less expensive than a Stin ger would be). Now, it would be reasonable to then ask what the use of a heat-s eeking surface-to-air missile would be against the forces of a murderous regime since we have determined that SAMs are neither panaceas nor even always the most economical means of destroying moving aircraft. The answer is that SAMs are us eful for offensive attacks (for instance, if a Chinese close-air-support aircraf t is bearing down upon you and about to drop a 500-lb. bomb upon you and your co mpatriots, you do not have the time to establish a "curtain of fire" that an evi ldoer desirous of destroying a jetliner would since he could easily set up an am bush just beyond the point of takeoff) and thus do have a place in the arsenal o f the citizen-soldiers, albeit a far less important one than small-arms. It sho uld also be instructive (upon the efficacy of the free-market in supplying any a nd all services and goods desired, including those pertaining to security) that devices that can scramble SAM warheads have been developed to protect jetliners. I hope that the above dissertation upon the right of individuals to arm themse lves with grenades and missiles has been sufficiently informative that you now u nderstand why we should be permitted to own machine guns, autocannons, and antitank weapons as well; if not, I will be happy to elaborate upon them (I will pri marily concern myself with the ease with which some semi-auto weapons can be mad e into mchineguns, albeit through illicit means, the manner in which prohibition s upon them do not dissuade hardened criminals from using them and indeed do not always render it particularly inconvenient for them to acquire them, the import ance of a citizenry capable of defending itself against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and the fact that these weapons are not even the ideal tools for comm on criminals. A single criminal with an accurate sniper rifle would be far more frightening to me than one with an RPG-7, for instance. I will explain why if y'all desire.) (This response will be continued below.)