If it was simply “a continuation of the right to bear arms that was part of English common law”, then it wasn’t a fundamental right at all, since it could be limited or abolished at any time by legislation.
I understand that’s what you’re saying. I’m pointing it that it’s disingenuous of you not to recognise that cars, food, etc have substantial benefits unrelated to public safety, and which are taken into account in determining how they should be regulated, whereas this is is not true of guns, and this explains the different approach to regulating them.
But you can’t have - or, at any rate, you don’t have - firearms regulation which permits “the vast majority of handguns which never imperil the safety of others” and only affect the ones that do. Any firearms regulatory regime (and this includes a complete ban) is going to have good outcomes in certain situations and poor outcomes in others. You have to take both the good outcomes and the poor outcomes into account in framing public policy. You can’t justify a firearms policy by appealing to the good outcomes, the ones you wanted and hoped for, and discount the bad outcomes on the basis that you didn’t want or intend them.
Like, we can all understand a right to life, to bodily sovereignty, to privacy, things like that. Those can all be rationally justified as “fundamental rights”. What possible similar justification is there for being able to own a firearm? How can we make that case? If I had to start from the position of “There is no fundamental right to life” and demonstrate that we should consider the right to life fundamental, I could. And so could most of the people on this board. Could you do the same for firearm ownership? Why should I consider your right to own a firearm fundamental? And doesn’t this mean we should be handing out guns to every man, woman, and child in America?
Oh look a study showing that the number of unjustified homicides alone seriously outnumber the number of lives saved by handguns.
In 2012, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 32 criminal homicides. And this ratio, of course, does not take into account the tens of thousands of lives ended in gun suicides or unintentional shootings that year.
Granted, we’d probably be better off if we had better studies, like, say, from the CDC, but the CDC isn’t allowed to study gun violence. I wonder why.
English common law recognized it as a natural right, which is where the founders of America got the idea.
But it doesn’t. Yes, food and cars have benefits beyond public safety. That doesn’t detract from the fact that 1) the right to bare arms is fundamental and 2) public safety is adequate in itself to justify the ownership of handguns, even if that ownership weren’t a fundamental right.
Do you support the banning of unhealthy diets and lack of exercise?
Right. There’s no way to totally mitigate the danger handguns present without somehow making them all disappear. But to argue that handguns should be legal only if they are never misused is an impossibly high bar that is applied to no other form of property.
I’m not discounting the bad outcomes, I’m saying they don’t meet the threshold necessary for denying a fundamental right.
There are rebuttals to this study. This one for example.
There are studies that find contrary results. This one for example.
Seems to me this issue has been politicized, and that includes both the pro and anti gun think tanks. I’m not willing to give up fundamental rights for a study that may or may not be conducted in good faith with sound methodology.
This is painfully backwards. No, the right to property is not the fundamental basis for the right so sovereignty or the right to life. That might be the most bizarre thing I’ve heard all day.
Guns are necessary for neither of these things.
Worried about self-defense? Get a pit bull. Learn Kraw Maga. Carry a taser or pepper spray. You don’t need a gun to protect yourself any more than you need a hand grenade or a flamethrower.
Worried about your private property? Become part of a society that respects property rights. Boom, done. No need for guns. If the society is peaceful enough (or even just not particularly well-armed), you don’t even need the police to carry guns.
So, in short, your claims fall horribly flat.
I recommend “The Moral Landscape” by Sam Harris for this one. It’s a bit of a long argument and I have little interest to rehash it here.
Well why don’t we try to get an overview and examine the best possible data? Does it matter at all? I concede that the study I cited is based on bad data. Well, let’s find some good data. Let’s actually try to resolve this question and figure out if there’s anything to your claim that handguns save more lives.
Oh, and by the way? Your “study” that finds contrary results does nothing of the sort - it simply points to a weak correlation between an increasing number of guns and a decrease in gun violence and asserts with no further backing that this correlation means causation. It does absolutely nothing to address the question of whether there are more people protected by guns than killed by guns.
The metric shouldn’t be counting dead bad guys, counting dead good guys, and comparing the two. It should be “lives saved”, not “gross body count”.
Because the CDC funded a piss-poor study with a political agenda behind it, and the CDC’s Congressional overseers determined that that was a waste of funds and banned the practice.
Spoken like a true male. The reality of crime is, men are usually perpetrators, and women are usually victims. Men usually have a significant height, weight, and strength advantage over female victims. A gun is a way to even the playing field. Krav Maga is a ludicrous suggestion.
Here’s an experiment: ask every woman you know if she has ever been a victim of a violent crime. Sadly, probably half of them will say yes. Then ask them, if they were in the same situation again, would they rather be a black belt, or have a gun.
I have to say the idea that comparing firing a ar-15 to a bazooka seems like the journalist was so scared of the weapon before he even touched it that he couldn’t be expected to have a reasoned response to it. I’ve never fired a ar-15, which by the way are extremely customizable and there are so many variations such that it’s hard to call it a single weapon, but I have extensive experience with the m-16 on which ar-15 is based and it is one of the most gentle weapons you can fire. In basic training the drill sergeants wanted to ensure that people weren’t scared of the weapon because it would screw up your aim. They would fire the weapon with the but against various parts of their body including their forehead and their crouch to demonstrate that it had no recoil. My five year old daughter could handle it if i would give it to her. I’ve also been near “bazookas”, actually AT4, as it went off and they’re in no way comparable.
I can only conclude that he was so scared of what he was doing that it became a scary monster in his hands.
Not sure how I missed this response before, but I’ll answer it now.
Feel free to abstain from twisting my words into a pretzel anymore. My point seemed fairly obvious to me, but I’ll clarify. Let’s assume that your solution is implemented: most law-abiding citizens are prevented from buying guns. This will not stop those who are not law-abiding from getting them on the black market. So basically you’re making those who actually follow law more vulnerable to those who don’t. It has absolutely nothing to do with somehow divining the buyer’s intent. Clear enough?
And please refrain from implying that I’m an idiot in future. I am most assuredly not.
No that study doesn’t say that *the number of unjustified homicides alone seriously outnumber the number of lives saved by handguns. * It doesnt count the number of times a handgun was used to save a life -without killing the perp.
The CDC is indeed allowed to and indeed does study gun violence. You are simply wrong.
"Firstly, CDC was not banned from doing the research. In fact, CDC articles pertaining to firearms have held steady since the defunding, and even increased to 121 in 2013."
Here is what they can’t do : *“None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
*
Here’s a quote from the article:
"*Squeeze lightly on the trigger and the resulting explosion of firepower is humbling and deafening (even with ear protection).
The recoil bruised my shoulder, which can happen if you don’t know what you’re doing. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary form of PTSD.
*"
Recoil on a .223 is very light.
Smokeless powder has no sulfur smell. That’s blackpowder, which no .223 is powered by.
Not that loud if your wearing mandatory hearing protection.
If you know it’s based on bad data, presenting it is bad form. It’s falsifiable in about, 30 seconds. For example, Table 1 says Arkansas had zero justifiable homicides in 2011. Here is a justifiable homicide in 2011 in Arkansas:
The definitions used, the flawed methodology, the bad data sources, all of this contributes to why the VPC info is both wrong, and stupid.
of course there’s be a conclusion, but it could be “Guns are heavily used among inner city youths” or whatever. The conclusion does not have to be political.
True, but that would be a somewhat less than useful study. I would think most people, when they advocate for the CDC to study guns, actually want USEFUL studies like “CCW holders are more/less likely to be robbed” or “Guns in the home increase/decrease home invasions” rather than “Guns are purchased by people who purchase guns”