Yay, GUNS!

[John Cuthber]

It's not about enjoyment. The founders intentionally added a personal right to keep and bear arms because standing armies of tyrannical governments are a threat to freedom and liberty. Why should my rights and those of the population at large be infringed as a result of the unjust and/or illegal actions of the few? I think the advocates of gun control owe me a guarantee of freedom from tyranny if they want to advocate that my rights of defense from it should be infringed in any way. When will the advocates of gun control advocate further restrictions on government?

 

So a knitting needle over 3 inches is prohibited in public places? Are the any advocates that my right to purchase a sword or a knitting needle should be prohibited just because it is prohibited in public places?

Oh dear!. I thought we had nailed the rather quaint idea that the pea shooters which the people have would be any use against the military strength of a government which spends more on "defence" than the next handful of countries put together.In essence, if you are inside an APC a muzzle flash is a clear signal for where your target is, but it isn't a threat.

 

Have you considered not voting for tyrannical governments as an alternative to carrying guns to defend yourselves from them?

 

And, odd as it may seem, the police don't arrest people for knitting in public because there's a recognised defence of "lawful reason".

But that doesn't make any difference to the fact that- unless you have a good reason, swords are, in fact banned.

So the idea that "you never hear of any advocacy to ban them." is a bit redundant: they are banned.

[MonDie]

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that analogy. Just because a hammer was could be used to kill someone doesn't mean you could sue the hammer manufacturer for a lack of safety features.

 

There is certainly negligence on someone's part in every child gun death but it is not one of the gun manufacturer. All guns have a safety position and even that is unnecessary with unloaded guns. When someone leaves a loaded gun, or a gun and the required ammunition, accessible to a child then it is their negligence that is responsible, not the manufacturer's.

 

I do not particularly believe any gun manufacturer designs their civilian products to be used to commit murder, manslaughter or accidental death of anyone. They design them primarily for defense and hunting purposes. They design them with safety features to prevent accidents. That ignorant people circumvent and/or ignore those features is not their fault.

Hammers are not designed to kill. However, they are designed to hammer, and one would kill (intentionally or not) with a hammer by way of hammering. Thus we could not make a safe hammer without totally removing its original purpose.

 

The problems:

(1) I could also hammer someone with a lamp or a two-by-four. Shooting is specific to guns.

(2) Hammering has wider application than shooting.

 

These also apply to the pill bottle analogy.

(1) Houses contain tons of things that could poison children. Pills are not unique in this respect.

(2) Pills can treat/cure disease and relieve pain. Guns do neither.

 

Let's try this for the gun and its corresponding function, shooting.

(1) Nothing else closely approximates how the gun kills.

(2) You can shoot a person to defend yourself. This has been discussed already. When someone breaks into your home or comes to mug you, they probably don't want to kill you. However, they're more likely to kill you if they realize you have a gun. Nonetheless, there are premeditating murderers, so shooting does have beneficial applications, but the extent of this is highly questionable.

 

The lawnmower doesn't enter this format at all. Unless we're actually mowing people down, lawnmower deaths have almost no relationship to the intended function.

 

Feel free to modify this, but, for ease of access, distinguish original content from modifications. Organization promotes long-term memory, and I think more organization will help this conversation progress.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Mondays Assignment: Die

[Moontanman]

An uniquely American as well as reasoned take on gun control, it's well worth watching...

 

 

Gun control in the US is an odd thing, someone here said something about pocket knives, I carry a Buck knife 5.5" blade, very sharp and heavy, I've carried a pocket knife since I was a young boy, I never even considered threatening anyone with it, never even thought of it as a weapon.

 

We live in a society that has for whatever reasons, justified or not, decided we will allow guns in the general populace. Personally I do not believe in a nanny state, I don't want my government to protect me from everything, I don't expect it, police never show up in time to prevent a crime, only investigate it after the fact.

 

On the street I rarely think of a robber as threat, if he accosts me i will give him my wallet and go about canceling my cards and such, only rarely would a real criminal want to really harm you, he wants to get away and easy as possible...

