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I'm asking this because I would like people's honest opinions. I know i'll likely get flamed but it will be fun to see where it goes. What is coming immedietly next is a hypothetical
A man currently owns a gun, however at this time the actual Gun, magazine, and bullets are all seperate. In this particular hypothetical, the owning of a device capable of doing lethal harm is illegal. A government search of his home finds the Gun, magazine, and bullets all in seperate places. The question comes down to this....
Did the man have a "device capable of doing lethal harm" because he had all the pieces to do it and merely had to put them together to have the final product and therefore is guilty
OR
Is the man innocent becuase while he had the seperate parts and the means to combine them, they were not combined and therefore was not a "device capable of doing lethal harm"
The reason I bring this up is due to the notion of "iraq not having WMD's" that is toated so greatly lately. (anyone annoyed by this already my appologizes, I just finished a semester long "special elective" course in my government department that was "politics of weapons proliferation" and we hit these points as we went through the Iraq portion of the class) After the fall of Saddam's regime there were numerous locations discovered that had the facilities needed along with the agents needed to be combined to form chemical weapons. These matched greatly with a 2002 National Intellegence Estimates report stating that Iraq was thought to have stock piled at least 100 metric tons of chemical weapons agents as well as agents for biological weapons and that many of the weapons Saddam possessed during the first gulf war was likely still located within the country. (I appologize that I do not have links to these things off hand from the class)
Remember now, WMD's does not equal "nuclear weapons" and that alone. The term WMD refers to a collection of weapons including Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical.
Now, assuming this information is correct, re-go over this hypothetical but slightly different.
Instead of the gun, magazine, and bullets replace it with facilities, tools, and agents needed to mix a chemical or biological weapon. Do you still answer the same way? Does having these things in a close vicinity when it takes only weeks to make a majority of them equal the possesion of WMD's? Or does the fact that they are not currently combined make them non-eligable for use of the WMD delimma.
I'll be interesting to hear your opinions. Please don't turn this into a tirade of "we shouldn't have gone to war" or "bush is great" or "Bush lied, people died" or anything along those lines. Try to stick to the hypothetical and lets see if we can get an interesting discussion going.
A man currently owns a gun, however at this time the actual Gun, magazine, and bullets are all seperate. In this particular hypothetical, the owning of a device capable of doing lethal harm is illegal. A government search of his home finds the Gun, magazine, and bullets all in seperate places. The question comes down to this....
Did the man have a "device capable of doing lethal harm" because he had all the pieces to do it and merely had to put them together to have the final product and therefore is guilty
OR
Is the man innocent becuase while he had the seperate parts and the means to combine them, they were not combined and therefore was not a "device capable of doing lethal harm"
The reason I bring this up is due to the notion of "iraq not having WMD's" that is toated so greatly lately. (anyone annoyed by this already my appologizes, I just finished a semester long "special elective" course in my government department that was "politics of weapons proliferation" and we hit these points as we went through the Iraq portion of the class) After the fall of Saddam's regime there were numerous locations discovered that had the facilities needed along with the agents needed to be combined to form chemical weapons. These matched greatly with a 2002 National Intellegence Estimates report stating that Iraq was thought to have stock piled at least 100 metric tons of chemical weapons agents as well as agents for biological weapons and that many of the weapons Saddam possessed during the first gulf war was likely still located within the country. (I appologize that I do not have links to these things off hand from the class)
Remember now, WMD's does not equal "nuclear weapons" and that alone. The term WMD refers to a collection of weapons including Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical.
Now, assuming this information is correct, re-go over this hypothetical but slightly different.
Instead of the gun, magazine, and bullets replace it with facilities, tools, and agents needed to mix a chemical or biological weapon. Do you still answer the same way? Does having these things in a close vicinity when it takes only weeks to make a majority of them equal the possesion of WMD's? Or does the fact that they are not currently combined make them non-eligable for use of the WMD delimma.
I'll be interesting to hear your opinions. Please don't turn this into a tirade of "we shouldn't have gone to war" or "bush is great" or "Bush lied, people died" or anything along those lines. Try to stick to the hypothetical and lets see if we can get an interesting discussion going.