Yup, the defense of the poor, sad white boy has begun.
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It would seem to me that if, even when tested under fairly optimal conditions with ordinary civilians during a time when voluntary state militias were the ideal form of civil defense during wartime, the Second Amendment failed to prove its functional utility, it’s fundamentally broken and needs to be scrapped. To say nothing of the complete inversion of federal authority to make and wage war in the intervening 200 years effectively eradicating the primary reason for securing the underlying right to arms in the first place.
We’ve scrapped broken amendments based on improper assumptions and painfully-learned lessons before, there’s no reason not to do it again. In which case, if we eliminate the Second Amendment because its central purpose of ensuring a well-armed populace from which to draw up a militia is now centuries out of date and proved to be ineffective in real-world trials, what other purposes would you propose to justify an unregulated constitutional right to own firearms?
Also, if you want to talk about regulated individual rights, let’s talk about this:
an establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof; or … the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Ever heard of a free speech zone, or needing a permit to protest? The concept of unlawful assembly? Those seem like pretty substantial regulations and restrictions on protected First Amendment rights, despite the first clause of the amendment being even more explicit in saying that Congress shall make no law restricting them. Why does the Second Amendment get such an unyielding and unqualified free pass?
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It doesn’t. It is FAR from unregulated. There are a ton of laws on guns. The most sweeping and significant FEDERAL laws (and there are many, many more state and local laws):
National Firearm Act of 1934 - Highly restricted full autos, short-barrelled shotguns and rifles, and suppressors, disguised or improvised firearms.
Federal Firearms Act of 1938 - Set up first Federal Firearms License, bans felons from possession
Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets act of 1968 - raises handgun buying age to 21
Gun Control act of 1968 - lots of things, but mainly made it so you had to go through an FFL for new guns and used guns over state lines.
Firearm Owners Protect Act 1988 - albeit, mixed bag, banned new registered machine guns to the NFA list. ATF has to clear all NFA sales.
Undetectable Firearms Act 1988 - Someone watched a movie about an undetectable ceramic gun.
Gun Free School Zones Act 1990 - no guns in schools.
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act 1993 - set up NICS background checks for all new sales
Federal Assault Weapons Ban 1994 - banned certain assault weapons - though this sun set
One may want new laws, fine, but don’t act like it’s 1776 with zero laws on the books.
Every time new firearm legislation or regulation is proposed by officials or even suggested by commenters, you’ve been here to be loudly and proudly against it. Every. Time. Regardless of purpose, scope, target, or mechanism for enforcement. Every. Time. You’ve opposed tighter licensing requirements. You’ve opposed strengthening background checks. You’ve opposed removing guns from those who have committed domestic violence (a massive red flag and reliable indicator of future willingness to use a gun to murder someone). You’ve opposed insurance mandates. You’ve opposed buy-back programs. You’ve opposed reinstating the assault weapons ban from the 1990s, despite evidence that it succeeded in reducing gun deaths and that deaths spiked again after the ban lapsed. In fact, you’ve opposed bans of all kinds, be it on extended magazines, bump stocks, handguns, or rifles. You’ve opposed literally any steps to try to reduce the ratio of guns to human beings in this country to less than 1.
You’ve argued against every piece of evidence that has ever been provided on this forum illustrating that reducing firearm ownership reduces gun violence, mass shootings, and the deaths of innocent people. You’re always first out of the starting block whenever the second amendment comes up, and you wield it like a cudgel every time some new form of legislation is introduced, or someone suggests that maybe an unassailable right to a deadly weapon with high portability, long-range lethality, and pinpoint accuracy is perhaps not the best way to run a civil society. Basically the only talking point you’ve ever backed away from here is that the NRA is a rational force merely fighting for the rights of everyday gun owners, and it seems like the only reason you’ve stepped away from that is because they’ve become so unflinchingly and nakedly corrupt, racist, and fascist that even you can’t deny it anymore.
So why don’t you answer my question?
what other [non-militia] purposes would you propose to justify an unregulated constitutional right to own firearms?
