Emotion is the fear and racism that drives our current gun laws.
Robots don’t get rights. Angry people do. Don’t tell people not to be angry.
Emotion is what we need to have in order to gain support for new laws. If we’re all numb to these attacks, we keep the status quo.
I’m not. But just “being angry” doesn’t seem to work in creating gun control laws with the current makeup of the Senate. “Hulk smash!” works in Marvel movies, not against Republicans and/or gun owners, and obviously appeals to emotion aren’t getting the job done. Be Professor Hulk, or even Joe Fixit ( a sneaky and cynical but weaker Hulk) not dumb Hulk.
The only comparison I can think of right off the bat is the death penalty. People are happy when a person who has committed terrible crimes is executed. But it hasn’t really accomplished anything.
The core reason is they are wedding tightly with the right to self-defense, which I consider an innate and fundamental right that should not be wholly ceded to government. There are a few other reasons I am against guns being banned, but this is the fundamental / most important constitutional reason.
I might ask you–considering I am in support of a far stricter gun control regime than I think any individual State in America has at present, why do you (or the collective you of this thread if you personally don’t) care that in spite of that I don’t support a full ban of ownership rights?
Mind you again–many of the countries that the trolls in this thread point to as countries to emulate have never banned guns, in fact complete gun bans are relatively rare in OECD countries.
I believe only three OECD countries for example even completely ban handguns: Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom. I’ll note that of those three countries, only South Korea comes fairly close to banning all gun ownership–you can own rifles and shotguns (but not handguns) in South Korea, but they have to be stored at the police department and can only be retrieved on a per use basis for a limited number of approved uses.
It seems weird to me people are upset that I’ve drawn a line in the sand of being against complete bans–when that is not even the norm basically in any of our peer countries.
I think people are more upset, generally, by:
- Your frequent and shocking intellectual dishonesty, and
- Your willingness to trade the lives of others for that which you hold dear.
And as far as banning handguns: Canada is considering it.
I am aware that is the fig leaf SCOTUS used, after over a hundred and fifty years of reading the Second Amendment as a limit on the power of the federal government only, to justify incorporating it to limit the states as well. Self-defense is a fundamental right (I agree) therefore… handguns for all my friends!
It’s kind of ironic, actually, because one might apply the same sort of logic to abortions. Not that having an abortion is a fundamental right per se (any more than owning a semiautomatic pistol is a fundamental right: certainly we have no indication the founders contemplated the right of individuals to own any sort of semiautomatic weapon), but that just as “self-defense is a fundamental right, therefor…” we might as well say “bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, therefore…” no?
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Point out actual intellectual dishonesty, all I’ve seen in this thread is a lot of trolls trolling with personal insults.
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I’m willing to trade people’s lives for all fundamental rights. I think that is inherent to such rights. Locke’s three most fundamental rights: life, liberty and property, all might require some people to die as a trade. For example, to protect life generally a government must form and maintain a military, which is ultimately an instrument of death. To protect liberty a government must be willing to use that instrument of death to kill external threats to said liberty. To protect property, sometimes individuals and civil authorities have to use force against criminals and that will sometimes escalate to deadly force. I frankly view it as dishonest to advance a belief that you can have fundamental rights and not be trading lives for them. If you aren’t willing to trade a life for the right, then that is a good sign it probably isn’t a fundamental right.
God, you’re a pompous twat.
Point of order–the Supreme Court largely did not have any meaningful Second Amendment jurisprudence for most of our history, so the 150 years thing isn’t really accurate. There have been vanishingly few Federal gun regulations, compared to the large number of State gun regulations, and State gun regulations were not regularly challenged in courts until the latter 20th century. The few significant Federal gun regulations (National Firearms Act among others) have all been challenged a few times, and mostly upheld, but there was never the sort of incontrovertible ruling that the 2nd Amendment is solely a limit to Federal action or that there is absolutely no private right to gun ownership. The idea it was only a limitation on the Federal government flies in the face of the general view towards incorporating constitutionally defined rights onto the States via the 14th Amendment, just because the court had never had a case directly touching on that until the 21st century doesn’t mean it had settled law to the contrary. Note the only Supreme Court case to even directly deal with the 2nd Amendment head on before Heller was Miller, and in Miller Justice McReynolds upheld gun regulations because they regulated firearms that had “no use as part of a well-regulated militia.” While anti-gun people are happy to proclaim this settled for all time the 2nd Amendment simply protects the rights of the States to organize militias, and nothing else, McReynolds’ actual opinion isn’t all that expansive, and dealt with a narrow issue of law. The simple reality is there was a vacuum in this area of the law at the Federal level, any attempt to portray it as more than that is generally political in nature.
I mean I’m in favor of legal abortions so not sure if this is intended as some sort of gotcha. The constitutional and legal issues around abortion are significantly more complex than guns I think, but from a strict legal perspective while I think you can make the argument bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, explicitly protecting it through the Federal courts is a difficult lift because the Federal courts have generally been reticent to recognize very many unenumerated fundamental rights (there are a few exceptions.)
I did create a thread to discuss this with you since you kept saying that this is not the place, haven’t seen you there though.
I’ve pointed it out repeatedly*. You either:
- Don’t read it
- Cannot read it, or
- Cannot understand what it means
The alternatives are all worse.
It’s really not an admirable trait.
You omitted the word “other” (people’s lives). How convenient.
*But for convenience:
I’m not sure why you think people are mad at you for opposing gun bans. I haven’t seen anyone here in the current wave of gun threads actually propose a gun ban as US policy (aside from musings like “we would be better off with no guns at all”).
What you oppose is meaningful change to the laws and mindset that allow gun proliferation in this country.
I see you are only interested in perpetuating intellectual dishonesty, good to note.
That simply isn’t true. I can be found promoting reasonable gun restrictions, at least as far back as 2012 on these forums:
Note that thread was for the Newtown shooting itself–I am significantly more pessimistic about the politics of passing gun laws now than I was then, I actually assumed in response to a bunch of dead grade school children we would have changed our laws at least around the edges. Considering not only did that not occur, but that largely the Republican party continued to win on this issue politically, I generally think Democrats should focus their efforts on more limited things for the time being simply out of political realism, but I don’t disagree with the actual ideas I posted back then, just the practicality of them.
I also was unaware back then that most of our gun laws right now are poorly enforced, which colors how effective I think such laws can be.
Not quite.
You’ve made it clear that you’re willing to trade the lives of people you don’t know
And if anyone makes a suggestion that you start thinking of trading the lives of people you do know.… Well, this makes you even angrier.
This is one of the things that is making people think less of you.
I never added any such qualifier–what I did say is that wishing innocent people die is immoral, which is an entirely different thing.
You’ve made it abundantly clear. But it makes you look like an amoral dickhead, and nobody wants to look like an amoral dickhead. So you weasel your way around this sentiment that you’ve expressed, in order to make yourself look better.
Understandable.
But others are seeing what you have typed, and can see that you are willing to trade other people’s lives for your right to have weapons that are designed to kill people. And that when you’re asked to think about trading lives of people you know… Well we can see the reaction.
So keep on obfuscating to make yourself feel better.
And you go ahead and keep posting lies, you’ve done so thousands of times before so no reason to alter your behavior now.
fuck you