It’s always a good time to kick the can down the road.
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I’m very pro gun rights, and I’ve had this same argument a hundred times. You don’t own a gun for target practice or dick-waving, you own it for when you need to kill someone or something. It’s not a fucking toy to be fetishized. If owning one makes you feel better about yourself, you can’t be trusted with it. If you have the fucking narcissistic gall to carry it around a department store, you deserve to live in a cage.
Look- I will stand up and argue on behalf of hunters, because I know what it’s like to go hungry, and I’ve slaughtered my own livestock for food. And I will argue the whole defense of tyranny line because:
- I don’t trust Donald J Trump to have authority over who is and isn’t allowed to have a gun; and
- because I can’t for the life of me argue that only the police should be allowed guns, while simultaneously railing against those same police shooting unarmed black men and peaceful protesters without provocation. That’s something you don’t get to have both ways.
But violence is a last resort, not your first course of action. Guns are killing machines, period. You pick up a gun, you should be terrified of what it can do. If that kind of power gets your rocks off, you’re someone who shouldn’t be trusted with a butter knife.
Personally, I think we should be reframing the second amendment not as a right, but as a duty- and reserving the ability to tell someone that no, they are not fit for that duty.
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when hands are outlawed, only outlaws will have hands 
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proves, not makes. horse, cart.
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I enjoy archery. Everyone at every target range I’ve been to uses target tips to practice marksmanship rather than the razor-edged broadheads used by hunters, because we see the “dangerous/potentially lethal” thing as a bug rather than a feature. Most target ranges don’t even allow the use of broadheads.
I haven’t heard of any gun ranges that only allow shooters to use wax bullets.
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You must remember this
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That’s the other half of the coin. The 2A was intended to be IN LIEU OF a military.
What I would like to see personally, would be to keep the Coast Guard, a few SEAL/Special Forces groups, and enough techs to man the radar and nukes. Disband the rest of the military, and make National Guard service mandatory for able bodied adults (say, with reduced time commitment after basic training). Everyone is issued their service weapons, which they are henceforth responsible for. If you can’t hack the basic training, including a psych eval and showing that you’re responsible with your weapon, then you don’t get another chance. Then eliminate SWAT teams and military gear for police. If a situation comes up, the force may deputize whomever is handy, since they will have had training.
Because as far as I’m concerned, that’s as close to the original intent- a vision I believe in- as I think we can get.
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Again with the “needs it’s own thread”, but…
I think that what we call toxic masculinity evolved for a reason, and I think it’s a worthwhile and necessary adaptation for dealing with certain situations- like fight or flight, or going into shock, or having a fever.
But here’s the thing: It’s a crisis response. It’s not a way to live. It’s something to be turned on when you need to clear the burning building and decide which bystanders can be saved and which need to be sacrificed, and then turned off when that moment is over, so that you can go on living like a civilized, socialized human being.
And I can’t help but think that what we’re seeing is the natural result of creating a society where every moment feels like a crisis.
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Whenever takes a shot at Trump. If it’s a danger to him personally, he’ll sign an executive order banning all firearms inside of an hour.
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So it’s not at all true that “nothing changes.” In fact, a remarkable research paper published in 2016 by Harvard’s Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin found that between 1989 and 2014, the most probable policy response to a mass shooting was a loosening of gun laws.
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Much of the US gun debate essentially boils down to a contest between “we should maintain domination over the working class by disarming them” and “we should maintain domination over the working class by arming ourselves”.
Notice how the “bad” gun owners are constantly portrayed as poor black people in the cities or poor rednecks in the country?
Whereas middle class suburban whites and wealthy rural landowners are the canonical image of the “responsible gun owner”. Despite the point that domestic violence handgun use in the suburbs forms a core part of the firearm murder toll.
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It wasn’t about specific types of arms but about people’s right to defend themselves, largely from improper actions by the government. Aside from the fact that they had just fought off their previous government, like much of our early law, it comes from English common law.
The English had a bill of rights from the 1600s when Protestants and Catholics were fighting which was to redress the situation wherein the government “By causing severall good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when Papists were both Armed and Imployed contrary to Law.” (One could interpret that as perhaps being a time when well-armed police were exceeding their authority, getting away with breaking the law, and disproportionately targeting minorities.)
If read that it was intended to allow people to arm so as to defend themselves against a hostile government, then there’s no way that they would have intended to limit it to muskets. They would see it as whatever armaments the average government police/soldier would use, at least. And in fact, legal terminology which has been used before in multiple cases explicitly states that it applies to “ordinary military equipment; [but] the legislature have the power to prohibit the keeping or wearing weapons dangerous to the peace and safety of the citizens, and which are not usual in civilized warfare.”
Our police and soldiers on average use semiautomatic weapons, with some allowed to use automatics. However, we all see a need for a limit, we don’t let random people bear nukes. So the devil’s in the details. Licensing (requiring training/testing) and registration, even for ‘ordinary military equipment’ sound good. But the strong opposition to them is because they result in giving a list to the government of people to persecute and weapons to confiscate, in the event that a bad government comes into power.
