It’s a difference of philosophy I suppose, but I grant that the distinction that I’m drawing has no impact in the application of the right.
I make the point because I find that many folks who support gun control haven’t actually read the Heller opinion. This is arguably the most important SCOTUS decision on gun rights in … ever. Things like the recognition of a pre-existing right, or the fact that there was unanimous agreement regarding the right as an individual right, often get missed. So on that point, it was a correction of a factual error.
I think you are bringing straw men int the argument. We haven’t seen anyone say “what part of shall not be infringed don’t you undersstand” in a long time. Every time someone says that I remind them that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is about as clear as you can get and yet we subject God’s word to interpretation.
Maye I need to clarify. 1999 is not the bginning of history as faras gun violence is concerned.
The rate of gun suicide fluctuates with the rate of suicide and has been fairly steady for a long time. The biggest variable in gun deaths has been gun murders.
As you can see despite the rapidly increasing number of guns in society, the rate of gun murders (and gun deaths generally) rose and then dropped entirely independent of the number of guns in society.
As a liberal gun nerd, I think youa re painting witha broad brush and picking out the weakest pro-gun arguments to argue against. how about arguing against the arguments actually being brought up here?
That’s because “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is a mistranslation. The original is “Thou Shalt Not Murder”. Well, it’s really a plain “Don’t murder”, but if you want to be poetic…
"The Hebrew verb רצח (r-ṣ-ḥ, also transliterated retzach, ratzákh, ratsakh etc.) is the word in the original text that is translated as “murder” or “kill”, but it has a wider range of meanings, generally describing destructive activity, including meanings “to break, to dash to pieces” as well as “to slay, kill, murder”.
According to the Priestly Code of the Book of Numbers, killing anyone outside the context of war with a weapon, or in unarmed combat, is considered retzach,[2] even if the killing is accidental."
It has been interpreted to exlude things like capital punishment and self defense but that is not the way the word is defined.
The Wall Street Journal - Breaking News, Business, Financial & Economic News, World News and Video - taking out where killer’s race is unknown (and presuming that the distribution there would be same as in known cases), out of the total of 138K homicides where the killer’s identity is known, blacks committed 67K and Hispanics 16K. Whites committed 50K homicides, or 36%. Whites are about 72% of US population (see Demographics of the United States - Wikipedia). So white-killer homicides, if it was proportional to demographic percentage, would have been about 100K (out of 138K). So we can say that white homicide rate is about half of the national homicide rate.
So if all of the population of the US was committing homicides at the same rate whites are, US homicide rate would be about 2.4. Finland’s is 2.2. So - plus minus, about the same, yes. Finland and Norway’s homicide rates are pretty high, by European standards. Western Europe’s average is about 1.
Back around 1999-2000 or so I looked at the CDC’s “Deaths: Final Data for XXXX” so they would have been 1997’s or 1998’s stats.
The national average firearm homicide rate was about 11 or 12/100,000, IIRC. The rate for black males age 16-30-something was around 33/100,000.
Black females came in dead last for either homicides or suicides.
Whites overall accounted for the majority of suicides by firearm, but don’t remember the percentages; it was high, though.
You can see for yourself at the CDC’s website, but it may take some digging around through the stats to find the breakdown by age/race/etc.
One thing I do remember is that suicides accounted for just under 60% (58%-59%) of all firearms deaths, and firearms accounted for something like 60% of all suicides.
Neither is a perfect translation but murder is not more accurate (never mind “a lot more accurate”) than kill.
“killing anyone outside the context of war with a weapon, or in unarmed combat, is considered retzach,[2] even if the killing is accidental”
Do you see why? In any event, it does not exclude killing in self defense. It only excludes killing in self defense as a result of interpretation not as a result of the words used.
Your link does not support that, showing neither gun deaths generally or the number of guns.
To do more of your work for you than I should, you could show, with other links, that the murder spurt correlated with the crack epidemic wasn’t correlated with an increase in gun ownership (although the end of it was correlated with a decrease in gun ownership). There are exceptions. No one claims there is a perfect correlation between gun ownership rates and gun death. Once in a while you will see a relative outlier, like Switzerland.
Having a gun right there facilitates episodes of extreme anger or self-loathing becoming deadly. That’s why gun ownership is correlated with violent death and should be discouraged.
