Who said it mentions guns by name? I specifically said arms for a reason.
The reason you can buy and AR-15 and not a grenade has nothing to do with the NRA and everything to do with the common law definition of an arm (owing to the fact the the constitution does not define them)
common-law definition “light infantry weapons which can be carried and used, together with ammunition, by a single militiaman, functionally equivalent to those commonly used by infantrymen in land warfare.”
That includes modern rifles and handguns, full-auto machine guns and shotguns, grenade and grenade launchers, flares, smoke, tear gas, incendiary rounds, and anti-tank weapons, but not heavy artillery, rockets, or bombs, or lethal chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
No precise line has been drawn as to where arms end and prohibited items begin so the debate is still open. But yes, this has everything to do with the constitution.
Hence Scott Adams’s brilliant suggestion that the government should not regulate the sale of guns, but ban the sale of bullets. A strict constructionist would have to agree that the Second Amendment allows people to carry weapons but says nothing about being allowed to fire them - outside a well regulated militia.
I have to got work soon, but please keep in mind:
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That number doesn’t reflect how many times guns were used to STOP a crime from happening that do didn’t result in the death of someone. We don’t track stats for how many times a criminal is wounded in defense, shot at and missed, or the criminals is warned of the gun or see the gun and leaves.
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They are right about criminals using guns to kill people - usually other criminals. I don’t have time to link to specific pages, but I have found this report on Milwaukee that has some great info that is more in depth than your standard FBI stats about WHO is committing gun crimes. http://city.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/Groups/cityHRC/reports/2011Reportv6.pdf
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Despite the gun crime (which is falling), tens of millions of Americans managed to hurt no one in the last year. Yet we somehow want to condemn and restrict them further for others peoples’ actions? Mmm that isn’t right and you would be an “-ist” of some sort if you did so to any other group. Gunist?
The number of people killed in this country (by guns, or other means) by criminals (and cops, etc.) is very, VERY sickening.
Banning guns isn’t going to make a difference though. Just like banning drugs and alcohol never worked.
Education and cultural changes are the only real solution. We have far too much media depicting violence as the glorious answer to problems, and far too little public example of people resolving real problems real ways. Not to mention all the attention the mass killers get - letting the next candidates know that for sure they’ll be famous.
I’m not a gun nut (not having held one in years) but I really am surprised that people who are alarmed at how our country is coming to be “ruled” (by banks and other corporations, etc.) can’t see the wisdom in the 2nd amendment. The second amendment is a direct answer to the complaints listed in the Declaration of Independence (tyranny). The patterns of history clearly show that some day we may need to take similar action - but let’s hope political process can magically start working properly before it comes to that.
If the constitution does not define them then why would we need a Constitutional Amendment to regulate them?
I’m also not buying your “common-law definition.” Just Google “arms definition” and the very first result includes “artillery” right next to “firearms.” I know very few people who think it should be legal for most people to own and use artillery.
No precise line has been drawn as to where arms end and prohibited items begin so the debate is still open.
Exactly. The weapons available today are very different than anything the Founders could have imagined. We’ve already spent two centuries putting all kinds of limits on what kinds of “arms” to allow and disallow, so it’s silly to argue that a Constitutional Amendment would be required to regulate guns any differently than we do now.
Those people are not in charge of our legal system. What they think doesn’t really matter
Just so you know, you can buy grenades and grenade launchers legally in the U.S… You just have to pay the $200 ATF license. You can legally buy tanks, anti tank guns, grenade launchers, etc.
Because the amendment was written to protect all arms and not just the ones you happen to like. You will need a constitutional amendment to abolish the right to keep and bear arms of any type.
As for you buying my common law definition, it really doesn’t matter since that’s how the courts see it.
Again, it also doesn’t reflect how many times guns were used to commit crimes that didn’t result in death. Muggings, bank or liquor store holdups, non-lethal shootings, rapists who kept their victims from escaping or screaming for help by putting a gun to their heads, etc. etc.
Not any more than I’d need a Constitutional Amendment to regulate speech. But you’ll notice that plenty of forms of speech have restrictions: i.e. libel, copyright infringement, incitement to violence etc.
