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[The Second Amendment] Red, White, and Shoot
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
America is the Home of the Whopper. It's also home to a bunch of guns. Lots and lots of guns. The USA has more guns per person than any other nation, and it's not even close; nine in ten people in America own guns, or at least there's nine guns for every ten people. The next closest country? Six guns. Australia? 1.5 guns per ten people. The UK? 0.6 guns per ten.
What else we have is a lot of gun violence. Seven people were killed in a hate crime in Wisconsin last week by a White Supremacist with assault rifles. The week before that saw a madman shoot 64 innocent movie-goers using military-grade weaponry obtained legally through the internet and gun shows. In 1999, two maladjusted teens with fully-automatic 9mm handguns murdered 13 random schoolmates and injured 21 others in Columbine, Colorado.
Let me come clean a little bit. I own a gun. My family owns guns. They have for a long time. My family hunts deer and fowl; no one in the family owns a handgun, or a military-grade weapon, or an automatic weapon. I am not exempt from this discussion because of these caveats.
Do we need guns? What's more, do we really need them protected by a Constitutional Amendment? Right now, during the 2012 election cycle, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre has repeatedly said that re-electing Barack Obama is the number-one threat to gun ownership in the US' history, despite not having any evidence or circumstance to back up this assertion. Second Amendment Rights are frequently cited as a top concern for America's conservatives, and even today it's not hard to find a right-wing voter fretting over the fate of this beloved provision (though, for a laugh, ask how sacrosanct they feel the 14th Amendment is).
But if the Founders thought gun rights so important to protect them outright, why is that?
Hmm. This puts ol' TJ's "Tree of Liberty" business in a decidedly different light, although, that whole "refreshing with the blood of tyrants" bit always gets taken out of context. Do people even look for context anymore? It's not like Jefferson sat around coming up with single-sentence bon mots and jotting them down in a book for posterity. That famous quote, for example, was but one line in a lengthy letter between Jefferson and William Smith, wherein Jefferson offered the notion that the violence caused in the Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts was the result of widespread political ignorance of the American constituency, and it's the duty of a strong Federal system to ensure that voters aren't basically Dunning-Kruger'ing themselves into a cycle of bloody (and stupid) warfare.
TL;DR - Jefferson was saying that when people respond to their government with violence, it's because they're hillbilly morons, and the central government needs to keep that shit in check and make those jackasses go to school.
Still, that leaves us with a Second Amendment that plainly argues, "Everybody can have guns, because one day you might need to shoot someone wearing a uniform." How do we rectify that with what we have going on today? How can we reconcile that allowance while stemming wanton murder and mayhem?
Argument 1: We can argue that Jefferson's viewpoint is clouded by a historical context which had civilians and soldiers on relatively equal footing. No one is going on a rampage with a musket, or if they did, it'd be cut short by anyone nearby with a heavy rock handy. This caveat allows for us to significantly restrict gun tolerances due to the fact that Jefferson's protection is virtually null and void in a world in which the Army can kill you from space while you're on the toilet.
Argument 2: We can argue that to fulfill Jefferson's imperative, the public must be free to arm themselves as best possible to meet with any retaliatory or preemptive threat from organized military or paramilitary personnel. Of course, you can see how that turns out by googling, "Branch Davidians" or "Ruby Ridge." Therein, we must allow for things like Columbine and Aurora and Milwaukee as simply being statistical probabilities in a culture that may or may not be more concerned with maintaining the availability of weapons solely designed to murder human beings than who is using them and on whom. If we have to form Jefferson's Militia, somebody has to go and buy the Bradley-mounted .50 cals.
I, for one, have no intention of welcoming our new hillbilly moron overlords.
What else we have is a lot of gun violence. Seven people were killed in a hate crime in Wisconsin last week by a White Supremacist with assault rifles. The week before that saw a madman shoot 64 innocent movie-goers using military-grade weaponry obtained legally through the internet and gun shows. In 1999, two maladjusted teens with fully-automatic 9mm handguns murdered 13 random schoolmates and injured 21 others in Columbine, Colorado.
Let me come clean a little bit. I own a gun. My family owns guns. They have for a long time. My family hunts deer and fowl; no one in the family owns a handgun, or a military-grade weapon, or an automatic weapon. I am not exempt from this discussion because of these caveats.