 

But, anyone who breaks into my house is playing a more deadly game, he is taking a big risk, I can avoid places of high crime when I am out and about and to be honest I have always gotten along rather well in bad neighborhoods, I guess I feel comfortable around regular people like me and I do avoid really high crime areas, no point in testing your luck... but, break into my house and you have passed a line, in my yard, I'll call the police, screw with my parked car and I will call the police, come into my home and you have shown me you have no respect whatsoever for your life or mine... i'll kill you, I will call the police but they will find a body if it is necessary I have to admit that if the intruder surrendered when confronted i wouldn't just kill him outright but make an aggressive move and the slide on my 12 gauge will chamber a round, if he is armed then it's no quarter given. If that makes me bad person then so be it, in my part of the US I have the right to defend myself from bodily harm inside my home and i will do so... I do take precautions, I use #5 shot so i won't kill the neighbors down the street if I miss and hit a wall, I would never even consider shooting anyone that I wasn't absolutely sure was an intruder, no shooting anyone hiding or through walls shit you see in the movies.

 

I was raised with guns, i know you never shoot at shadows or noises, killing someone is serious business, not some macho bullshit, it would no doubt haunt me the rest of my life. In fact the one time i held someone at gunpoint haunts me to this day, my stomach churns at the thought, but I saved my mother's life, to me that worth a little bit of gut wrenching reflection from time to time...

 

My real worry is people who buy guns and don't have a damn clue as to how to use them, what their limitations are, or what conditions to use them, it's very worrisome...

 

And the 5 yo with the gun... I'd horse whip his dad, every day for the rest of his dumbass life... a 5 yo, a rifle, the kids isn't even old enough to carry a pocket knife, you can't cure stupid, sometimes bad shit happens but usually it's because of someone who thinks he is immune to the consequences, there are always consequences...

[doG]

Oh dear!. I thought we had nailed the rather quaint idea that the pea shooters which the people have would be any use against the military strength of a government which spends more on "defence" than the next handful of countries put together.In essence, if you are inside an APC a muzzle flash is a clear signal for where your target is, but it isn't a threat.

 

Have you considered not voting for tyrannical governments as an alternative to carrying guns to defend yourselves from them?

 

And, odd as it may seem, the police don't arrest people for knitting in public because there's a recognised defence of "lawful reason".

But that doesn't make any difference to the fact that- unless you have a good reason, swords are, in fact banned.

So the idea that "you never hear of any advocacy to ban them." is a bit redundant: they are banned.

Voting doesn't work. Everyone is allowed to vote and too many that are promised gifts from the public treasury vote for the very tyrants claiming to offer more gifts from the public treasury. We've ended up with a rather sully collection of people that are now the government.

 

Swords are banned in public places but there is no restriction on buying them. They could be misused in public just as guns are. The law does not keep the unlawful in line, only the law abiding. And yet, whenever an outlaw uses a gun people start screaming that the law abiding are the ones that need to bear the consequences. That makes no sense.

[Moontanman]

Voting doesn't work. Everyone is allowed to vote and too many that are promised gifts from the public treasury vote for the very tyrants claiming to offer more gifts from the public treasury. We've ended up with a rather sully collection of people that are now the government.

 

Horse feathers, what we have are corporate welfare advocates who cringe at the thought of someone other than a wealthy corporation getting anything. The big banks and corporations own the legislators, everything else is smoke and mirrors...

 

Swords are banned in public places but there is no restriction on buying them. They could be misused in public just as guns are. The law does not keep the unlawful in line, only the law abiding. And yet, whenever an outlaw uses a gun people start screaming that the law abiding are the ones that need to bear the consequences. That makes no sense.

 

I tend to agree with this except some degree of control is needed, if you can go to a gun show and buy a gun no questions asked there is something wrong with the system..

[John Cuthber]

"We've ended up with a rather sully collection of people that are now the government."

AKA democracy.

Now all you need to do is teach them that their best interests are not actually served by a government which taxes the majority to give vast sums of money to teh rich.

 

But, even in the meantime, you are basing your support of guns on the idea that the people will attack themselves. Now, I may not have a very high opinion of the intelligence of the masses but that seems a bit extreme.

