The second amendment is just as relevant in any discussion of gun control as the first amendment is relevant in any discussion about censorship.
So you think there’s some other way it can be read that doesn’t completely dismiss it? Pray tell, what? The right to bear arms exists in the context of participation in a militia, and for that matter only when it’s being well-regulated, as with the slave patrols for whom it was written. The Second guarantees only that the National Guard will be armed (and, by calling it necessary, that there will *be *a Guard). Outside that range, the Constitution is silent, no matter how devotedly you may cherish an alternative and more convenient reading. The framers couldn’t have made their intent more clear, and the only way to read it any other way is to pretend that half the amendment doesn’t actually mean anything!
Of course, the Scalia wing of the Court has been able to yank a right self-defense, among other things, out of the emanations and penumbras that they stoutly deny exist in other, inconvenient contexts, but that only makes them authoritative, for now, not right.
Happened upon this earlier today, an interesting read (gotta download the PDF though),
CMC
Yes, but not in the same way. Its that word “infringed”. If you take it to mean precisely what it says, then no regulation is possible, as any regulation is bound to imply some form of infringement. Which is, of course, absurd.
If you make the reasonable assumption that the Founders knew that some infringement was inherent and simply didn’t think it necessary to point out the bleeding obvious, then the 2nd Amendment does not make regulation of firearms unConstitutional, and the only questions that remain are the degree to which we choose to regulate them.
If you want to insist that your form of regulation and “infringement” is more Constitutional than someone else’s, sure, knock yourself out. But you cannot reasonably expect to rely on the precise wording of the Constitution, because that would put us in the absurd position of not regulating firearm possession by anybody at all. Ever.
Let’s look at it another way:
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What fraction of potential crimes do you think are deterred by DGU, in a typical year?
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Assuming you don’t live in a particularly crime-ridden area, what’s the chance that you will have the opportunity to deter a crime with DGU in the coming year?
1 - I have no idea, do you?
2 - I have no idea, do you?
Regarding the question of deterrence, this article persuasively makes the claim that yes, gun ownership does reduce the incidents of home invasion (burglarizing a home when occupants are present). Article is from 2001, but the statistics are sourced and I think the conclusions still hold. From the article:
There are several more examples in the article itself.
Quite the article. Love the crisp altitude and clarity of the unprejudiced mind researching a topic and probing for the truth. That opening quote kind of says it all, doesn’t it, about the sternly unbiased approach we can expect.
Well, there you have it! Straight from the horse’s mouth!
Being curious, I wondered who might this “Arkansas buglar” be? Alas, he is lost to history, but the quote is a quote from Mr Claire Wolfe. so all doubt vanishes, a man whose unvarnished candor and strict non-partisan clarity is firmly attested to by his years as a columnist for* WorldNet Daily*. Of course, if one is to get picky, not as trustworthy an unbiased source for truth as perhaps Fox News, or the gold standard set by the Drudge Report, but still…
Well, it used to be viewed by some as a state right that protected the state from a tyranny from the center. Imagine the EU deciding that their current set up doesn’t work and they need a single government to which every member sends representatives. To allay the fears of the smaller countries, they create two congressional houses. One will be based on population and the other will have an equal number of representatives from each state. Now imagine asking each of the EU nations to demilitarize and trust their security from enemies foreign and within the EU to a central EU military.
This didn’t seem like a good idea to the 13 colonies either so they limited the central government’s ability to field a standing army and they preserved their ability to have their own military organizations. I think, the second amendment was intended to be a state check on federal power (regardless of how silly that seems to us now, it was deadly serious stuff when they wrote the constitution).
I think Heller recognized a right to self defense (from the penumbra of the second amendment) that translates into an individual right to bear arms BUT I think it would take pretty draconian gun control laws to run afoul of Heller.
This is all just a long winded way of saying that I don’t think the federal government can restrict guns that a state wants its citizens to have up to and including any weapon that the common soldier would be expected to carry. Based on Heller I don’t think a state OR the federal government has the right to restrict guns that would provide effective self defense.
Militia used to mean every male between 18 and 45 and anyone else who avails themselves to the defense of the Republic. When did it come to mean a group of volunteer weekend warriors?
I see pretty absolute words in the first amendment. “Congress shall make NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” Tell that to the polygamists in utah. Tell that to the rastafarians in every college dorm I’ve ever seen. And we make laws abridging freedom of speech, press, assembly and lobbying.
I don’t get to choose the limits of the second amendment, neither do you and neither does congress or the president. Its not a matter of how much we CHOOSE to regulate them, its a matter how much regulation you can justify consistent with constitutional principles. The same standard for limiting the right to free speech is applicable to limitations on the right to bear arms. Significant government interest+ time,manner,place or compelling state interest+narrowly tailored. The assault weapons ban doesn’t meet even the “significant government interest criteria” (and I could argue that the higher standard applies).
So many folks here apologizing for wanting to reduce gun violence.
Meanwhile the hearses, 30 a day, carrying men, women and kids, keep circling the block where they used to live.
Ban guns, save lives.
Only pussies need guns.
Yes, such as a central government that might want to impose the abolition of slavery. But that still only applies to the purpose of a militia, not a blanket, absolute right.
In 1903, with the passage of the Militia Act.