The correlation between murder by itself and gun ownership isn’t as strong as that between violent death generally and gun ownership. But there is still a good deal, including when you look at change over time:
The graphb is a graph of homicides by weapon type. The blue line is handguns, the green line is other guns.
I didn’t think I needed a cite for the fact that we have an ever increasing number of guns in our society. I can look one up for you but the graph slopes upward the entire way.
The Crack epidemic was between 1984 and the early 1990’s. Gun homicides start rising in 1988 until 1994 and then doesn’t stop dropping until 1999.
So do trains and bridges and tall buildings, a lot of things facilitate suicide if you really really want to do it. We have a relatively low suicide rate despite having much higher rates of gun ownership. File:Suicide-deaths-per-100000-trend.jpg - Wikipedia
I don’t doubt that our suicide rate would drop if people didn’t have guns but I am just as sure that some large portion of current gun suicides would be replaced with other types of suicide. But discourage gun ownership all you want, just don’t make laws banning or restricting the ownership of guns or vilifying people who own guns.
Are yous aying that being a gun owner makes me more likely to commit suicide? Or that people who are going to commit suicide frequently buy guns?
Are you saying that people with guns get murdered or that people who are at risk of getting murdered tend to buy guns?
Maybe you do, but it wouldn’t mean much if you include people who go from, say, three guns in the house to five.
Most, not all, evidence I have seen on what’s more significant – the rate of gunownership – goes the other way:
Sounds good. But if you want to convince, I’ll mention that I’m a fan of peer review, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
As you may recall, I am a supporter of suicide prevention, and most US gun deaths are suicide. That I am saying. I’m going with the public health research that strongly associates having a gun in the house with getting shot.
Based on my gun-owning acquaintances, I think it has more to do with watching FoxNews in safe distant suburbs than risk of being murdered. But that’s anecdotal evidence.
I’ll consider it.
To get back the OP: The US Constiution means what the Supreme Court says it means, and, on the right to bear arms, they’ve been silent.
SCOTUS has been silent. The circuit courts have not. The 7th and 9th circuits have rulings already. The next case that is eligible for cert is Drake out of New Jersey.
Yes, but these cert denials were not about carry so not really relevant.
This is out of date. The 9th has ruled (the subject of this thread).
Perhaps. Then the right to carry will be dependent on what federal jurisdiction a person lives in. That seems like a nonsensical outcome to me, but if SCOTUS doesn’t resolve the issue that would be the status quo.
Kinda like if Congress repeals Newton’s Law nobody will get hurt or die from falls?
The right to arms is not created, given, granted or otherwise established by the 2nd Amendment thus the right to arms is not in any manner dependent on the Constitution for its existence.
The Supreme Court has been boringly consistent in affirming this for going on 140 years:
[INDENT] Supreme Court, 1876: “The right . . . of “bearing arms for a lawful purpose” [that of self-defense from the KKK by ex-slaves in Louisiana] . . . is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. . .”
Supreme Court, 1886: "the right of the people to keep and bear arms is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. . . "
Supreme Court, 2008: "it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it “shall not be infringed.” As we said in . . . 1876 , “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.”
[/INDENT]
Altering or removing words upon which the right in no manner depends would do nothing to the right, which has always been possessed by the people.
I seem to remember a rather definitive statement in Heller:
[INDENT]
c. Meaning of the Operative Clause. Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment . We look to this because it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment , like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it “shall not be infringed.” As we said in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876) , “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed … .”
[/INDENT]
The operative clause of the 2nd Amendment guarantees the individual right to “possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” and of course Cruikshank recognized the “right to bear arms for lawful purpose” as being the right to be armed for self defense against aggressors (the KKK) as being possessed by two former slaves, then citizens, in public, in 1870’s Louisiana.
I find it interesting that you have missed that the canon of prenumbral rights philosophy recognizes the right to keep and bear arms as part of the “rational continuum” of liberty that doesn’t emanate from the specific enumerations of the Bill of Rights which are only the absolute bare minimum of rights possessed by the people.
As SCOTUS said in 1992, continuing a substantial and important line of opinions that began with Griswold, affirming a right to privacy which encompasses reproductive and abortion rights:
[INDENT]
"Neither the Bill of Rights nor the specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment marks the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects. See U. S. Const., Amend. 9. As the second Justice Harlan recognized:
[INDENT]“[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty’ is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment.” – Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992)
[/INDENT]
[/INDENT]
Yeah, silent they’ve been . . .
