I figured you were being facetious. Because the Constitution doesn’t say anything about regulation or gun control, and we have certainly regulated other protected rights such as free speech…you just can’t completely abolish access without vacating the amendment first (or doing what the anti-gun types tried in the past, which is re-interpret it so that they can circumvent it and take the right away by legislative sleight of hand). The OPs plan wouldn’t work because it’s a major infringement on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, so my guess is the OP plans to have his new USSC re-re-interpret the 2nd to be a collective right so that he can get around that stuffy technicality and make it all about the militias.
With all due respect, this isn’t going to accomplish squat.
If all existing guns are “grandfathered in” then we’re still going to have a massive, MASSIVE amount of guns out there. There are more guns in america, then there are Americans.
And, c’mon, "regular therapy?’ Many, many mentally ill people, especially on medication, KNOW what “normal” looks like, because they observe it every day, even if they aren’t, and can fake it to some therapist. I have little doubt Paddock would have passed this test.
This does nothing, practically nothing, to stop some guy from doing a checkout and shooting up a school.
There is only ONE solution. Repeal the 2nd amendment and do a massive gun grab. That will be a bloody, bloody day that will make school shootings look like child’s play.
Then, perhaps allow for bolt action rifle sales, small capacity pump shotguns, and that’s it. That should reasonably cover hunting, target shooting, and home protection.
You think your side would win that “bloody, bloody day”?
Let’s try to keep it civil, Crotalus. We like civil.
You’re being presumptuous. I don’t even own a gun. I have no stake in this whatsoever. But I know plenty of people that aren’t giving up their guns unless you pry them from their cold, dead hands. SWAT style raids against the uncooperative is going to be a bloody, bloody day. Don’t fool yourself.
Many (though not all) of the pro-gunners are motivated by fear of governmental tyranny. The idea of giving control of all the nation’s guns to one powerful entity is naturally going to alarm them, and perhaps some of the rest of us.
Honestly, Ditka, the US would win in a walk. A repeal of the 2nd amendment - along with the attendant laws about seizure and such - would bring law enforcement and potentially the National Guard into the process. Posse commitatus prevents the full time military from getting involved.
But once professional military units get involved gun owners would lose. It’s hard for your hobbyists to stand up against police, much less professionals with top of the line equipment.
I’ve heard this argument before, that there’s no means by which people could be disarmed at this point. That’s true under current circumstances. But under a repeal situation it would just be a matter of being willing to pay the price.
The reason such standoffs seemingly function - Waco, the Bundy stuff and so forth - is that the government, in the persons of law enforcement and the military - has decided the goal isn’t worth the price. The minute that calculus changes the guns will be taken and a lot of people will die quickly. After that collecting the remaining guns - from those who like them but aren’t willing to die for them (doubtless later referred to as summer soldiers and sunshine patriots) - will be a simple matter of administrative headaches.
If they stopped ‘all’ gun manufacturing today, it would be several decades before there would any kind of shortage. I am married to a Redneck, southern guy. You won’t pry his gun out of his hand. He will not give them up freely. My son; same. Everybody I know; same. It ain’t happening. And if it starts getting pushed upon them, I promise they will start hoarding.
My people are all ex-military, they know guns and how to use and store them.
Your idea won’t fly around here.
They are not the ones going around shooting up soft targets,though.
All solutions must target the ‘problem’ gun owner. I don’t know how they will determine this, but that can be the only solution.
Which Constitution? … from the State Constitution of Indiana (for example):
If Them the People of Indiana wanted Federal gun control, you’d think they would amend their own constitution first … quite a few states have this kind of language in their state constitutions so the first battles to be fought will have to be in the State Houses across the land … whatever the magnitude of difficulty of getting 2/3’s of each house of the US Congress to agree, now try getting 38 States to ratify …
As unlikely as the image of the heroic gun owner fighting off the federal government Red Dawn style. The thing is, a lot of people who are in the police force and national guard are also gun owners…same with every branch of the military. And even if the police and military obeyed in lockstep, even a few incidents of Americans being killed defending their guns would be a huge PR cluster fuck of epic proportions. Hell, Waco was a bunch of religious nuts who WANTED the government to come in to fight and kill them in some sort of apocalypse trigger event a la ISIL, and that was still a PR nightmare. Something like average Joe American and his wife and 2.5 kids being killed or injured to take their guns away is not going to play well on the news.
More likely what you’d have is a lot of people just hiding their weapons. We don’t have enough police or military to do complete searches of everyone who MIGHT own guns home.
I agree that, eventually, over time it will reduce the number of guns in the US substantially if you vacated the 2nd and put in more draconian gun controls or bans…but I think there will still be 10’s if not 100’s of millions of guns out there, and the pain of doing it this way would be pretty bad, even if it didn’t spark a civil war…and it will make those who already see liberals under their bed ready to grab their guns even more fervent in their desire to hold onto them.