Right, meaning there is no such thing as an absolute right, before which all other rights must give way when they conflict. In the case of the Second, those limits are even explicitly stated.
“Promote the general welfare”. As in “keep citizens alive”.
It’s easy to lose sight of reality when the discussion of rights and responsibilities in a society is allowed to become too abstract - which is what discussion of militias has been ever since the end of slavery, and which the claim of a limited right to be absolute has always been.
Oh look, a CDC study. From the abstract:
Yes, it’s data from 1994 and published in 1997.
Operative word being “reportedly”. What are the figures for intruders scared away by the very fact that somebody saw them and is likely to call the cops?
Who knows. Take it up with the CDC, you know, the people you wanted to conduct the study.
Or, alternatively, I could ask the guy who seems to think it proves something. Like you, for instance.
I present a study from the CDC that describes and projects defensive gun use in the home, something you characterized as a crock of shit. You also didn’t trust either older, or non-CDC conducted studies. So there it is, the CDC study that says your position is not based in reality. Then you ask a question about an item not covered by the study, and expect me to know? Talk about a crock of shit.
They also didn’t ask about rainbows on the moon. Am I supposed to know about that as well? It says what it says it does, that there are hundreds of thousands of incidents where there is DGU in the home. You can argue that people shouldn’t be able to defend themselves in their home, or that there may have been other means available to them besides firearms. But there is no argument that DGU occurs often. If you can’t accept that then your contributions to the discussion are worthless.
That’s why we need to have the CDC conduct more studies. You can ignore the ones that are unplatable to what you want reality to be and just pick the ones you like. With more CDC studies, we have more to choose from.
You seem to be arguing against science, since advancements in science come from conducting more studies, not fewer. If this impression is correct, then it is clear that on the subject of firearms you are a completely unhinged fucking asshole.
If I’ve misread you, and you actually are calling for more of the research that the NRA has to this point silenced, I apologize.
I don’t know how you can take my post to somehow be anti-science. I’m clearly attacking him for being a hypocrite. He wants the CDC to be able to study gun violence, because they’re just the best entity to conduct such research. But then when he’s presented data from the vaunted CDC about something he doesn’t want to be true, he just dismisses it. It’s ridiculous.
I don’t think there should be some sort of ban at the CDC for doing these studies. I don’t know if the CDC studies these sorts of things. If the CDC normally covers things like the demographics or other factors of violent crime, then by all means. If they have a political axe to grind on guns and don’t normally conduct that sort of research (again, I have no idea), then they should be discouraged from it - I don’t want public money used for what would essentially amount to political advocacy in that case, there are other entities like the DOJ who could take it.
If it’s within the realm of normal CDC studies, and it passes the funding rounds where it’s deemed to be a worthwhile study, then sure, go ahead.
Because you say the value in having the CDC conduct further studies is so that we will have more to pick and choose from, rather than the fact that the development of a literature base in a science is a collective ongoing effort to refine and revise theoretical models. Additional studies help to address questions raised by prior studies and test new hypotheses suggested by old ones.
For instance, the cited study relies entirely on self-report of the impression of the person. For instance, if the guy in the recent Georgia incident had not actually killed anyone and had been called on the phone afterward, he would be counted as a defensive gun use. He would say that he believed he chased off an intruder rather than that he killed an innocent person who pulled into the wrong driveway. People get guns because they are afraid they are going to be attacked. People who are afraid they are going to be attacked are more likely to perceive benign circumstances as threatening.
So, we take the previously cited study as one study with significant potential flaws, as noted by the authors of the study, and place it in the context of an expanding literature base. Ultimately, we are able to determine by integrating the results of a variety of studies that the method of asking people to self-report defensive gun uses appears to hold up well compared to other methods of measurement. Or we don’t.
But in other circumstances, you have appeared to understand that science is not a process of picking and choosing desired results.
You don’t know what the CDC does? Well, there’s a pretty easy way to find out what the CDC does, but I’ll give you a head start. They are the primary nexus for public health research in the country. They involve themselves very much with injury prevention and control. I know people who have been funded by the CDC for violence research. I’ve been part of teams that have submitted to the CDC for funding to conduct violence research. They do work on the prevalence and prevention of brain injury and concussion, for example. It isn’t all just the study of the flu and zombie outbreaks.
The “axe they have to grind” is the description and reduction of processes that lead to injury, impairment and death. Gun violence falls well within their purview.
My point was that in this very thread we have people arguing that the CDC is unfairly kept from researching gun violence (may be true) and that we really need to see that data because the CDC does high quality science and they should be our main method of studying such things.
And then from the same people, we get an outright dismissal of a study on defensive gun use from the CDC, and suddenly the CDC aren’t important conductors of science in that instance, and that can all be dismissed.
I have no idea how you could interpret my posts to be about the nature of science when it was clearly just pointing out the immediate hypocrisy of partisanship on this issue.
As for the rest, yes, self-reporting studies are unreliable, but there’s a fairly large body of literature developing that tells us that whether it be 100,000 or 3 million, some significant number of defensive gun uses really do happen, and these are a public good. You can dispute that flawed methodology miscounts the number, but it’s very hard to conclude that since even the most stringent, conservative tudies put up numbers over 100,000 that these are all phantom effects and it really doesn’t happen. Goes against common sense too.