 

"They could be misused in public just as guns are."

There we go again.

It's not clear that killing someone by using a gun is misuse.

That's what guns are for, so it's use.

 

Another possible reason is that people don't often run amuck with a sword.

Also, where they do, the death toll is usually rather lower than a rogue gunman.

 

There really is a difference.

[Moontanman]

"We've ended up with a rather sully collection of people that are now the government."

AKA democracy.

Now all you need to do is teach them that their best interests are not actually served by a government which taxes the majority to give vast sums of money to teh rich.

 

But, even in the meantime, you are basing your support of guns on the idea that the people will attack themselves. Now, I may not have a very high opinion of the intelligence of the masses but that seems a bit extreme.

 

"They could be misused in public just as guns are."

There we go again.

It's not clear that killing someone by using a gun is misuse.

That's what guns are for, so it's use.

 

Another possible reason is that people don't often run amuck with a sword.

Also, where they do, the death toll is usually rather lower than a rogue gunman.

 

There really is a difference.

 

 

I agree, you run amok with a sword and someone will shoot your ass...

[overtone]

 

I think the point about the child gun death was that it's an egregious
example of the gun culture run amok. Analogous to a lawnmower with no
safety features whatsoever.

There is no such analogy, and the confusion is dangerous.

 

Human culture is not hardware, and a policy of regulating its features by physical force as if they were hardware is tyranny itself.

 

I would gladly give up that right to remove guns from the populace. The
reason being, I have weighed up the probability of the government going
tyrannical vs the probability of harm coming to me from the populace
being armed such that I consider the latter to be more likely.

Setting this up as a full scale military vs citizenry issue misleads.

 

When a society falls into an internally generated authoritarian abyss, it does not begin with the tanks rolling in - it begins with death squads, paramilitary organizations clandestinely associated with local authorities, organized crime, gangs and sects and packs coalescing against the rest of the population or some part, etc. Key to that is the vulnerability of the general citizenry to informal violence.

 

The Jim Crow and Klan era in the US ended, to the extent it actually ended, less than a generation ago. The abuse of the disarmed along the Mexican border is ongoing. Organized criminal control of metropoliltan areas in the US has a long history and almost certainly some current examples. The crazy wing of the gun rights advocate faction is largely the perpetrating faction of deliberately oppressive violence against disarmed and vulnerable groups in the US. They know from personal experience and acquaintanceship how that is done: the cooperation of local police and sheriffs as "one of us", the importance of the target being disarmed in advance. And they do not want to be that target. They have a point, there, no?

 

 

Another possible reason is that people don't often run amuck with a sword

In places where machetes are the common weapon, they do. The word "amok" comes from the language of a place where cutting weapons were the common choice.

[John Cuthber]

In places where machetes are the common weapon, they do. The word "amok" comes from the language of a place where cutting weapons were the common choice.

That's just silly.

You were asking why there isn't a hue and cry in the States for control of swords.

Pointing out that machetes are often used somewhere else is irrelevant.

 

And, since swords are practically banned (i.e. if you start waving one around, you are likely to get shot) a strict ban wouldn't achieve much more.

And the point still remains that there's an obvious defence against a man with a sword that simply won't work against a gun.

Can you outrun a bullet?

That's one of the reasons why the death toll in sword attacks is much lower (quite often zero- though the injuries are sometimes horrific).

[Moontanman]

I am beginning to think this is just another issue to polarize our society, we have so many polar issues I am beginning to wonder if it will ever be possible to have any productive talks on any issue. Religion, guns, conservative, liberal, where does it end? If liberals ever manage to grow a spine...

 

 

From where I sit, in the "South" it's not really funny at all...

[doG]

But, even in the meantime, you are basing your support of guns on the idea that the people will attack themselves. Now, I may not have a very high opinion of the intelligence of the masses but that seems a bit extreme.

Not really, I am against gun control that is unconstitutional. I am opposed to crazy people and children having access to guns but discussions about unconstitutional regulations are not an acceptable solution in my opinion because I wholly support what the constitution literally says until it is changed. Until then we should use what is legally available to us to control the consequences of the unlawful like giving a gun owner severe public punishment when a child accesses their gun and kills another.