What gives you the right to your toys when literal scores people are being killed by them every day? What gives you the right to your toys when people with easy access to firearms are murdering men, women, and children at rates at or above those of automobile fatalities every year? What gives you the right to your toys when it’s easier to shoot a waitress in the head over being asked to put out your cigarette than use your words like a fucking adult? (Hell, just google “waitress shot” if you want a seemingly unending litany of horror stories where women have been murdered by responsible gun owners insecure asshole men with easy access to personal firearms and a short fucking temper.)
People are being murdered in their homes. In their offices, newsrooms, and city buildings. At airports and hospitals. In their temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques. At their colleges, high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, and pre-schools. At concerts, night clubs, movie theaters, bars, and bowling alleys. In shopping malls and yoga studios and outdoor festivals and restaurants. Even on military bases and at political events. There are no safe places left to hide from gun violence in America. Mass shootings are now common enough in this country that survivors are being killed in subsequent mass shootings. You can argue that gun-free zones don’t work until you’re blue in the face, but even reasonable precautions and good-guys-with-guns are not enough to protect people from killers with access to a bottomless ocean of firepower and a determination to use it.
So I will ask you again.
What.
Gives.
You.
The.
Right?
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You’re right about the “people” part, but wrong about this. The “well regulated militia” phrase is structured as a predicate clause, such that everything that follows is dependent on the condition laid out in the clause. Nowhere else in the Constitution or contemporary documents is such a phase used as, “for example, [this thing].”
Completely incorrect. “Regulated” is used multiple times in the Constitution exactly as in the execution of laws. Again, nowhere else in the Constitution is it used as your alternate meaning.
ETA: The word “regulate, regulated, regulations, etc.” occurs 12 times in the US Constitution in addition to the occurrence in the 2nd A. Each time it refers to the enforcement of laws.
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As long as the children are Brown we tend to applaud it.
And that is a thorough damnation of the US
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More to the point, “regulated” at the time and in this particular context meant “trained and drilled” by a professional soldier (usually the equivalent of an NCO). For example, the original 1778 U.S. army field manual, von Steuben’s “blue book”, was titled “The Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States”. The term was basically shorthand for “by-the-book training”.
The Framers didn’t envision a bunch of amateur yahoos taking potshots with muskets winning a war against a foreign oppressor. They knew from their own recent experience that guerilla warfare had its limits against a global military power like Britain, and that discipline and organisation and regular training were the only ways an American militia could prevail in battle.
That one term is more evidence that the original primary intent of 2nd Amendment was more about establishing citizen militias like today’s National Guard – certainly more than it was about letting insecure fantasists fondle their collections of masculinity totems.
[ETA: this is the core irony of Scalia being regarded as the great “originalist” in re: Heller]
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What gives me the right?
It’s the same right everyone else has to be for more gun control.
Why I am I against most suggestions?
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They aren’t usually well thought out and many times completely ignorant of the subject they want to regulate. There have been many suggestions in this thread alone, such as making a ballistics database of all new weapons, like they don’t have the money to process a million rape kits, but will plug in a shell casing to get a match in a computer. Like CSI is real life (it’s not). Nor is the science on this 100% - it can help eliminate matches, but not always 100% on if the matches are the same. Massachusetts had such a program and they shut it down because it didn’t solve any crimes and cost millions per year. This problem won’t be solved by a technocratic law, where everything is in proper order and when everyone follows the rules, everyone will be safe. That’s not how reality works.
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They don’t address the causes of most crime and violence and our unique systemic socioeconomic situations that makes us harder to compare directly against other nations. (i.e. our systemic racism has caused massive, unnecessary poverty which leads to more crime. As well as the neglect of our poor rural areas.) Magically wish away the guns tomorrow and the violence from this issue would still be there.
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We have had a massive, nearly halving of the homicide rate since the 90s with out sweeping gun reform, proving that there are solutions that include not becoming more draconian.
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Most suggestions would be largely ineffective against the two biggest vectors in homicides, street level crime and domestic violence.
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Suggestions that might put a dent in these numbers will greatly disproportionately effect previously legal gun owners. And like all laws, be leveraged against minorities disproportionately.
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Because two of the nations held up as shining examples of proper gun laws all lead to massive bans and turn ins. That is one huge reason for hard-line positions on some issues such as registration. Even if that isn’t the true intent at the time, it can and most likely will be used later down the road.