That’s insane … FBI, Marshall’s office and the National Guard fighting it out with State Police and local sheriff’s offices … then what, Federal authorities will have to occupy the county because the people can’t be trusted to elect compliant officials … take away the guns, the pressure cookers, the charcoal briquets, kitchen knives, nails … all the time under sniper fire …
Blood bath … how many millions of cold dead fingers will the Feds have to pry open? … how many Nation Guardsmen will refuse to gun down American civilians? … “What if you knew her and saw her dead on the ground” …
Well, I’ve heard this response, too. But doesn’t that imply there’s no reason to be scared of the government taking guns from people? It’s a catch-22 in gun debates.
You’re absolutely correct that it would be a PR nightmare. But in the scenario described, that the people as a whole had approved an Amendment, I’d feel comfortable postulating that the PR nightmare would be on the other side. If we’re at the point where we’re repealing the 2nd amendment people are going to see the National Guard and Police as heroes of the national will. Those resisting will, on the whole, be seen as criminals being arrested or mad dogs being put down.
Not that I think it’s ever going to happen. And I agree that the 2nd Amendment allows for private ownership of guns. I’m just enormously opposed to argument from emotion - which is what the above seems to be - rather than argument from procedure and data.
Not unlike my position on marijuana. It’s internally inconsistent to have marijuana illegal and have beer and whiskey legal. Inconsistency in policy bugs the fuck out of me.
While, I’m ranting - forgive me - I really resent how polarized this issue is. I don’t actually give a fuck about ownership of guns but it becomes impossible to discuss it without the other side assuming one is an extremist on the other side. It’s a Gresham’s law of discussion. There’s got to be a reasonable middle, but the whack jobs on both sides prevent the vast middle from even coming together to discuss it.
How many tanks, jets, bombs, and missiles does “your side” have? Better get cracking.
Besides, *what *resistance? If you all really are “law-abiding citizens” like we keep hearing, you’ll abide by the law, won’t you? Or is that term somewhat selective?
I don’t think your point was very well taken - the Constitution does say what I said it did, and it doesn’t say what you said (apparently facetiously) it did.
It’s a difficult hypothetical to talk about, because repealing the Second Amendment would mean that a super-majority of state legislatures and/or Americans wanted it, and therefore a super-majority would not fight.
A slightly more reasonable hypothetical might be where the Supreme Court simply announces (asChronos facetiously suggested) that the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says, that there is no right of the people to keep and bear arms, and tries to impose the kind of restrictions suggested in the OP. That would not be a walk, because there would not be a super-majority in its favor.
There are various figures on defensive gun uses in the US ranging from 400,000 to 3 million per year. Suppose we take the lower figure - does the US have the will, or the resources, to prosecute 400,000 people a year for using an illegal gun to defend themselves?
shunpiker asks who is going to pay for the armory, and storage, and treatment, and administration of the whole program. That is a perfectly valid question, which is why I asked above for figures on how effective it would be. Who tracks if I am showing up for my regular therapy sessions? If a psychologist decides I am not sane enough to own a gun, do I have due process rights to appeal, or to confront witnesses against me? Am I presumed innocent? What are my privacy rights to this diagnosis? Do I have the right to an attorney, and if I cannot afford one, will one be provided for me? Do I have the right to remain silent in the therapy sessions? Etc., etc.
Regards,
Shodan
You’re going to blow up people’s homes to get their guns? … that’s Waco all over again …
Just pointing out how ridiculous a fantasy it is.
Well, technically the Branch Davidians blew their ownselves up. Let’s not forget that.
Nice to see my last point is still valid, though.
Don’t forget the massive re-structuring of the various DFW’s … if there’s no guns about who will go and shoot all the extra deer? …
I don’t think they need to be scared that the government will take their guns, no, because I don’t see that as a realistic scenario. But there are a lot of people on the pro-gun side who lived through what they saw as a slippery slope of increasing gun control headed towards (or in some local cases at) outright bans of whole categories of guns…or all guns.
Even if we posit that the US has changed so much that the 2nd could be vacated by a new amendment and then very strict national gun control regulations or outright bans could be put in without the majority of Americans having an issue with that and in fact going along, I don’t think that federal troops or police killing a family over their guns is going to be bad PR on the pro-gun side. I can’t see Americans so changing that they would think of a family with kids being ‘mad dogs being put down’, regardless of what they did. Hell, I doubt if this happened in Europe that they would view it that way, even if they agreed that the family absolutely shouldn’t have guns and were completely in the wrong.
I completely agree, and it bugs me too.
That would be almost half again the number of prisoners we currently have, and we are already straining resources at the local levels to fund and adequately provide that level of detention centers and prisons. It’s hard to say what the legal results would be, but it would certainly add quite a few prisoners to our system if you were going to really enforce the bans once all the legislative hurdles were crossed.
Yeah, I again totally agree. I’ve been accused in multiple of these threads of being rabidly pro-gun because I disagree with things like what’s in this OP. Myself, I see room for compromise, but sadly both sides are so polarized and there is such a small level of trust (read: non-existent) along with demonization of the opposing side that I don’t see a viable way to compromise. Instead, depending on which way the pendulum is moving one side or the other is able to do what they want and beat up the other side until it swings the other way.
Hell, I support the 2nd Amendment, don’t own a gun - I’ve fired two and have the first brass from each right here on my desk - and believe that moderate regulation for the protection of all should be achievable and I’d back rebellion over that. That’s the end of the United States as a functioning unit.