The right to bear arms?

On Wednesday, October 29, 2003, at 09:37 PM, Ed Minchau wrote:

>> Not in my colony. You're welcome to have them [firearms] in yours.
>>
>
> Good luck defending your colony against those that do.

Firearms are useful weapons inside a habitat, but getting into a
habitat uninvited is a bit tricky (our airlock will be operated from
the inside). My habitat will, of course, have external defenses in
case the trigger-happy think its easier to take ours rather than just
build another. The nature of these defenses is TBD, but I don't see
firearms randomly distributed in the population as very useful -- just
as the widespread availability of weapons in Iraq failed to do anything
to stop the American invasion (although RPGs and land mines have been
handy for knocking off a soldier or two every couple of days since
then, these are illegal even in the US. Also, somehow I think Iraq
would be better served by other forms of resistance, and I don't like
to see our boys in body-bags).

Space tourism could be our ticket to the stars. Save your pennies,
suborbital flights for $100,000 may start in 2005! See
http://www.spaceadventures.com/suborbital for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.