Does the use of firearms to commit murder change their constitutional status?
That is:
Case 1: 99.5% of all murders are committed with firearms, and 20% of all firearms are used in crimes of some sort.
Case 2: 50% of all murders are committed with forearms, and 0.1% of all firearms are used in a crime of some sort.
If Case 1 is true, does that change the constitutional dimension of firearms somehow? Or if Case 2 is true… does THAT change the constitutional picture at hand?
Is Popeye on a killing spree?
I eats my spinach and stick my victims inna ditch, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!!
Bricker, while I agree the line may be difficult to draw IRL, there comes a time when the theoretical and ideal set of “rights” may have to be forced to give way to strict controls. We may all agree that a small pistol as an infrequent article in very few homes and put to rare use is acceptable in society, but I doubt if we would agree that allowing every mentally questionable neighbor to possess a cheap, small nuclear device with an unstable hair trigger is OK.
But the difference is only a matter of degree in weaponry. It breaks my heart to say it, but pure rights can be trumped by practical considerations.
Probably the constitutional framers never envisioned weapons much larger than a front-loading musket. They could afford to think in pure, theoretical terms. I suspect if they could have looked 200 years into the future, they might have written the 2nd Amendment differently.
Maybe that’s so. And I don’t disagree that the Second Amendment’s right are subject to reasonable limits - just as the First Amendment’s rights are subject to reasonable limits. And so are the Fourth’s, the Fifth’s and so forth.
But if you believe that the Second Amendment rights are simply no longer wise to grant AT ALL, then the proper approach is to modify the Constitution, as we’ve done many times before in our Constitution’s history… not to use the judiciary to wish them away.
The Puckle Gun, an early repeating gun, dates back to 1718.
http://ccrkba.org/pub/rkba/news/PuckleGun.htm
It’s highly implausible Ben Franklin, at the least, was unaware of the concept of repeating guns.
As far as bigger? Good lord, the bullets were .70 caliber on some of them. 7/10ths of an inch across.
More range? More power? What do you mean ‘larger’.
Very interesting link. I especially liked the choice of the bullets according to who they were being used against:
While it certainly plausible that Franklin et al had heard of that weapon, I can’t recall any use of it in the Revolutionary War, and that article says:
…which indicates to me that it was a minor factor in 18th Century weaponry (probably too far ahead of it’s time!) Another factor in marginalizing it might have been the firing rate, “nine shots per minute”, which isn’t quite in the rapid-fire tommy gun category.
It certainly doesn’t compare to a pocket nuke, which the framers are unlikely to have forseen.
While it may indeed be true that the constituional framers were aware of some minor weapon improvements, it doesn’t seem likely that the 2nd Amendment was much affected by them, so my point still stands.
Agreed.
Huh? I included an explanation of what I thought your meaning was. How is it that you would accuse me of quoting out of context?
What’s your point?
No, it doesn’t - yet gun-advocates make such arguments all the time.
My entire post was a singe sentence: “Actually, guns are RARELY used to murder people, less than 1% of the guns in America are even used in a crime.” Now I know we all sometimes edit a Quote for brevity, but when you Replied with Quote, you took this “Actually, guns are RARELY used to murder people,” out of context. Bad form.
63 discharges in 7 minutes, of up to 16 shots at a time, not affected by weather.
144 rounds a minute.
I seen worse. That said, portable nukes would probably count as ordinance until such time as they are commonly carried by soldiers as longarms.
The point being, of course, that the Founding Fathers, being natural philosophers of exceptional talent, were most unlikely to be unaware of the nature of man to improve weaponry. Franklin, again, I’m sure, was most aware of the potential for electricity to be lethal, and the ability for it to be captured, for example. That it was not yet a man portable weapon? Science advances. These men were smarter than you or I, and they looked ahead.
