Totally. I also move that it would make an awesome wallpaper.

Not very encouraging news for someone on the management team of a web start-up looking for funding...

That really sucks. Some people can be so insensitive, I'd be pissed too. Usually when you check in together you get seated next to each other. It's like they requested to be seated separately so his wife didn't have to suffered being squashed in next to him. The person working the check in counter should have sensed what was happening and used a diplomatic excuse for having to seat them together if that's what's happened.

Wow, feeling for you (both). Interesting to see how raising the issue of a persons weight opens the floodgates of controversy. Have to wonder why though. It might turn out to be a publicity nightmare for an airline to start requiring "large" people to purchase an extra seat. I think it would be fair in your situation to politely request to be relocated to a different seat.

I see what you're saying, it's more about following due process to amend the constitution correctly. That's fair enough, I agree with you on that point. Don't quite follow the logic of saying that criminals are bad, so we should all be allowed to have guns to defend ourselves against the bad criminals, who of course will also have guns...

We had a couple of loonies go mad and shoot a bunch of people, so the government basically bought back all the guns they could and banned them outright more or less. It pissed a lot of people off, but we went from about 500 gun related homicides a year down to an average of about 50. Maybe in the 12 years since it's increased again by 45% or something, but we're still under a hundred a year as far as I know.

Try imagining the situation from an outsiders perspective - someone who has never in their life seen or touched a gun, being told that to defend themselves against criminals they now have the right to go down to the shops and buy one. And so do the criminals. Can't see who stands to benefit from that. The net result would be a lot of people loosing their lives to guns in the process of either committing criminal acts, or defending themselves against criminal acts. There will always be crime, but it doesn't have to be gun crime.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I do appreciate the ideological principal of defending your constitutional rights. My question is whether owning guns will really aid you in abolishing a malicious government though? Modern democratic socialism really only serves to create the illusion of freedom anyway - it kinda works so long as we all play along by voting and distracting ourselves by indulging in consumerism - but if the people were to rise up in arms against the government we'd simply invoke their full wrath, and it wouldn't be pretty. You don't really think they'd just call off the army and surrender to a state militia?

I don't mean to attack your core values, I just don't think arming the people with guns is as effective a weapon against a corrupt government as arming them with education and knowledge about what really goes on and how to use their voice to speak out about it. It's not fair to look at a country which has already been taken over by an oppressive dictatorship in retrospect and say that freedom of speech would do nothing to help the people now (although it may well be true). It is fair to say that dropping in a bunch of guns would do nothing to help them against a regime which has already clearly demonstrated such contempt for its people. Which is why I say that having guns wouldn't prevent it from happening in the first place either. Can't fight fire with fire is how the old adage goes.

I'd like to think that governments are in fact instituted among men & women - who are human beings like you and I - with the same capacity for good as for evil as any one of us, and that given a chance to think about it they'd realise there are better ways to govern than by an iron fist. We need to get into their world and talk to them, let them know we're not just commodities but are people just like they are. If they don't respect us, pointing a gun at them will just cause them to point a much bigger one back at us.

I'm from Australia by the way. We don't have it too bad down here, the low (practically zero) gun violence is certainly a plus, but we have our issues just like any country really (such as a fractional reserve banking system for a start).

Seems to me the real issue is not being able to trust your government and military to not use their power against you. Maybe fixing that should take precedence over maintaining the right to stockpile automatic assault rifles to use in defence against them.

Lets be real here, if that's the reasoning behind keeping the right you might want to further amend it to include the right to keep a tank parked in your backyard and anti-aircraft missiles on your roof. Should it come to needing to defend yourself against your own government guns aren't going to help you - theirs will always be bigger, and better trained.

In the meantime, privately owned guns wind up being used against citizens like you and me. Fighting for an ideological right that is clearly costing lives on a daily basis doesn't make sense to me. I live in a country with a reasonably benign government that banned guns of any form some time ago. Seems to be working OK so far, why not give it a try? You might as well start trusting someone, put someone in a position of power who you think might be trustworthy, believe in your ability to know who that person is, learn from past mistakes. I'm not making any suggestions as to who that might be, but I'd go for the person less likely to cause me to want or need to own a gun.

ps. I thought separation of church and state was actually in the constitution? If it's not, that might be a good place to start. That guy you have at the moment seemed to use his faith to justify and fuel his warmongering.