Or the well regulated part.
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If I’m remembering Heller right, Scalia makes the argument that the “bear = carry” meaning suggests to carry in order to offend or defend – citing Ginsburg of all people.
At the time of the founding, as now, to “bear” meant to “carry.” […] When used with “arms,” however, the term has a meaning that refers to carrying for a particular purpose—confrontation. […] “[s]urely a most familiar meaning is, as the Constitution’s Second Amendment … indicate[s]: ‘wear, bear, or carry … upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose … of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person.'"
There is interesting linguistic discussion on what the 2nd would have meant in contemporary language, including analysis of the phrase “keep and bear arms” and its parts. Linguist Neal Goldfarb did a whole series on a corpus-based analysis of the linguistics of the 2nd Amendment. Summary: it’s complicated, though Goldfarb roundly disagrees with Scalia’s opinion on the above point (settling on “bear arms” as specifically referring to carrying arms for military purposes). It gets more complicated when you look at “keep and bear arms” together, though Goldfarb finds some evidence to suggest that the historical use of the phrase connoted militia service in particular.
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If gun ownership had mandatory liability insurance like cars, illegal gun trafficking would reduce dramatically. Creating national level paper trails of ownership makes straw buying more difficult.
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Thanks for the info. Skimming through the paper, I didn’t see where they broke down deaths between homicides, suicides, and accidents. If the increase in adolescent gun deaths is partly due to suicide, that too is concerning.
I read that the rise of social media is linked to an increase in suicides in young girls, but I know that doesn’t account for all of it. This pandemic can not be helping things.
Absolutely if I have a teenager in my house, I would want everything (guns, drugs, poisons) secured to prevent facilitating a suicide. 
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Our entire system of government really shouldn’t be determined by linguistic obscurity… it should be based on what protects the rights of everyone in the country. Anything else is just an attempt to keep most of us in some form of subjugation.
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yeah, through and through it reads militia. which makes sense because there was no standing army and they wanted “the people” to be able to self organize. these days that’d be the state national guards
other interpretations seem disingenuous at best
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Don’t inappropriately attribute rationality to that argument. The US has massive gun control that can only be attributed to the “well-regulated” phrase, Constitutionally. We don’t allow prisoners to have firearms, we don’t allow babies to have firearms. You can’t carry in most public schools, airports, or on planes. Most states prohibit felons from buying firearms. So the whole myth that the 2A prohibits gun control is nonsense. What gun advocates are really saying is that they personally are allowed to do anything they want. It’s bizarre wishful thinking that unfortunately is the practical reality.
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It’s a crying shame that Thomas and Alito didn’t blindly follow him in that vote…
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safer inside the cage, less safe outside the cage.
the thickening of the pillars and shortening of the windshields and rear glass/windows has allowed drivers to plow into each other with less death, but the subsequent decrease in visibility has had an increased impact (get it?) on pedestrians.
for me, the lede is that deaths from car ownership has been and still is pretty much neck-and-neck with deaths from gun ownership.
and yet, with all that regulation in place, cars are still about as deadly as guns. with the same regulations in place for guns, we can assume cars would once again become the most deadly machines in the US. but cars are not a hot-button political issue, as they’re used equally by the left and right. so the danger will always be mostly ignored.
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It was a bit of a double factor - people drove a lot less (and kids were generally trapped at home) in 2020 but also a lot of households bought guns (and greatly increased the gun death rate overall), and kids were spending more time at home with guns than at school. 2020 provided incredibly solid evidence that more guns = more deaths. Evidence that police (and the right in general) have been desperate to ignore, coming up with fantasies of how BLM somehow made cops unable to “do their jobs” (never mind that all evidence shows that their jobs don’t involve reducing murder rates), despite the fact that the gun death toll had already increased before the BLM protests even happened (much less any sort of blowback on police).
Also, you know, the whole “well regulated” bit.
You can have all the guns you want! Ammo, on the other hand…
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Only if one ignores hours of use per injury or fatality. Then, suddenly, the difference becomes stark again. Fatalities per hour of use of firearms is a bajillion times higher for firearms than cars.
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A huge difference to me, though, is that the US intentionally built up an infrastructure (and tore down existing ones) to make cars and driving a necessary part of living life in this country for most USians. There’s no such thing around guns. Most of us would be able to carry out our regular daily activities just fine without guns.
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If people drove their guns to work or school, traffic would be polite! /s
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Car safety is constantly being improved. Car regulations are constantly being revised to support increased safety. That guns can be improved in safety to a degree that something else passes it in the amount of harm done to people is an argument for doing so; not an argument to let more people die.
Cars also see far more hours of service than guns do. A comparison should include amounts of utilization. Most people go to the range once a month or so, if ever. Most people use their cars several times a day.
It’s also true that cars are not designed as weapons- their main functions is not harming people. It’s perfectly reasonable to hold things designed to harm people to additional scrutiny over things that aren’t.
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oh, I definitely concede that point. I’m very much against the forcing of car ownership and it’s infrastructure. decreasing the number of cars on the road is the healthiest path to decreasing their danger over marginal gains from making impacts safer.
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neither are brooms. and brooms don’t kill anyone. cars aren’t designed to hurt or kill people, true. yet their death toll is still astronomical. the normalization of such is my issue.
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There have been quite a lot of people sexually assaulted with broom handles - some who died. They’ve also been used as bludgeoning weapons.
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you’re right, we really need to implement broom testing and licensing.
How about we start with firearms and see how that goes?
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