 

Punishment in this country used to be very public and served as a valuable deterrent. Now it is very hidden and has no deterrent affect all. It is the evolution of criminal rights that causes many of these problems we see now. IMO, if we went bad to public hangings for those that willfully and wantedly commit murder then those people we be fewer and fewer.

[John Cuthber]

You do realise that the constitution is not actually holy scripture don't you?

It wasn't written with today's problems in mind and it is, unsurprisingly, not a solution to those problems.

So, if it needs changing to prevent lots of deaths, change it.

 

(and if you want to discuss the death penalty it's probably best to start another topic but the short answers to "IMO, if we went bad to public hangings for those that willfully and wantedly commit murder then those people we be fewer and fewer." are that

1 Sinking to the level of killing, just to avenge killing is not progress, it's savagery.

2 Most murders are committed in the heat of the moment, or by people who have planned them pretty much as carefully as they can.

In the first case hanging couldn't have a deterrent effect because the murderer isn't thinking about consequences.

In the second case the murderer expects to get away with it so he neither expects prison nor hanging. Since he doesn't expect to face hanging, it can't be e deterrent.

3 they sometimes get the wrong guy.)

[overtone]

 

You were asking why there isn't a hue and cry in the States for control of swords.

Pointing out that machetes are often used somewhere else is irrelevant.

I was not. You have me confused with somebody else. Machete amoking is directly relevant to the point I was making, which had nothing to do with swords in particular - people run amok, in the cultures in which they do (not all cultures enjoy that feature), with the weaponry of their culture. The phenomenon is not created by the presence of guns.

 

 

You do realise that the constitution is not actually holy scripture don't you?

It wasn't written with today's problems in mind and it is, unsurprisingly, not a solution to those problems.

So, if it needs changing to prevent lots of deaths, change it.

The short term benefit of "preventing lots of deaths" is not a good motive for amending the Constitution.

 

The main purpose of a Constitution is to prevent that kind of reasoning from being used to justify authoritarian intrusion and governmental oppression of the citizenry. And the people who wrote it were well acquainted with that problem, just as we face it today - there is nothing new about a government justifying the disarmament of its citizens as for their own good, as a safety precaution, as preventing accidents and crime and irresponsible misuse, as for the public safety and benefit. Hence the 2nd Amendment - written in to prevent that.

 

[Moontanman]

You do realise that the constitution is not actually holy scripture don't you?

It wasn't written with today's problems in mind and it is, unsurprisingly, not a solution to those problems.

So, if it needs changing to prevent lots of deaths, change it.

 

Well considering how large a percentage of the people who believe Holy Scripture is... well... the 100% inviolate word of God also believe in the 2nd Amendment is inviolate word of God fearing fathers of our country think you have just committed a new logical fallacy... oxymoron... at least you're expecting logic where none exists...

 

 

You guys can't imagine how much I wish this was a joke...

 

[Ringer]

Even with the Constitution in mind, personal ownership is not protected. It could be argued that only militia members, and their ownership is to be regulated. There is no argument based on the constitution that could hold water against gun regulation, since well regulated is strictly in the Constitution.

[John Cuthber]

Oh look! Evidence.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gun-science-proves-arming-untrained-citizens-bad-idea&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

[Moontanman]

Thanks John, for some reason I can't read that link from any other source and I've been trying to acces it. Can we get a copy online to dissect it a little? I would like to talk about use of handguns vs shotguns vs rifles in this debate. Some problems I saw had to do with the guy in south Africa who shot his girlfriend olympic champion or something, how is that relevant to a study in the US? Or are olympic champions pillars of virtue?

 

I am against handguns, I got rid of mine years ago, even trained law enforcement has had their problems with handguns.

 

Rifles have no place in home defense, especially the high powered ones like the military style rifles, the fact they are not full auto is irrelevant. A deer rifle, not a "macho" military style rifle, is potentially capable of firing many rounds as fast as the macho military style, semi auto is semi auto... but no one with two brain cells to rub together would seriously consider shooting a deer rifle inside their home or even in a city or suburban setting outside. The results could be devastating for anyone within miles, simply unacceptable...

