And the laws in Maryland prohibiting Catholics from possessing firearms? Or the laws prohibiting indentured servants from owning them? Or the fact many militia statutes tried to encourage specifically white male property owners owning guns? That to me is actually a decent amount of evidence that, with obvious variances in time and place, the 18th century saw several instances where the general right to own guns was understood to exist within a framework in which the State could significantly restrict that right based on who you were and what you were about.
And yet that is a pretty politically laden characterization of gun control. People exist on a spectrum–you have pkbites who erroneously believes that the constitution enshrined a common right to unrestricted, unregulated gun ownership, in which the government can impose no regulation on anything relating to guns. On the other side you have Michael Bloomberg types who probably would like to genuinely see private gun ownership reduced to zero. But that excludes a pretty big middle. Lots of gun control laws are not intended to reduce gun ownership to zero. You’re painting a highly politicized argument that is popular among the crowd of far right gun nuts, but has little relationship to the mainstream position on guns in most of the country for most of our history.
I’m not quoting someone, I’m saying that as a matter of fact, plural anecdotes are not the same as data. Someone who believes that has a poor understanding of what data is.
Again, you need to reread, I won’t follow up on this again. My statement made sense as a response to your statement, and you then clearly missed the point. I don’t play games with people who can’t understand thread flow and discussion flow because it results in tedious rehashing. Again–I will not respond on this point further, you had your chance.
Which was not understood to apply to State laws whatsoever. This is very basic civics, if you think it was understood that the 1791 bill of rights was a restriction on State laws you simply are not educated on the matter and need to fix that.
Maybe you did misunderstand - I’m not sure how you interpret the following as “never carry” and different from the diamond merchant/retailer/armored car driver who carries while working and doesn’t carry when they aren’t working.
Let’s be realistic, as a LEO who is admittedly obsessed with guns and constantly afraid of needing to defend yourself, you are far more likely to shoot an innocent black person while carrying than you are to defend yourself.
I’m simply talking probabilities, your odds of being attacked on the street are very low, and as a LEO your odds of murdering a minority are much higher than for an ordinary person.
Yeah, we had a whole thread on that, and you are wrong. Speaking as a data expert, plural anecdotes are unambiguously data. They are usually bad data for most purposes, but they are data.
Your odds of being attacked on the NYC subway, which is pretty much always full of witnesses, are even lower. And the odds that you’ll kill some random bystander if you fire a gun are pretty high.
The NYC subway is not a place where guns have any positive value. The only legitimate reason to let people carry them on the subway is transportation, so they will have the gun when they get off the subway. On the subway, every gun is, at best, an accident waiting to happen, kept securely out of the way.
By definition an “anecdote” is an intrinsically unverifiable and often erroneous retelling, it is not the case that you can produce good data from lots of anecdotes. That is why when researchers attempt to produce a high quality dataset they have controls on how the information is sourced. Random accounts of people’s plural “remembrances” don’t count–that’s how we end up with a large segment of the population thinking that the comedian Sinbad starred in a movie called “Shazaam” in the 1990s.
I had taken some drug interdiction courses years back before 2007 that was taught by some NYPD detectives. We had a long conversation about carrying off duty and none of them said anything about that.
To quote Percy Garris(and no, I am not insulting you) "….Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going down the mountain. When we have got the money, on the way back, then you can sweat." In other words, IF you are a target just because you carry valuables, then that is when they will rob you. Now sure, if there is some other reason, like that battered wife who has escaped her dangerous ex-husband, then she might carry it all the time.
Then, there is no reason for them to pull out a gun on the subway. But later, bringing the money “on the way back” (as Percy says), then the CCW holder may need their weapon. And if he/she/them can not get to work, by using mass transit, then what happens?
I don’t think people are gonna carry the gun just to ride the subway.
Right. But sure, some people might need to carry all the time.
A CCW holder shot someone on the NYC subway? Cite please.
Stop the rude snark. I will no longer debate with you.
I would say “often” not “usually” but yeah.
Right. People aren’t gonna carry a gun just to ride the subway. But the rule is just an illegal end run around the Ruling and it will be knocked down, in (dare I say it?) a New York minute.
To me that seems more to do with rights in general than gun rights specifically. In the 18th century our forebears were still progressing away from a medieval feudal view of society that they’d inherited, in which only those at the top were considered Citizens: the white, male, landowning soldier/warriors who were the people who counted. Everyone else- women, children, tenants, servants and slaves- were mere dependents, ancillaries of the people who actually upheld society as they knew it. It is why by 18th century standards the values espoused by the Founders, however tentative and incomplete, were radically liberal. They fought a war to be free of a system in which only the hereditary nobility sitting in Parliament back in Britain were considered to have full political rights.
One would hardly venture to say today that denying citizens the right to vote is perfectly okay because it was allowed in colonial times; it wasn’t, it was that the definition of “citizen” was rather narrower at the time. From that same time we have ample evidence that denying that narrow segment of society the right (and they did consider it a right, not a privilege) to possess firearms led to a general outcry.
It was in fact the fear that “the general right to own guns was understood to exist within a framework in which the State could significantly restrict that right based on who you were and what you were about” that led to the Second Amendment. Since the Constitution granted the federal government co-authority with the states over summoning the populace to arms, proponents of a Bill of Rights wanted an ironclad guarantee that this authority would not be leveraged to disarm the general population.
Sorry, but this is a bunch of gobbledygook. People with not much of anything get held up all the time. Then there is the psycho that goes into a grocery store not to rob but simply to kill. Trying to guess when you may or may not need to defend yourself is a fools errand.