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Because even with the US having a higher than some other nations homicide rate, the number is still very low. The reality is most homicides aren’t random, they are people you know. The headline grabbing mass shootings are statistically extremely unlikely to happen to you, but are the “scariest” because they are mostly random. “Normal” murders you can avoid by not being involved in crime, staying out of certain neighborhoods, etc. Random shootings can happen anywhere because that is the point of these people. Never mind the tools for this sort of thing have been there since the early 1900s, something in the zeitgeist has changed. But these sort of things are going to be nigh impossible to stop unless you get super draconian. How are you going to filter out a sale from a guy who, until now, has done nothing wrong?
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These anecdotal evidences are appeals to emotion and are just like so many other times in our recent history where a serious issue is involved, are promoting ham-fisted solutions. It makes for great evidence to promote cognitive dissonance, and allow one to ignore that the US is much safer than it was when I was in high school. I have seen this time and again in our history and I disagree with all of it:
- This crack epidemic is a real problem - Solution: crack down, ban it, and lock them up, destroying the family unit for a generation, shooting up prison numbers and bolstering the whole prison industrial complex, use it as a tool to target minorities. (Cocaine penalties are much more forgiving.)
- This drinking alcohol is causing some real problems - Solution: crack down and ban it and lock them up - leading to the most lucrative black market up to that point history and some of the most violent crime our nation has seen (precursor to the NFA).
- Drugs are bad, mmkay? - Solution: crack down, ban it, and lock them up. Enact a litany of laws that strip away civil rights and then exploit them. Continue along this road to where the police in some cities look like a paramilitary force and at times act like it. Resulting in the must lucrative black market in human history - one that is bathed in blood.
- A terrorist event happened - Solution: Enact security theater to make people feel safe, and then expand our domestic spying capabilities. Make public surveillance the norm. But don’t worry, you’re “safe” now.
- Bad people are doing bad things with computers - Solution: Ban cryptography. What could you pleebs ever need something like that for anyway? Or at least give us a backdoor. Only bad guys need this sort of thing.
- There is a smattering of voter fraud, so small it registers as nil - Solution: Insist on new voter ID laws that end up disenfranchising waaaaayyyy more people than the fraud it was supposed to stop.
- A google search can find you 100 stories of illegal immigrants murdering, raping, and assaulting people. (never mind they commit these crimes at or lower than the regular citizen population) - Solution: BUILD THE WALL!! BUILD THE WALL!
So many example of often times well meaning politicians enacting laws to try to tame the chaos, and end up creating bigger and arguably worse problems.
Self defense and personal freedom are the only two justifications one needs. Not that anyone needs to justify their RIGHTS to anyone. But again, this is a straw man argument because guns are not unregulated.
Actually I let A LOT of stuff go. But I get triggered when there is a really bad framing of the argument, or an egregious misrepresentation of the facts. I let most of the opinion, hyperbole (but not all), ad hominem, and slurs go.
But for every right one is passionate about, one will see replies about it. And that’s great. I’m not going to not stand up for my rights because some people don’t agree with me. And I’d never suggest others don’t chime in on things at every opportunity when something comes up they are passionate about.
That’s true. I’m glad you noticed. They were never a perfect organization, but the best one had for protecting the 2nd Amendment. But clearly their leadership is in shambles and there is A LOT of disgruntled members at this point. Their recent shenanigans are indefensible. (though it doesn’t mean every ad hominem attack on them is correct either, but I’m mostly not wasting my breath on them. Though I have corrected when historical facts are wrong.) It doesn’t mean I am abandoning what was supposed to be their core mission.
That’s true, and neither will more laws. Unless maybe those laws completely trample the rights of 80 million others through mass buy outs and confiscation, in which case, it will hinder some of these people from causing harm. Personally, that isn’t acceptable.
Just like the trampling of the rights YOU and everyone else value isn’t acceptable either - and none of you would stand for it.
Going solely by what you’ve posted here on this forum over the years: you give many people the impression that you seem to care far more about your own interests and hobbies than the safety and well being of the rest of the society which you also inhabit.
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You have to take it in the context of the times and within the text.
