I disagree. As I wrote above, I’d like to see the Second Amendment repealed. But only so gun ownership could be regulated not abolished. I would not support a general prohibition of private gun ownership.
I think the problem is that moderates like myself usually avoid these debates. The only people who regularly participate in them are the people on each extreme. So people get the mistaken impression that the extremists they’re hearing are representative of a far broader demographic than they really are.
People like myself aren’t that worked up about gun control or gun ownership. I might like to see the Second Amendment get repealed but quite frankly I’m not putting any significant effort into that cause.
But if the gun control extremists ever manage to get the Second Amendment repealed, then they’ll be handing the issue over to moderates like me. Gun regulation would become an issue for the general electorate and regular legislation. And I don’t see any consensus in the general population for a gun ban.
I’ve lived (and suffered) in the world where the winners of the genetic lottery (in terms of size/strength) set the rules and everyone else suffered at their (often) cruel whim(s).
I’ve heard the God created all Men, but Sam Colt made them Equal.
Ain’t got much use for God; never got any help I could hang a hat on from on high, not when I needed it. God can stay in whatever church he chooses; I live in the world he (may or may not have) created.
The two times in my life when I needed a gun, one of them I didn’t have one, and I’m still dealing with the scars.
The other time, I did have a gun. And it all ended just fine, a bad guy locked up, and no one hurt.
In the mean time, I put holes in paper targets, and choose to live in places that generally don’t require its residents to be armed in order to secure themselves and their homes.
That doesn’t mean I’m ready to turn ploughshares to swords and trust my “fellow man,” though.
And I’m not willing to let someone else make the decision (armed/disarmed) for me.
But I think there needs to be a licensing system that works for people like you while still making it harder to bring guns into my neighborhood, in town.
While I won’t deny that having a gun has on occasion kept people safe, the amount of fear that motivates gun owners as a group is nearly as puzzling to this Canadian as that of survivalists. If I only relied on their comments, I would think that US society is like the movie Seven and on the brink of turning into Mad Max.
We don’t have a Second Amendment here yet you can indeed get guns; There are 2 million firearms licences in Canada for a country of about 36 millions (By the numbers: Guns in Canada | Ottawa Citizen) . They haven’t been confiscated en masse and we’re not a tyrannical dictatorship. We even have government health insurance and yet we didn’t turn into Soviet Russia, the capital owners haven’t been expropriated and no one’s stuck in a gulag*!
Are you telling me that good 'ol USA isn’t capable of doing at least as well as Canada? And no, it’s not because we hardly have any brown people or immigrants Demographics of Canada - Wikipedia
Whose side is James Hodgkinson on? In your worldview, anyone who targets a Republican is allied with the forces of reason?
But suppose we stipulate that James Hodgkinson is allied with the rational team. Does that end the claim? Come up with 1000 or 2000 or 10,000 violently criminal rightwingers would have no effect on the discussion — as long as you “have one”, James Hodgkinson, you’ve got your “What about? … nanner nanner nanner”?
BTW, are we sure that what James Hodgkinson did was entirely unreasonable?
The government wouldn’t stand a chance. A government cannot hold territory if enough people object. I give you Poland as proof. It was held by the second most powerful country in the world. A country with thousands and thousands of tanks. Forget tanks, they had thousands and thousands of nukes and yet Poland is now free. Try visiting the country that held Poland under it’s power. You can’t. It doesn’t exist anymore.
The Second Amendment serves many purposes but ultimately it’s designed to protect us from ourselves. It allows us individual protection from criminals and it protects us from political oppression. Something the people of China are learning in a very hard way. Everything they do is monitored by a government that will actively suppress them for the crime of opinion. They are now assigning points to citizen’s behavior. Read or type anything on the internet that’s negative about China and it’s points against you. Jay walk in China and it’s points against you. If you don’t buy enough products from China then it’s points against you.
It’s not just China. Countries like the UK are now prosecuting people for hate speech. It’s a slippery slope when your opinion is criminalized because we’re not that far away from technology that reads minds. Keeping your mouth shut won’t be enough when that happens.
We’re repeatedly told, by gun-lovers, that every half-crazed redneck who hasn’t been convicted of a felony yet is entitled to buy all the AR-15’s he can afford, and if we don’t like it we need to repeal the Second Commandment.
Now you tell us that the only reason to repeal the Second is for a ban or near-ban.