I’m sure we can all imagine a government where someone might get elected who would say “get the list of all registered people with muslim-sounding names and confiscate their weapons” or something like that. The people against it fear just that scenario (except turned against them of course).
So how do you reconcile giving a government that list in such a way that they can’t abuse it?
Or do we just say it’s a flawed premise and people can’t defend themselves against a bad government? (If they could, why do they fear the government having that list anyway?) The U.S. comes from a line that has fought multiple wars over that exact thing, and it’s deep in our idealism.
I’m in favor of stronger licensing and registration, but I have no idea how to solve those points.
The 14th amendment (which extended the bill of rights to apply at lower levels after the civil war) was partially to address that. Specifically to prevent states or municipalities from enacting gun control laws that might be prejudiced. Then the article gives a prime example from 100 years later:
The Panthers responded to racial violence by patrolling black neighborhoods brandishing guns — in an effort to police the police.
[…] The Panthers sought to protect themselves and other law-abiding citizens against indiscriminate violence perpetrated by police forces.
That sounds like a situation being faced today, 50 years later. And in fact, within this decade the Supreme Court has dealt with the 14th amendment bit at least a couple of times (to uphold that state/local gun control cannot override the 2nd amendment). How do you safely remove that right without endangering minorities?
We’re facing the same problems again and again. Given that the problems of the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s that all led to this all involved police/government abuse of authority (often against minorities), and that’s why people demand the right to arm, that may be a problem that needs to be addressed before gun control will become acceptable enough to pass.
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Note what happened to the Panthers. The 2A has never really been extended to Black America.
Rights on paper are only valuable so long as the state respects the rule of law.
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Is it possible that you are using toxic masculinity to describe something else?
"The concept of toxic masculinity is used in the social sciences to describe traditional norms of behavior among men in contemporary American and European society that are associated with detrimental social and psychological effects. Such “toxic” masculine norms include dominance, devaluation of women, extreme self-reliance, and the suppression of emotions.
Conformity with certain traits viewed as traditionally male, such as misogyny, homophobia, and violence, can be considered “toxic” due to harmful effects on others in society, while related traits, including self-reliance and the stifling of emotions, are correlated with harm to men themselves through psychological problems such as depression, increased stress, and substance abuse. Other traditionally masculine traits such as devotion to work, pride in excelling at sports, and providing for one’s family, are not considered to be toxic."
Because the reality is that isolation, extreme, self reliance and the repression of all emotions other than anger kills men, either in the immediate due to violence, or in the long term due to stress over time or in the abscence of support systems. None of it neccesary in leadership or survival stress management. It will hinder your shock response and prolong your fever.
I agree that we are living in high stress levels and mental pain, and in the abscence of coping skills and the ability to process emotions, people are resorting to extremes.
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And if a non-lethal but just-as-accurate form of ammunition was readily available do you think most gun owners would opt for that instead of the little metal bits designed to kill? If not, let’s drop the comparisons to archery.
Heck, let’s drop the comparison to archery anyway unless we get to a point where tens of thousands of Americans are killed with arrows every year. Ditto javelin and fencing.
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I get what you’re saying, but it comes across as what academics call “essentialist.” You’re implying, for instance, that if a women springs into action against a threat, she’s suddenly acting like a man.
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make the time
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Oh bullshit. If that was the point of the amendment, they sure did a phenomenally shitty job of putting that intent into writing. “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” does not at first or even twentieth glance read as “people should be allowed to own as much weaponry as they want in case the government turns evil”. (It also doesn’t even read as a coherent sentence, but that’s somewhat beside the point.)
Why does every gun nut seem to forget and/or intentionally ignore the “well-regulated militia” part of this fucking thing? The United States had no standing army in 1789, so it made perfect sense to ensure that the citizenry could be called up to defend the United States in times of war with the expectation that they already had the necessary training and hardware. We have a professional military now; the second amendment is redundant in this context, and expecting everyday people with sixteen assault rifles and zero training to be able to go toe-to-toe with a highly-trained multi-billion-dollar professional fighting force with both land, sea, and air superiority is both stupid and dangerous. The best case outcome to such a scenario would be permanent military occupation of the United States, ala Afghanistan and Iraq.
We proscribe rules and restrictions around rights in this country all the time. The right to vote, IMO the most sacrosanct of rights in any democracy, is under constant assault by Republicans for infractions far less common and damaging to the foundation of the republic than mass shootings. The only time it’s functionally impossible to institute some form of enforced responsibility or consequence for a right seems to be when guns (and only ever specifically guns, not “arms” in general) are involved. That’s fucked.
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Also, if the right-wingers who interpret the Amendment that way are really worried about a tyrannical government then shouldn’t they be AGAINST a ridiculously huge and well-equipped military instead of in favor of it?
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You keep trying to trick me into adding to your already grotesque hoard of Likes 
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