Do we need guns? What's more, do we really need them protected by a Constitutional Amendment? Right now, during the 2012 election cycle, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre has repeatedly said that re-electing Barack Obama is the number-one threat to gun ownership in the US' history, despite not having any evidence or circumstance to back up this assertion. Second Amendment Rights are frequently cited as a top concern for America's conservatives, and even today it's not hard to find a right-wing voter fretting over the fate of this beloved provision (though, for a laugh, ask how sacrosanct they feel the 14th Amendment is).
But if the Founders thought gun rights so important to protect them outright, why is that?
Thomas Jefferson wrote: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.[8]
Hmm. This puts ol' TJ's "Tree of Liberty" business in a decidedly different light, although, that whole "refreshing with the blood of tyrants" bit always gets taken out of context. Do people even look for context anymore? It's not like Jefferson sat around coming up with single-sentence bon mots and jotting them down in a book for posterity. That famous quote, for example, was but one line in a lengthy letter between Jefferson and William Smith, wherein Jefferson offered the notion that the violence caused in the Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts was the result of widespread political ignorance of the American constituency, and it's the duty of a strong Federal system to ensure that voters aren't basically Dunning-Kruger'ing themselves into a cycle of bloody (and stupid) warfare.
TL;DR - Jefferson was saying that when people respond to their government with violence, it's because they're hillbilly morons, and the central government needs to keep that shit in check and make those jackasses go to school.
Still, that leaves us with a Second Amendment that plainly argues, "Everybody can have guns, because one day you might need to shoot someone wearing a uniform." How do we rectify that with what we have going on today? How can we reconcile that allowance while stemming wanton murder and mayhem?
Argument 1: We can argue that Jefferson's viewpoint is clouded by a historical context which had civilians and soldiers on relatively equal footing. No one is going on a rampage with a musket, or if they did, it'd be cut short by anyone nearby with a heavy rock handy. This caveat allows for us to significantly restrict gun tolerances due to the fact that Jefferson's protection is virtually null and void in a world in which the Army can kill you from space while you're on the toilet.
Argument 2: We can argue that to fulfill Jefferson's imperative, the public must be free to arm themselves as best possible to meet with any retaliatory or preemptive threat from organized military or paramilitary personnel. Of course, you can see how that turns out by googling, "Branch Davidians" or "Ruby Ridge." Therein, we must allow for things like Columbine and Aurora and Milwaukee as simply being statistical probabilities in a culture that may or may not be more concerned with maintaining the availability of weapons solely designed to murder human beings than who is using them and on whom. If we have to form Jefferson's Militia, somebody has to go and buy the Bradley-mounted .50 cals.
I, for one, have no intention of welcoming our new hillbilly moron overlords.
Atomika on
+1
This discussion has been closed.
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*ratified before Congress
EDIT: the thread referenced in the above article.
Beyond that better opportunity (education, jobs, etc.) and better mental healthcare are the only things that will really help cut down on violence.
Would better economic conditions prevented Milwaukee, or Aurora, or Columbine, or Waco?
Better mental healthcare might have.
And you're never going to prevent all atrocities; gun restrictions wouldn't have stopped any of those things either. Especially not Waco.
Pretty much. David Koresh literally thought he was Jesus 2: Electric Boogaloo. Once you're that deep in the crazy pool you gon' find ways to get what you want.
Actually we have a problem with violent crime, not gun violence. That is an important distinction to make. Next this paragraph has a ton wrong with it. First the Wisconsin shooter did not have any "assault rifles" he made the shooting with a pistol. Second the shooter in Colorado did not have "military grade weaponry" he was using a civilian AR-15. Where he obtained it, which was not the internet mind you, is irrelevant as there was absolutely nothing in his record to prevent him from legally purchasing it. Third none of the guns used in the Columbine shooting were fully auto.
Perhaps you could explain exactly what a "military grade" weapon means, because its a completely made up term that could be stretched to cover any number of things. Automatic weapons are also Class 3 firearms, time consuming to get, as well as expensive. Not sure what they have to do with anything as you never really spell it out.
Because they just fought a war where the soldiers consisted of the civilian populous armed with whatever they happened to own. This is not exactly a hard question here. Hell the militia act of 1794 required every male between the ages of 18-45 to own a gun by law. Why did they enshrine it in law? Because guns were frequently used to get shit done for all manor of purposes from fending off wildlife, to hunting, to recreation, to dueling, to fighting former owners of the land. We were by no means a completely stable country, with fixed borders, and no enemies.