So those are the only two choices, hunh? Every half-crazed redneck gets his own AR-15 or guns are completely banned. There is no middle ground. Got it.
For the last time: supporting the rights of citizens to bear arms does not make me a “gun-lover”.
And some of you might want to check and see what regulations already exist on the ownership of guns in various locations; it’s not the free-for-all you imagine.
Yes, it does. One leftist example is all I need to refute the false claim that “only one side is willing to kill if and when they don’t get their way at the ballot box.”
Not really, we have some difference in language, where you seem to assume that we are represented by James, just because he has left leaning tendencies, but as long as we are in agreement that the violence from the pro-gun control side is an anomaly, and the violence form the pro-gun side is being said to be very, very common, we can call it good enough.
I didn’t say that is was started by a gun owner, I said specifically what you said, that gun advocates said that if we tried to ban guns, then gun owners would violently resist the democratically passed laws.
If abortion were made illegal, I would resist that at the polls. If immigration were made illegal, I would resist that at the polls. If alcohol or tobacco were made illegal, I would resist that at the polls. Even if anti-discrimination were outlawed, even if minorities rights were stripped, I would only use the constitutionally granted rights to make my opinion known. The only thing that I would even think about resisting with violence would be making voting illegal.
I may gripe, I may complain, I may write my congresscritter and even march in the street, but I will not commit violence because I disagree with the outcome of a fair election.
If gun owners want to gripe and complain and protest, that’s absolutely fine, and I would expect that. If they want to refuse to follow the laws that are passed by the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens, then they do not believe in the basic principles of democracy, and it also concerns me that, if it is that well considered by their peers in this thread that they will commit violence because of those laws, then what keeps them from committing violence to affect other laws that they don’t like?
I do consider the hypothetical to be extremely unlikely, and partly for the reasons that you say. That people know that many gun owners will not respect the laws and turn violent if they were to go for a door to door confiscation is part of the reason that such a thing would only be desired by the furthest extremes of the anti-gun crowd, and considered likely only by a surprisingly substantial portion of gun advocates.
It’s a debate, where you have one side advocating for one position, and the other side advocating for the others. I do not see how a discussion is even possible without having sides.
All of this is hogwash. A gun ban is not the only, or even a plausible motive for removing 2A at all. The main reason for removing 2A is that we cannot have any effective gun laws with it in place.
Removing 2A doesn’t suddenly create anti-gun laws, it just makes it possible to have them. Without 2A, you can have a reasonable discussion about how and where guns can be owned and carried, and not run into the constant wall of “But 2A says you can’t make that law”.
There will always be those who advocate for a total gun ban, but they are a tiny minority, and the only reason that they have any voice in this at all is because their words are magnified by being repeated constantly by the pro-gun advocates in order to make their peers think that such is a common sentiment, while the words of moderates are ignored until the moderates get frustrated by you repeatedly telling them that they are lying about their motives and drop out of the discussion, allowing you to continue with only the most extreme again.
Telling people what their motives are, and accusing them of being liars when they say that those are not their motives is probably the least productive form of debate imaginable, and yet, that is precisely what you do here.
That you can find someone “on my side” that has a more extrme position than the vast majority of moderate does not mean that you have discovered true motivations, it means that you cherry pick quotes from people until you find something that confirms the narrative that you want to tell, but it has nothing at all to do with reality.
Well, yeah. It would take a pretty solid majority of voters to support a repeal of 2A. If 2A has been repealed, then we have largely become enlightened pro-gun control’ers. If you are saying that we have to have 100% of people agree before we can do anything I would ask if that is how we should pass any other form of legislation?
At the time of the writing of 2A, it did not apply to states. States could, and did, pass laws about gun control. 2A itself says that it is to help to maintain a well regulated militia, and who would regulate the militia, the states?
The FF’s absolutely felt that states should have control over gun laws, and 2A was only to keep federal hands off of it and allow each state to regulate the militia and arms the way they best saw fit.
That the government should have a monopoly on the use of force and violence is not a hypocritical stance to have while also saying that the agents of the state, those authorized to use that violence, should be better screened and trained. No cognitive dissonance, just you conflating different perspectives from different people about different subjects, and finding a way to somehow make yourself convinced that you are confused by this.
Which is why the US is two different countries now, after the south objected to being held territory of the United States, right?
George Washington would object to your statement as he rallied his troops to go quash the whiskey rebellion.