 

Shotguns are a different matter, to make these statistics relevant the type of gun used should be broken down into categories I'm betting that use of shotguns in crime is rare as well as accidental shootings. I will concede semi auto shotguns into the semi auto rifle category for this comparison.

 

Local law enforcement, about 40 years ago, bought a bunch of semi auto 12 gauge shotguns to put in their squad cars. Somehow someone got the idea that maybe they should be tested at the range to make sure they worked correctly... you guessed it, the factory had made a mistake and the guns were full auto, the first officer who loaded one up with a full magazine of 12 gauge magnum rounds was treated to all of the rounds firing off within one second... broke his shoulder, knocked him down, and sprayed 12 gauge rounds all over the indoor range...

 

I just don't think that all guns are comparable, to a great extent it is apples and oranges and bananas, with hand apples being the main culprit, semi auto oranges coming in second, and shot bananas not even in the running...

 

As long as anyone is trying to eliminate all guns in the USA all you will get is polarization and appeals to emotions and manhood if not directly then indirectly for sure... The "pro gun" people are fanning the flames of emotions to the point that even people who are afraid of guns are buying them. I suspect the pro gun leaders are nothing but corporate lobbyists trying to maximize profits for their owners... WOW! That would be surprising ...

[john5746]

Thanks John, for some reason I can't read that link from any other source and I've been trying to acces it. Can we get a copy online to dissect it a little? I would like to talk about use of handguns vs shotguns vs rifles in this debate. Some problems I saw had to do with the guy in south Africa who shot his girlfriend olympic champion or something, how is that relevant to a study in the US? Or are olympic champions pillars of virtue?

They were using it to make a universal point, not cultural commentary or statistical evidence. The man shot his wife. Either way, by accident or rage, the gun made it much easier.

As long as anyone is trying to eliminate all guns in the USA all you will get is polarization and appeals to emotions and manhood if not directly then indirectly for sure... The "pro gun" people are fanning the flames of emotions to the point that even people who are afraid of guns are buying them. I suspect the pro gun leaders are nothing but corporate lobbyists trying to maximize profits for their owners... WOW! That would be surprising ...

Most people realize they can't eliminate all guns, just as most people realize we can't live like Quakers to combat global warming, its a big strawman. People don't even want to concede that no guns is safer than infinite guns.

I just don't think that all guns are comparable, to a great extent it is apples and oranges and bananas, with hand apples being the main culprit, semi auto oranges coming in second, and shot bananas not even in the running...

Yes, that would be a good discussion, we can have it on this forum, but where it matters won't happen, becuase guns are a religion and you can't mess with them because someone wrote something somewhere a long time ago. Edited May 8, 2013 by john5746

[John Cuthber]

At the risk of being shouted at for breach of copyright, here's the text of the Scientific American story

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 31,672 people died by guns in 2010 (the most recent year for which U.S. figures are available), a staggering number that is orders of magnitude higher than that of comparable Western democracies. What can we do about it? National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre believes he knows: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” If LaPierre means professionally trained police and military who routinely practice shooting at ranges, this observation would at least be partially true. If he means armed private citizens with little to no training, he could not be more wrong.

Consider a 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery that found that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” Pistol owners' fantasy of blowing away home-invading bad guys or street toughs holding up liquor stores is a myth debunked by the data showing that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense. I harbored this belief for the 20 years I owned a Ruger .357 Magnum with hollow-point bullets designed to shred the body of anyone who dared to break into my home, but when I learned about these statistics, I got rid of the gun.

More insights can be found in a 2013 book from Johns Hopkins University Press entitled Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, edited by Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, both professors in health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In addition to the 31,672 people killed by guns in 2010, another 73,505 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for nonfatal bullet wounds, and 337,960 nonfatal violent crimes were committed with guns. Of those 31,672 dead, 61 percent were suicides, and the vast majority of the rest were homicides by people who knew one another.