Wanton murder and mayhem? Aren't you hyperboling it up a bit here? People wanting to commit murder and mayhem are going to commit murder and mayhem using whatever tool is at hand. We have a violent crime problem. How about we focus our energy on that?
I'm down for buying a mounted .50 cal want to float me a loan? There is a lot more to the second amendment than violent overthrow of the government. It also covers hunting, self defense, recreational shooting, and any number of fun wih gun activities. Hell shooting is an Olympic event. Heck we just had this thread like 3 weeks ago before it got locked and about 90% of it was correcting ignorance when people threw out meaningless terms like military grade, explaining how difficult it is to actually own a fully automatic firearm, and explaining to people that 80% of all gun crime is committed with small caliber handguns that hold less than 10 rounds as it is.
Much, MUCH easier if Justice Scalia has his way.
I don't think making guns illegal is going to solve the problem. It's not going to make the problem worse, as some might suggest, but we need to work on why this stuff happens in the first place.
It seems you think that, but can you prove it?
From first principles it would seem to go against the data - people in highly volatile states of mind tend to calm themselves down when introduced to obstacles to a plan motivated by the aforesaid state. If you "snap" then having to go and source a gun through means unknown rather than just heading down to the local department store would fit the exact type of psychological obstacle to buy time for the calm down.
Anecdotes do not make data, however, so I can't really make any sort of conclusion from that one point. It just seems strange to me.
One thing is that, cars kill around as many people as guns do per year in the US. A car is an incredibly dangerous machine, capable of killing a person with ease. The rules we have to qualify people for their use and ownership are fairly strict. Car ownership is not a right, and the privilege of driving one can be rescinded if you're proven to be incapable or untrustworthy of it. Car ownership is stringently tracked, and all car owners are required to be insured against damages to themselves, others, and property.
Any driver can suddenly decide to run over someone on a whim. Most don't.
What I'm getting at is, what is wrong with controlling guns and gun ownership as strictly as we control car ownership, while still permitting their use? Shouldn't guns owners be required to hold insurance the same way car owners do? Shouldn't some people be prevented from having guns, the same way we prevent some people from having cars?
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Hunting, target practice, home defense.
But hunting, especially. Right now Texas is having a huge problem with invasive wild pigs. Little fuckers are wreaking ecological havoc like nobody's business. It's open season on them 24/7, and even still they're a big damn problem. I'm seriously considering taking a trip to Texas when the weather cools down a bit to do some huntin'.
My first observation would be that the availability of weapons is necessary but not sufficient for the huge prevalence of gun crime in general and crazed gunman scenarios in particular. So there are doubtless other issues - such as the culture of the country, the welfare system, the mental health system and who knows what else.
Another relevant factor with regard to the mad gunman scenario is that even in the USA it is a statistically unusual event - from memory you're in a Scandinavian country, so we're dealing with between 295 and 285 million more people, which is a lot more people and a lot more chances for people to snap.
Of course, speaking of Scandinavians, Anders Brevik apparently spent a considerable length of time preparing and negotiated a large number of obstacles in the execution of his attack. Certainly an exception to the argument I gave up above, but not sufficient, I think to demonstrate it as being generally false.
As a hunter myself, I ask you, what part of the Constitution protects this practice? The Amendment is strictly about keeping the populace well-armed in the event of invasion or revolution.
At a guess, he's probably Swiss? (Edit: Nope, Israeli) They're not handing guns out to 4/5 of the male population in Scandinavia.
But of course it does raise questions - Switzerland has tons of assault rifles floating around and little gun violence. Norway has very strict gun laws and recently had one of the worst shooting sprees in history.
Assuming that we take this to mean that the availability of guns causes an increase in violent crime that takes a population of many millions to really feel, is this a sufficient reason to to make them unavailable to the general public? Would you say that this increase in crime is bigger than one caused by the availability of, say, knives or store-bought chemicals?
Unplanned shooting sprees, "petty" crimes or accidents are a completely different story though, and since they probably account for more deaths than the carefully planned sprees do, they are much better focuses for gun control discussions.
A la, if gun ownership needs to be off-the-books to ensure that a cabal of authority figures can't round up all the gun owners when Teh Rebelyun starts, this supposition would inherently dictate an authority that had capabilities far beyond what individuals are capable of defending against with a collection of small arms.
