There's also a large black market for dangerous hit-men. Should we legalize the murder of adults on that basis?

Oh, so doing a good Prince's job (protecting his people from their enemies) is now something to be ashamed of? You should be proud that you take it up the rear from another man, but ashamed that you kill to protect your countrymen? The world really is turned upside down.

I saw your response to my post. I guess I agree more than disagree, but I do think it will hamper our long term combat readiness. Our national defense will suffer because of this decision. It perhaps won't be totally destroyed, but it still will be affected because violations of male-female gender roles cannot go without consequences.

You are not addressing the real heart of the matter. The real heart of the matter is the progressive loss of the diversity between men and women. I do think this will have negative consequences on the battlefield, but those will be less felt than the negative consequences it has for male-female relationships overall. When men are not being the protectors and women are not being the nurturers, it will result in damage to society. It is already rearing its ugly head in the moral anarchy of the youth (I'm a "youth") of our generation. With women deployed in faraway lands, there will be no one left to keep the home fires burning, so to speak, and we will all suffer.

Your problem, DSMike, is you see this as some kind of attack on women from us Traditional Conservatives. You are wrong. The actual position of real Conservative Traditionalists is that men and women have separate roles to play in society, and one of the male roles is to protect women. By putting women in combat roles, you are subverting those roles. Doing that is bad news for everyone involved because it devalues true human nature and will result in negative consequences, not just in combat, but even within marriages and families who have no service members in our society.

Affirming the previous poster, training has little to do with this and a soldier's natural instinct and possible ethical conviction will take over from the training. You cannot completely remove that natural order from consideration by merely doing the appropriate drill enough times.

Aside from practical considerations, which are numerous, there is the ethical consideration that men are supposed to be the protectors of women. That is the way it ought to be, and women serving in a combat role is a subversion of the order that God created. All this is doing is destroying the wonderful diversity (ironic from the liberals who love "diversity") that existed between the sexes that resulted in a healthy interest of trying to understand the other better. Now, we are becoming one giant androgynous society without men or women. I have no idea why one would want to live in such a world, but in seems to be the way we are going.

The problem is that "moderate" actually means "moderately liberal." They makeup almost as many votes as the Conservatives, but split decidedly Democratic. A Republican needs to unite Conservatives with just enough moderates to squeak past the finish line. In our climate, that seems unlikely.

Abolitionism was not very popular either.

If you understood legal manners, you would understand that the court did not rule on the assault weapons issue. Any discussion in a court opinion not directly relevant to the issue at hand is called "dicta" and is not binding authority. Furthermore, there is older legal precedent that implies that it is the right of every American to bare arms equivalent to what the average infantry soldier would bare.

So?