The example you are using is a foreign government occupying another territory, that is entirely different than the government elected by the people occupying the territory of the country it governs. By definition, it is supported by the majority of the people, and those fighting against it are simply terrorists trying to get their way in opposition of the democratic will of the people.
When the criminals have easier access to guns than people do, it does very little to protect us from them, it just makes encounters with criminals much more likely to result in death or injury.
Yor complaints about china are mostly exaggerations, but in any case, it is not a lack of guns that allows the chinese govt to have authoritarian control. That is mainly due to china having historically been quite poor and desperate, and when a govt cam into power that was competent, even if a bit immoral, it was welcomed. China’s been doing pretty well on the world stage, and has elevated more of its citizens from poverty to middle class than we have citizens.
This should actually be a lesson to those who support authoritarian principles here in the US, although, strangely, gun advocates and supporters of authoritarian rule are pretty close to a circle on the Venn Diagram.
The difference between democracy and authoritarianism, is that in a democracy, I can be patient, and make my opinion heard, and fight it out at the ballot box. If I lose, I will redouble my efforts in making my opinion heard and fighting it out at the ballot box. In an authoritarian government, I will fight to be in charge, as that is the only way to have my opinion heard. The gun owners who would take up arms against their country due to disagreement with a legally enacted law are advocating authoritarianism, not democracy.
UK has always prosecuted hate speech. It’s just now you are hearing about it, and suddenly afraid of something that most countries have done forever. We are an exception in our first amendment, in that most countries guarantee the right to criticize the govt, but we also protect the right to criticize other fellow citizens. Being able to publically use hateful speech and ethnic slurs against a marginalized minority is not actually something that protects us from authoritarianism.
Mind reading is a bit further off than you think, and it is just utter ridiculous paranoia if you are actually advancing that as a credible fear.
Not even a little. You are completely clueless about what is going on over there. They are putting together a massive monitoring system that rates it’s citizens.
The primary amendments are not up for debate. I’m not giving up the First Amendment because YOU voted it out of existence.
Cite? The Public Order Act was enacted in 1986.
We’re already experimenting with mind/computer interfaces. That’s a done deal. How long it takes before it can be used against someone is not that far off.
Given how easy it is for a corporation to currently track your every move via phone, computer and financial transactions there isn’t much stopping full scale abuse. This is EXACTLY what China is doing now.
What an armed citizenry does is raise the effort needed by gov’t to acheive tyranny. The cost is not worth the gain.
And other countries do not factor into this. None of them are as good as the (admittedly imperfect) USA. And the Constitution, including the entire Bill of Rights, is a big part of that.
It’s a way to avoid engaging in a true discussion, peremptorily dismissing any view one does not share while simultaneously virtue-signaling to one’s colleagues.
You’ve been on this board long enough to know about it.
No, not clueless, just not hysterically paranoid about it. We have many different systems of rating our citizens. How much they make, how much debt they have, their criminal history, their work history, their health history, their educational history.
What they are doing is a bit different, but it is not somethign taht you need to get worked up into such a lather about.
Actually they are all up for debate, unless you are saying that the constitution itself, where it specifically says how to amend the constitution, is up for debate.
You would not be giving up any rights granted by the amendments because I voted it out of existence, you would be accepting that, because the vast majority of your fellow citizens agreed to make a change, that the government would no longer be protecting that right for you.
Okay, always being for well over a generation. My point was that you were claiming this was something new and scary. That it is something that is 32 years old, and the fears that have you staying awake at night have yet to come to pass, should let you loosen your grip on your pearls, just a bit.
This is just paranoid ranting that cannot be taken seriously. At most, the mind computer interface can, with much effort on the user’s part, move a cursor around the screen.
Your fears of the govt reading your mind and prosecuting your for your seditious thoughts are not only irrationally paranoid from a sociological standpoint, but from a technological one as well.
Not sure how we get from guns to your paranoid rantings about what you think is happening in another country, but I’d like to see a cite that China has and is using mind reading technology.
You’re the one making the case that it’s a slipper slope as a counter point for dismissal. You just hand waved away any argument you could have made and you did it again with the post I’m responding to.
We have people who want to ban guns or the majority of them in the US. It’s not a secret. Because of this we see legislation that picks off individual guns and that looks like slippery slope material to gun owners.
We protect the first amendment with great intensity to avoid a whittling away of that right. Gun owners feel the same about the 2nd Amendment.