Yeah, it's not all about people "snapping" is it? We shouldn't forget that poverty is and has for a very long time been a huuuge problem in the US and when there are guns all over the place, there are bound to be many armed robberies where a robber carries a gun with them, don't really want to hurt anybody just threaten them, and then it goes horribly wrong and it ends in a shoot-out. Some people might say "but they'd just use a knife instead and the same thing happens!" but is it really necessarily so? Accidentally killing someone with a knife doesn't happen as easily, and when the police has the upper hand because GUNS, fighting back is less likely to seem like a possible alternative, even when feeling desperate.
Edit: Also when doing the car analogy one should remember that they are created for daily use and are useful to all citizens in a country, except maybe hermits who live out in the desert where there are no roads. Not all guns are created for hunting, and even then, the majority of US citizens don't go hunting. This is why countries like Sweden require citizens who wish to regularly hunt to acquire a hunting license, so that those who truly have a use of firearms in their daily lives(excluding assassins of course) can get them while at the same time keeping the total number of firearms down to prevent crime. Oh and the same thing goes for people interested in target shooting as a sport, as far as I know. I don't really see why this regulative system should baffle so many Americans. It makes acquiring and using a rifle more of a hassle but to me, that's a low price to pay.
The ability to use guns for self-defense is lost, sure, but with the regulative system in place the risk for you to be attacked by someone with a gun in the first place is much lower and so you end up being safer on the whole. It's people thinking on a micro level and not bothering with the macro.
No. The intent behind a law matters only in so far as it can help resolve ambiguities in the law's interpretation. Ineffective laws are still valid.
Unless you're asking whether, because a citizen militia would be ineffective, the 2nd amendment ought be repealed. In which case, dunno.
- US gun deaths per year: 11,400/3.7 per 100,000 people
- UK knife deaths per year: 332/0.9 per 100,000 people
More people die by guns in the US, in both volume and proportion, than all homicides in the UK combined.
Right, and what percentage of those gun deaths are suicide?
Close, sort of, but only if you factor in suicides where a gun is used.
2007- 31,224 Firearm deaths in the US. 17,352 from suicide. 12,632 were homicide.
2007- 41,059 automobile related deaths.
Yes, the latter is what I'm asking. The Second Amendment's intent cannot be met in any realistic terms, and doing so would require the populace's access to very dangerous weapons.
As near as i can tell, the minutemen have been overblown in historical context, and the second amendment actually concerns the right of regions to have batteries and military equipment to arm regionally. Which we actually have taken away on one level, but which we make up for by having police forces the founders would consider militaries.
I host a podcast about movies.
I'm not sure where I stand, personally, but I don't think that the militia argument would be relevant, in practice, in a debate on repeal. I don't think anybody on the repeal side would be swayed to support the amendment if convinced that a citizen's militia could be effective. And no amendment supporter would switch sides even if convinced of the opposite. Whatever role the militia idea played in the original construction of the amendment, I think it's purely window dressing in the current debate.
heh
Some police departments are better armed than the militaries of many countries. SWAT is special forces, a lot of them have some sort of APC now as well, not to mention helicopters with FLIR/night vision.
There's a recent news story making the papers here in Canada, about an American tourist named Walt Wawra. He went to Calgary during the Stampede (a large cultural festival slash bacchanal) and while walking in a public park some guys came up to him and asked him if he'd been to the Stampede yet. He felt threatened, and wrote a letter to the Calgary Herald complaining about his lack of ability to legally carry a firearm himself while being a tourist in Calgary and thank his Lord Jesus Christ that those young Canadians did not pull a weapon themselves.
Calgary is pretty much the heart of the right wing in Canada. In Calgary, that man was laughed at. The National Post article went so far as to post funny demotivators based on the situation - and they're the right wing national paper.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/08/09/walt-wawra/
There's a difference between the attitude of loving guns - as recreational sporting devices, as collector's items, and yes, potentially a method of last defense - and being part of a gun culture, seeing guns as a primary method of conflict resolution and seeing guns as an unadulterated good that should not in any way be infringed upon. I don't think that the number of guns in America is a problem. I think that the way Americans - on both sides of the aisle - think about guns is the problem.
Also, you're spreading it north of the border. Stop that!
It's not moot if he's making a political argument, rather than a legal one. Though as I said above, I don't think that the militia argument would move the needle much, one way or the other, in a national debate on repeal. But I could be wrong.
So the Constitution is potentially a suicide pact?
Potentially, yes.
And Judicial Review often is.
Lincoln said that during the Civil War, it has nothing to do with the day to day running of our nation, Ross.