For example, of the 1,082 women and 267 men killed in 2010 by their intimate partners, 54 percent were shot by guns. Over the past quarter of a century, guns were involved in greater number of intimate partner homicides than all other causes combined. When a woman is murdered, it is most likely by her intimate partner with a gun. Regardless of what really caused Olympic track star Oscar Pistorius to shoot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp (whether he mistook her for an intruder or he snapped in a lover's quarrel), her death is only the latest such headline. Recall, too, the fate of Nancy Lanza, killed by her own gun in her own home in Connecticut by her son, Adam Lanza, before he went to Sandy Hook Elementary School to murder some two dozen children and adults. As an alternative to arming women against violent men, legislation can help: data show that in states that prohibit gun ownership by men who have received a domestic violence restraining order, gun-caused homicides of intimate female partners have been reduced by 25 percent.

Another myth to fall to the facts is that gun-control laws disarm good people and leave the crooks with weapons. Not so, say the Johns Hopkins authors: “Strong regulation and oversight of licensed gun dealers—defined as having a state law that required state or local licensing of retail firearm sellers, mandatory record keeping by those sellers, law enforcement access to records for inspection, regular inspections of gun dealers, and mandated reporting of theft of loss of firearms—was associated with 64 percent less diversion of guns to criminals by in-state gun dealers.”

Finally, before we concede civilization and arm everyone to the teeth pace the NRA, consider the primary cause of the centuries-long decline of violence as documented by Steven Pinker in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: the rule of law by states that turned over settlement of disputes to judicial courts and curtailed private self-help justice through legitimate use of force by police and military trained in the proper use of weapons.

[Moontanman]

At the risk of being shouted at for breach of copyright, here's the text of the Scientific American story

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 31,672 people died by guns in 2010 (the most recent year for which U.S. figures are available), a staggering number that is orders of magnitude higher than that of comparable Western democracies. What can we do about it? National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre believes he knows: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” If LaPierre means professionally trained police and military who routinely practice shooting at ranges, this observation would at least be partially true. If he means armed private citizens with little to no training, he could not be more wrong.

 

I can contest a little of this i think.

 

Consider a 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery that found that

 

#1

“every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting,

 

#2

there were four unintentional shootings,

 

#3

seven criminal assaults or homicides,

 

#4

and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”

 

I can see a connection, possibly, between #1 and #2 but the others do not follow...

 

Pistol owners' fantasy of blowing away home-invading bad guys or street toughs holding up liquor stores is a myth debunked by the data showing that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.

 

A gun... so my gun will leave the house under it's own free will and commit crimes?

 

I harbored this belief for the 20 years I owned a Ruger .357 Magnum with hollow-point bullets designed to shred the body of anyone who dared to break into my home, but when I learned about these statistics, I got rid of the gun.

 

A gun, all guns are not the same thing any more than pocket knife is a sword... A handgun is not a shotgun and they are not similarly dangerous.

 

Let go with these few first then I'll dissect the others but statistics can be used to show just about anything from earthquakes getting more prevalent in years with odd numbers that line up with jupiter to astrological signs...

 

A bit of relevant humor...

 

http://www.theonion.com/articles/jenny-sanford-im-loving-these-lax-gun-purchasing-l,32353/

 

They were using it to make a universal point, not cultural commentary or statistical evidence. The man shot his wife. Either way, by accident or rage, the gun made it much easier.

 

Agreed... but it didn't make him kill his wife...

 

 

Most people realize they can't eliminate all guns, just as most people realize we can't live like Quakers to combat global warming, its a big strawman. People don't even want to concede that no guns is safer than infinite guns.

 

We understand it is a strawman, I've had a couple of discussions on facebook about this with people who are evidently either nutters or so stupid they believe anything as long as it's reported on fox noise...

 

Yes, that would be a good discussion, we can have it on this forum, but where it matters won't happen, becuase guns are a religion and you can't mess with them because someone wrote something somewhere a long time ago.

 

Pretty much my point exactly, in fact the religious are at the heart of this, it's their god given right...