Honestly, as much as I don’t really like guns, I don’t care about them directly, just think that it’s crazy that in the US in 2012 there were around 15000 homicides, while in the UK there were 650, Italy 530, France and Germany 660…
There were also 13000 in Russia - I’d hope the US doesn’t want to be lumped together with that state.
I really can’t understand what is culturally wrong that leads to this orders of magnitude difference in killings between the US and Western Europe. That is what needs fixing.
As far as using the 2nd amendment to overthrow a tyrannical government goes, I think that’s just pie in the sky thinking. If you want to start a guerilla war you’ll do it regardless of what the constitution says (as we’re always told, there’s guns lying around everywhere anyway and you can make your own), and I don’t think the US Army would be very intimidated. You’d need them to be taking part in this revolution if you wanted to succeed.
You would need a Constitutional Amendment to abolish free speech… Just like you need one to abolish the right to keep and bear arms.
You do not need one to restrict manner, time, and place for either. You do know there is a difference between abolishment and restriction right?
I never argued for an outright abolishment. They haven’t abolished guns in the UK or Australia or any of the culturally-comparable nations where gun violence is orders of magnitude less common, but they have very different regulations than we do.
Copypase from my response to this article on reddit:
This study does not account for all the instances where a firearm is used for self defense that does not end in a death. Instances where brandishing a gun is enough to scare off an attacker, or where an attacker is shot but not killed.
This article lists the number of such instances at around 67,700 per year. That figure comes from a study done by the Violence Policy Center, a decidedly anti-gun organization, so it’s a low estimate if anything. It’s a lot lower than the NRA’s “2 million per year” talking point, but even as a shooting sports enthusiast, I don’t trust any of their statistics.
One has to wonder that, without those 67k (at least) defensive gun uses per year, how much higher would the gun homicide number be? Probably higher than the 8k/yr it is now. Even if only five percent of those attacks thwarted by defensive use of a gun would have otherwise ended in a gun murder, that means the gun homicide rate would be over 40% higher without defensive gun use.
Yet the Supreme Court has said that that’s the meaning of the Constitution. The Constitution – in fact – protects your right to certain firearms for self-defense. Just like the Constitution – in fact – protects your right to contraception or (starting later this week) same-sex marriage and effective assistance of counsel and all sorts of other things that certainly are implied in the text, but really don’t come to the full until the Supreme Court says otherwise.
Still relevant:
“There is one argument and one argument alone for having a gun: Fuck off. I like guns! It’s not the best argument, but it’s all you’ve got.”
How so?
Maybe Vermont
The state of Vermont neither issues nor requires a permit to carry a weapon on one’s person, openly or concealed. This permissive stance on gun control known in the US as Constitutional carry, since one’s “permit” is said to be the constitution.
vs Pennsylvania, Illinois, Hawaii, Rhode Island, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, or California.
Again, do you have any reason to believe these instances are more common than instances of gun crime that did not result in death? Muggings, hold-ups, gun-facilitated rapes and other assaults, non-lethal gang shootings, etc. weren’t included in the study either. If you insist on accounting for all the times a good guy brandished a gun then you should also account for all the times a bad guy brandished a gun.
As for this study I suspect they focused on the body count because that’s an easy number to quantify. And it’s a terrifyingly large number.
The American Medical Association did a comprehensive statistical study on whether having a gun in the home makes that person safer. The conclusion was, that having a gun in the home (whether it is locked up or not) means that the gun owner or someone in his/her family has a higher likelyhood of being injured or killed by that gun than someone with no gun in the house. (That conclusion is supported by the (suicide stat) approx. 20,000 or 2/3 of the average 31,000 US gun related deaths are suicides.
Basically if you are going to kill yourself, you are more likely to do a better job of it if you have a gun in the house.
Rather like the suicide by coal gas in the 60s went down in the UK when they switched to a non-lethal cooking gas.
It is amazing to me that there are more guns than adults in the U.S. That statistic itself should cause any sane person to shudder.
Please define “criminal” as you are using it in this phrase. Typically it would be someone previously convicted of a crime – and if they are walking the streets, presumably someone who has paid their price to society for that crime already. If those people are the ones “usually” killed, why is that relevant exactly?