Sorry if this has already been covered (it’s getting to be a pretty long thread!), but: Supposing that the Supreme Court ever issues some sort of ruling recognizing an individual right to posses firearms, and furthermore holds that the Second Amendment is indeed incorporated- the states have to respect a personal right to weaponry. How would such a stance affect state and local gun laws? What would be the pracitcal effect? Would it be similar to the “shall issue” laws current in many states? Could a state demand enrollment in an organized armed unit, and obligatory service in said unit, as the price of possessing firearms? Would it affect the laws governing military-style automatic weapons?
Oh, I see. Sorry I didn’t include the second sentence. It wasn’t my intention to quote you out of context, as I included immediately thereafter the intended meaning of your statement:
“I think what you meant to say was most guns aren’t used to murder people”
What I was pointing out was that you didn’t word it well. My wording is more clear. The fact that you incorrectly used a comma instead of a semicolon notwithstanding, “Actually, guns are RARELY used to murder people” is a complete sentence. And it’s a misleading sentence. Guns are in fact frequently used to murder people.
I aplogize for leaving out your second sentence, but it doesn’t change my point.
There was only one damn sentence. You misquoted me.
I already apologized; what is it you want from me?
And no, incorrectly seperating two sentences with a comma does not make them one sentence, I can write this whole paragraph with no periods or semicolons, it wouldn’t be one sentence, it would just be incorrectly punctuated sentences, putting a bell around a duck’s neck doesn’t make it a cow.
I would guess that he would have preferred that you understood his original statement and responded to it rather than misunderstanding it and responding to a point he had not made.
His original statement (paraphrased by me) was that guns were not primarily used as murder weapons. That is a true statement, even if 100% of murders were committed by guns, given that very few guns are used as murder weapons (there being far more guns than murders in the U.S.)
Two suggstions:
**re-**read texts a bit more closely to be sure that you are responding to the statements actually made by a poster, just to avoid confusion;
use ellipses to indicate removed text if there is the slightest chance that anyone else might think that you have mangled a quote on purpose.
One more suggestion: you might both want to move on from what is becoming a hijack. Gun debates nearly always raise tempers around here, but we fight more ignorance debating the issues than beating each other for personal misunderstandings.
Good advice. Thanks.
But he PHRASED it in a misleading way. I’m sure you would like to let that stand, but I didn’t. It’s misleading to say that “guns are rarely used to murder people”, when what you mean is “most of the guns that exist are used for other purposes”. Even with the second sentence, the FIRST sentence is poorly phrased.
I DID understand, and if you read my whole post, you would SEE that I understand, because I correctly paraphrased the meaning. I wanted to correct the phrasing of the first sentence because it’s misleading the way it’s written.
I resent being accused of misquoting when that was obviously not my intention. Had it been my intention to misrepresent, I wouldn’t have included my paraphrase of what I believed DrDeth intended to say, would I?
Excuse me, but did you read the part where I apologized for not including the text of the second sentence? Why are you making suggestions to me regarding things that I have already acknowledged and apologized for?
In my view, we’d then have a number of court cases bubble through the system to challenge the various restrictive laws, and the end result would be similar to what we have now concerning other sections of the Bill of Rights: a balance struck between the right and the orderly function of society. We already know that “…shall make no law…” regarding the free exercise of religion doesn’t mean that the legislature cannot prohibit marijuana use, even if it impacts a religion that requires marijuana use for its ceremonies. We would end up with a similar balance struck for possession and use of firearms, with laws that completely prohibit them struck down, but laws that impose reasonable restrictions permitted… and the courts would have hashed out exactly what is “reasonable” in this hap.
I’d guess that the courts would stike a balance as they do for other cases where individual rights collide with other individual rights or the genuinely necessary powers of government. For instance, as I noted upthread, Miller found that the militia clause provides guidance as to which sort of weapons constitute “arms”, and this would support a certain degree of deference to political decisions as to which specific weapons were regulated or prohibited (provided that such regulations didn’t make a mockery of the basic right to keep and bear arms, as the struck-down District laws did). I suspect that if someone were to challenge reasonable limitations on who may keep and bear arms (e.g. you must be free of a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record), the courts would take a similar position.