But I’ll let you argue with the some constitutional experts:
Warning from a Fake News site 
/s
OH hey - I guess someone posted this, but it bears repeating.
Now, this does support @Brainspore 's earlier point that it as more about the militia vs a personal right. Which I do agree with to a point. But my point still stands - based on the concept of the militia at the time, one could not have a militia with out a well armed populace to pull from.
I’ve even said one could argue if the only point of personal rights of being armed was to form a militia, and the militias have been largely supplanted by the Federal Military and the National Guard, then the 2nd Amendment is a bit obsolete. But the past two rulings is that it is a personal right and that text isn’t going anywhere.
Pressing for a revision or repeal of the language is ones prerogative.
That is a gross misrepresentation, but I guess you’re free to make it.
What I don’t understand about your position as outlined in your post: you seem to understand that there are people who should definitely not have guns. Whether it is because of the real risk they present to themselves or others, or just general lack of responsibility or impulse control. Wouldn’t it make sense to prohibit those people from acquiring and/or possessing firearms?
At that point it’s just figuring out where to draw the line, not whether there is a line. Your post seems to contradict that, by asserting that there should not/cannot be a line.
ETA:
I did. It is 2A extremists who twist the words of the very plain English in the document to fit their wishes, not the other way around. Don’t get me started on Scalia. That SOB decided what he wanted the law to be, then distorted and twisted the words of the Constitution to fit his fever dream. Every decision he authored should be simply purged from the books.
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Better a thousand innocents be killed, than one deserving person be denied their god-given gun.
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If Scalia had been a true originalist, he would have required Heller and every other owner of a firearm in the country to spend at least one day a year with a middle-aged drill sergeant who would determine whether this person was fit to carry one. If that were the (perfectly Constitutional) law I doubt most of the mass shooters would have ever gotten their hands on one of these weapons. Neither they nor the obsessive wannabe action heroes who collect firearms as if they were Pokemon cards would stand up to this kind of scrutiny.
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So, what is your suggestion? As a self-identified legal gun-owner who presumably has a vested interest in maintaining access to your hobby, and who has also spoken out against gun violence, and with the reality that this is very much a US-centric problem - and finally, with a long list of reasons why existing proposals do not work posted above - what is your suggested solution?
Because, without one, I believe the situation basically boils down to this: “The existing level of gun violence cannot continue, in the absence of a perfect solution, a less-than-perfect solution is necessary”.
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In my experience, this has always been the go-to basis of an ammosexual’s response to any proposal of more regulation:
It may seem a ridiculously transparent gambit, but these are the same people who will, for example, claim that comparisons of per-capita firearms deaths in OECD countries have no bearing on the debate or who think that the NRA has only recently been engaged in horrible behaviour, despite BoingBoing articles like this from 13 years ago:
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Which people? We already have laws in place to prohibit felons, some mentally ill, and people with domestic abuse charges. There are holes in the system for all three because the people who are supposed to report things to NICS don’t always do their job. This would signal that the process needs to be more tightly adhered to.
I actually could support those red flag laws for domestic abuse as long as they are set up to have the issue swiftly dealt with. If they are actually a threat, then I can see a suspension leading to a loss of rights on a conviction. Domestic violence is the 2nd largest vector for murder. It isn’t a rights violation if it is in response to your actions. From what I gathered, even in states that have laws similar to this on the books already, they have a real shit record of actually double checking their guns were removed, or added to the NICS flagging system for new sales.
For mental health - obviously egregious examples should be added to the NICS flag, and I believe some are. But the problem is so many people have minor mental health issues, and most people with mental health issue aren’t actually violent, that not just ANY issue shouldn’t be a flag. This is MUCH MUCH harder to codify. If a guy punches his girlfriend and threatens to kill her, that is a signal of intent, much easier to trigger a domestic violence flag. Someone who is depressed or having an issues that aren’t outwardly violent, what mechanism can you set up that doesn’t basically include all of us from time to time?
So other than those two vectors, what else are we talking about? The problem is 90% of the time it is just the nebulous “we need more gun control”. And when one tries to narrow down what that means, most of the ideas don’t sound like good ones, and here’s why. I do have a short list of “things I could live with”, such as a licensing scheme. But I can live with voter ID laws as well. It doens’t mean I like them.