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nra-gop-leaders-vow-back-gun-rights-annual/story?id=19104892#.UYrH6qLP2Fw

[doG]

Even with the Constitution in mind, personal ownership is not protected. It could be argued that only militia members, and their ownership is to be regulated. There is no argument based on the constitution that could hold water against gun regulation, since well regulated is strictly in the Constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

 

"District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), was a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual's right to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home and within federal enclaves..."

 

SCOTUS disagrees with you.

[john5746]

Agreed... but it didn't make him kill his wife...

Well, if he had actually protected his wife from a rapist, I think we would conclude the gun played a huge part. Without the gun, far more likely she would be alive.

 

 

In regards to the Constitution, if we take a literal, originalist viewpoint, its hard to argue against any weapon. Bill Gates should be able to purchase nukes, planes, etc. Maybe he would need to agree to use them in defense of his state, when needed and register them and pay taxes on them(regulated) but otherwise free to have them.

 

Since sane people realize this doesn't "form a more perfect union", we read into the vague lines the needs of the current situation. So a proposal to only allow taser guns and shotguns for personal protection and require national guard status(militia) for military style weapons would not be infringing on the right to be armed.

[overtone]

 

Even
with the Constitution in mind, personal ownership is not protected. It
could be argued that only militia members, and their ownership is to be
regulated.

That makes no sense. Militias are raised from the general citizenry, who generally bring their own weapons, or perhaps some supplied by their neighbors and local community, when they show up. To provide for that, the personal "keeping" of arms adequate for use in a militia should the occasion arise is specifically guaranteed as a right. Among an unarmed citizenry militias cannot be raised at need.

 

Now this leaves most hot button gun regulation out - militias, and home defenses generally, have little or no use for handguns, for example. Neither is the citizenry guaranteed secrecy in their ownership - gun registration is in theory Constitutionally fine, and certainly of non-militia weapons such as handguns.

 

But in pursuit of sane gun regulation in the US, the fact of political polarization is far more important than anything else. It is perhaps the one public issue in which the canard "both sides do it", "both sides are to blame", is a fair discription.

 

On the one hand the bizarre fantasies of home defense against bad guys or governments imagined as behaving like movie dinosaurs and the like, on the other a willingness to sucker for any ignorant and ill-considered justification or abuse of reason in support of having one's government step on a faction of people regarded as violent and irrational.

 

The second hand seems to need more attention here, so let's point out that the Scientific American article quoted is an example of a reputable publication lending its imprimature to some statistical reasoning quite obviously flawed, invalid at an elementary level it would not accept in other contexts. The fact that actually shooting people is more common in crimes and accidents than in defense against crimes, for example, has little bearing on the value of a gun in self defense. If guns worked better, the ratio of good guys shot to bad guys shot would be even higher - a hundred to one, more. When guns work well in good guy self defense, such as reducing the rate of burglary of occupied dwellings, nobody gets shot, see?

 

And so forth - the article is pretty easy to pick apart, but to little consequence. I've seen more decent politicians get knocked out on gun control than on abortion, and it's not worth it - if we have a country in which a kid is more likely to get shot than die of disease, malnutrition, or other accident, then let's just celebrate that fact and focus our concerns elsewhere for a while, eh?

[doG]

In regards to the Constitution, if we take a literal, originalist viewpoint, its hard to argue against any weapon. Bill Gates should be able to purchase nukes, planes, etc. Maybe he would need to agree to use them in defense of his state, when needed and register them and pay taxes on them(regulated) but otherwise free to have them.

 

Exactly. The right to keep and bear arms, which are undefined in the constitution, gives people the right to obtain arms that are not in the public interest. It's one example of reason to advocate a constitutional convention to write a new document better suited to current times.

 

Excuse my ignorance 'cos I'm from the wrong side of the pond but is the SCOTUS politically independent?

If not then their opinion might be as valid as that of the NRA.

 

Yes, SCOTUS is the top of our judicial branch of government and their opinions on the meaning of law as written, like the Constitution, are final.

[iNow]

The Heller case didn't speak against the ability of congress to introduce reasonable regulations, though.