From what I know, the right to bear arms is a natural right, part of English common law and the right to defend oneself and loved ones. That means it takes place with or without the Second or even the existence of a government. In addition, any citizen can choose not to bear arms.
On the other hand, the Second coupled with Art. 1 Sec. 8 and the Militia Acts regulate and enforce the use of firearms among male citizens of a certain age range in order to defend or fight for strangers.
It is a logical rebuttal. I never claimed they are only used for self defense. I claim that they are used for self defense a large percentage of the time, and they are very effective means of self defense, especially for people who are outnumbered or at a physical disadvantage to the people who are attacking them.
By depriving a person access to handguns, you’re making it substantially harder for that person to defend himself.
From what I remember, private property is a legal concept rather than a natural right, and started from physical force that was eventually legitimized (e.g., enclosures during the 18th century).
My understanding is that it’s the other way round: the need to defend others does not guarantee the right to defend oneself. Rather, self-defense is a natural right, but that by default involves oneself and loved ones. That natural right, in turn, is used to justify defending strangers.
Another point to consider is that the Second coupled with Art. 1 Sec. 8 and the Militia Acts is meant to force male citizens of a certain age range to serve the federal government.
Finally, natural rights may be abridged for one reason or another, and it does not have to involve the Second but gun regulations which vary across states.
He isn’t arguing otherwise. He’s pointing out that people also use handguns for offence, and they use or handle firearms in other ways which create danger to others. And we’re entitled - morally required, even - to balance these competing interests when deciding how to regulate firearms.
According to the cite above, Americans have a 1 in 300 chance of dying from gun violence. There’s a 1 in 6 chance of dying of heart disease, 1 in 7 chance of dying of cancer and 1 in 28 chance of dying of stroke.
Until people are ready to criminalize a shitty diet and lack of exercise, calls for repealing the 2nd amendment due to the need to balance freedom and risk seem disingenuous.
Denying you a handgun is not denying you “a fundamental right”. You’re still entitled to defend yourself; just not with a handgun. And the rationale for this is that the benefit to you of allowing you to defend yourself with a handgun is outweighed by the detriment to you (and others) of allowing other people to have handguns which may injure you (and others).
I don’t think the comparison with cars or diet is a good one. Handguns are fundamentally violent; they are machines for launching projectiles in a way that will kill or injure people. That’s what they were developed to do. Whereas cars and food have multiple beneficial uses that have nothing to do with killing or injuring people. I don’t think the two are analogous at all.
The ability of a gun to launch a projectile can be lifesaving in some situations. It’s a tool, like a car.
When people argue for restricting guns but not for restricting things that kill far, far more people, I have a hard time believing the public safety angle is being taken in good faith.
Yes. But your “fundamental right” assertion is an attempt to give the lifesaving potential of a gun some kind of priority over its potential for harm. The lifesaving potential “trumps” the potential for harm, so that public policy has to prioritise one over the other.
I say that’s BS. If a public policy is forseeably going to cause more deaths and injuries, attempts to discount that with an appeal to “fundamental rights” deserve the strictest and most sceptical scrutiny. And I’m not seeing any sense at all in the attempts to establish the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right. They seem completely incoherent to me.
And when people argue for a fundamental right to keep and bear arms as something that trumps the consequences of gun violence in the formation of public policy, I have a hard time believing that the public safety angle is being taken at all.
I’m making an even more radical claim than this. I’m saying a fundamental right should only be abridged when the potential for harm is much greater than the lifesaving potential.
You may not recognize the right to keep and bare arms, but it was of such a fundamental concern to the framers that the Federalist had to insert the right into the Bill of Rights to get the Anti-Federalists to go along with the Constitution in the first place.
Besides, your objection to handguns would only being to make sense if the number of unjustified homicides plus accidental gun related deaths were seriously out numbered by the number of lives saved by handguns.
I’m not the one making the an argument based on the appeal to public safety.
I wouldn’t be pointing this out, if I were you. Far from suggesting that the right to keep and bear arms was a “fundamental concern”, it suggests that whether it was a concern at all was a matter of disagreement even at the time. Not only is the US Bill of Rights the only statement of fundamental rights to include this one, but now you tell us it was only included by way of compromise.
Plus, as I have already pointed out, the terms in which the right was inserted into the Constitution are not consistent with your view that the right to keep and bear arms arising out of a right to self-defence; they explicitly link it to state security.
No, but I think the logic of your position is that you must accept public safety as a paramount concern. If the safety of the individual isn’t a matter of importance, how can there possibly be a right to self-defence? What value does that right vindicate, if not the value of people being safe in their persons and property? And this raises the question of whether I’m entitled to demand measures that (I think or hope) will enhance my safety, if the same measures are going to imperil the safety of others. I can’t demand, can I, that my safety be prioritised over the safety of others? That’s just selfishness.
Because the anti-federalists would only support a constitution that specifically enumerated the fundamental rights the government couldn’t violate, including the right to bare arms. And this was simply a continuation of the right to bare arms that was part of English Common Law.
And as I have pointed out 1) state security is simply a particular instance of self defense, and 2) the right to self defense exists in and of itself.
The logic of my point is it’s disingenuous to ban guns for the ostensible purpose of public safety while taking no action against things that are far, far more deadly.