I don’t think the people who did the write up for CNN in the linked article are extremists. The one guy is head of a non-partisan National Constitution Center, and the other a Pulitzer winner.
And while one may not agree with Scalia’s opinion on the issue, he wasn’t the only one who voted that way. But I am not basing my view on Scalia’s work.
Again - gross misrepresentation.
But tell me what other rights issues where this sort of logic is defensible? I gave a whole list above.
Thank’s for asking. I’ll get back to you later, I really should get this documentation done.
No two nations will ever be directly comparable, but claiming American Exceptionalism for gun deaths has always been a weird fucking flex. “We’re so uniquely special, and by special I mean terrible, that statistical comparisons are meaningless! USA! USA!”
Okay. While you’re at it, let’s just abandon all statistical analysis between the individual states for things like economic vitality, unemployment, and education. Let’s stop bothering to try and compare the health care outcomes in different countries because they’re so culturally distinct. Social science will never make perfect one-to-one comparisons, so let’s just chuck it altogether. Heck, you can’t even compare this period in history to other periods in history because culture and social mores change, so things like birth rate trends and historical crime rates are also fundamentally incompatible and we should give those up too. Data analysis is dead!
The thing is, even accounting for the overall higher rates of homicide and violence in the US, firearm deaths are still far higher in this country than in any other. They make up significantly smaller percentages of all deaths (be it murder, suicide, or accidental) in every other wealthy nation on Earth compared to the US.
Yes, there’s a lot of work that we as a country need to do to reduce income inequality and improve generational outcomes for people of color, and a lot of that work would likely go some distance toward addressing the overall crime rate. But socioeconomic solutions won’t do anything to impact the disproportionately large usage of guns to commit those crimes compared to other countries, because the US is certainly unique in its bone-headed determination to ensure that everyone who wants a gun can have one.
True. But: first of all, nobody is expecting this problem (and it is a problem) to be solved overnight. And second of all, the violence might still be there, but it would be comparatively difficult to maintain the death rate without all of those guns laying around.
Crime overall has dropped dramatically since the 90s. There’s been reasonably convincing evidence that the leaded gasoline ban had something to do with that reduction – turns out not poisoning people’s brains is a good idea, who knew.
Even with that reduction, though, gun violence is a disproportionately massive problem in the US. If you break out the numbers, a 2016 study found that “[m]ore than two thirds of the homicides in the United States are firearm homicides; by contrast, firearm homicide accounts for less than 20% of homicides in the other high-income countries.”
On top of that, gun deaths specifically haven’t changed much, and both suicides and homicides are in fact up since the turn of the century, with homicides in particular spiking significantly in the past few years (can’t imagine what that’s about…):
(data via the CDC)
Also spare me your eternal attempts to disentangle suicide from gun violence in this conversation. Suicidal ideation is dangerous, and guns make it disturbingly easy to act on them in an irreversible way. We’ve taken steps to eliminate or at least mitigate other such quick-and-easy mechanisms of committing suicide before (gas ovens, overpasses, etc.); guns should be no different.
As I’ve said before, guns kill as many people in the US as automobiles. Somehow automobile deaths are a focus of intense research and development in terms of improving their safety and developing new technologies to mitigate these deaths as much as possible. Meanwhile, firearms manufacturers are selling their weapons as penis extenders and encouraging people to arm themselves “just in case”, despite what you yourself point out is a drastic reduction in crime in this country, leaving everyone broadly safer than they were in the 70s. So what’s the deal with paranoid self-defense arguments?
And a good indicator for getting murdered by someone you know is owning a gun. Weird.
So explain to me again why you think prohibiting people who commit domestic violence from owning guns is a useless solution.
You’re going to have to explain to me why this is a problem when that is, in fact, the entire point. You can’t reduce gun violence without reducing access to guns. You’re trying to argue for some perfect world where “everyone follows the rules, [and] everyone will be safe. That’s not how reality works.” Gun owners are like any other group: the more of them there are, the more likely it is that someone is going to do something violent or stupid. Gun owners are, however, uniquely a group where doing something violent or stupid is extremely likely to result in someone being dead at the end of it. Reduce the pool, reduce the casualties.
Well, there were all those people getting murdered with tommy guns during prohibition, but I’m sure banning those had no impact on the murder rate at the time whatsoever, and also it was a culturally different period so statistical comparisons are invalid!
By not making it a legal requirement that he be allowed to have one. Is this a trick question?
Other countries have pretty good systems for how to handle gun ownership, and they’re based on documented need. If you want a gun, you have to explain why you need it. You can’t just waltz into a Walmart and walk out with a brand new rifle or handgun like you’re buying a box of cereal.
I’m glad you’re willing to compare the 2-3 cases of voter fraud per year (actually statistically nil) to the 15,000 people killed by guns every year (not actually statistically nil and in fact a major cause of death in the US). I’m not. Just because it’s less rare than heart disease doesn’t make it not important.
To your broader point that prohibition never works: fine. Alcoholic prohibition was a disaster, and the temperance movement was a bit off their rocker. However, attitudes towards alcohol and drunkenness have changed significantly over the past century, thanks in no small part to those who pushed back against its place in the status quo. Drunk driving is heavily punished, and much less of a problem than it used to be. Public drunkenness is frowned upon. “Please drink responsibly” is a tagline run underneath every beer commercial.
The war on drugs is a complicated mess of racist policy-making mixed in with some good old fashioned moral panic. The point of criminalizing marajuana was to incarcerate and disenfranchise people of color. A well regulated (ahem) system for overseeing the sorts of recreational drugs that people use regularly, as well as more assistance-based programs for those struggling with addiction, make much more sense than a blanket ban. I still don’t have a problem with showing the pharmacist my ID to buy some benadryl.
Security theater is bad, yes, as is the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism. But statistically, you’re much more likely to die from a firearm than a terrorist attack, yet we’ve done even less to mitigate that threat.
If your point is that people make stupid laws, people do that all the time. It happens, and you do your best to learn from it. But “prohibition failed, so gun control is useless” is a logical leap that the rest of the world seems pretty intent on disproving by example. Lots of countries heavily regulate firearm ownership and have far fewer problems with it than we do. Maybe, just maybe, there’s something to that?
Both of which are easily accomplished without firearms (in fact, by not owning a firearm I’m 2.7 times less likely to be murdered in my own home). Heck, I’m personal freedoming right now!
Do you really believe that people every other country that doesn’t guarantee you the right to own a firearm are somehow less free or safe than you are? Why is your sense of freedom so wrapped up in your ability to own a machine whose primary purpose is inflicting or threatening lethal violence?
I could claim a personal right to own a motor vehicle (god knows this country makes it really hard to live without one). I could claim a personal right to own fireworks. I could claim a personal right to own people. That doesn’t mean those things are rights. Owning firearms is an imagined need that you’re claiming as a right.
So, once more: if I were to write a new constitution today, and the original militia-focused intent of the second amendment was no longer relevant, what justification would you give me if you were arguing that the right to own a deadly weapon was absolutely necessary to enshrine into the highest organizational document of government?
To preemptively tackle the “tyranny! fascism!” canard… look around you. Who has all of the guns right now, and who are they deigning to wield them against? I promise you, open access to firearms has done nothing to forestall any kind of descent into fascist rights-trampling authoritarianism in this country, and the people making the argument that they should be allowed to own whatever weapons they want are broadly on the side of those doing the trampling. Guns are making this country less safe for people of color and other marginalized groups. They and their wielders are impinging on our freedoms to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So what about us?
So far the only one willing to egregiously misrepresent the text of the second amendment in this thread has been you (and Scalia), but I mean, you do you I guess.
Right! I forgot that laws can’t perfectly solve this problem, so we might as well not bother doing anything about it at all. Murder being illegal doesn’t stop people from getting murdered, so why bother outlawing it‽
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… is ultimately the reason why nothing changes.
Why change if you think of yourself as the “Best of the world!”?
As indicated by the word “seem”, it’s her impression and one that many, including myself, share with her.
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Which was the exact opposite of its intended purpose. Which was to create a pro-government militia (which in modern parlance are now called a “death squad”, “paramilitary” or “kapos”) to enforce its will on the people by armed force if necessary,
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