I have a nitpick with RexDart: I used the formulation “Resolved” for this thread because I’ve seen it on a couple of other GD posts, and I know it is a standard formulation from competitive forensic debate: The moderator pronounces a position in the form, “Resolved: God exists,” or whatever, and then the two teams toss a coin, one team defends the resolution and the other attacks it. I fail to see how that association makes the usage “pretentious” in this setting. I’ll admit it does sound a bit stuffy. I’ve left it off all the other threads I’ve started in this forum, but when you’re debating a well-worn hot-button issue like this one, I don’t think it’s inappropriate to kick off with something that sounds like the intellectual equivalent of a declaration of war.
Look at the age range he used: 0 to 14. For reasons unknown, you opted instead to include “children” as old as 20 in your survey. Why you’d want to include an age range with an inordinate number of gang-related deaths in a discussion (if you’ll look a bit higher) of “child gun deaths in homes” is beyond me.
Anyway, I went to this CDC web page, asked for unintentional firearm-related deaths in the 0-14 demographic, and received a result of 86 for the year 2000, or a rate of 0.15 per 100,000. Note that this doesn’t strip away deaths that didn’t occur “in homes” like you asked for, so this number is higher than the specific stat you wanted.
Deaths for all causes in the same period for the same demographic numbered 7,236, and some quick division tells us that accidental firearm discharges accounted for 1.18 percent of all deaths. Why, that correlates nicely with the figure ElJeffe gave you earlier!
There are less than a thousand accidental shooting deaths of children every year, and the number has been dropping. Of those, there are no statistics that I know of on whether or not the gun was legally owned. Evidence does, however, indicate that of those deaths, not all were caused by an accident involving the firearm of a law-abiding citizen (as in the case of the child who found a stolen firearm stashed under the bed of the crack house in which he lived). It’s dishonest to say that law-abiding gun owners must not be ‘safe enough’ because a crack dealer who stole a gun left it where a little kid could find it.
I can do that now, if by ‘machine gun’ you’re referring to fully automatic and ‘select fire’ type rifles. I can go to the range I’m a member of and borrow one of theirs, or if I have enough money and bother to go through the federal background check, I can buy one.
I do. I like exercising my hobby in the manner of my choosing. That’s what makes it a hobby and not my job.
Because most of the ‘child deaths’ listed there were 18 and 19 year old drug dealers and gang members who were shot by rivals while they were ‘working’?
That number is misleading because it includes gang violence and murder committed by people who already illegally possess firearms as if they are innocent little kids who found Dad’s .22 magnum when they pried open the night stand drawer.
Is that true or are a high number of those actually suicides?
Marc
1160 were suicides.
I’d like to add to, meaning not “explain” or “clarify” dogface’s point. This seems to get to an issue of logic, and dogface plainly points out the quandry of assuming no individual rights exist unless they are created by a government.
As I understand it, the US Constitution lays out a collective structure or gov’t by defining certain powers and granting them. (That act in and of itself should settle the issue as to which rights, individual or collective are axiomatic.) These are powers (not rights) granted to a gov’t by the people who created IT. In effort to protect some of the rights which at that time (right after an armed revolution) were perceived as particularly crucial yet perhaps vulnerable to infringement by presumptive opportunists, certain gov’tal powers were explicitly denied. One such denial was the power to infringe upon the right to access a particular means of killing. The very wording of the 2nd amendment implies unambiguously that the individual right pre-exists axiomatically.
There is a significant difference between acknowledging an existing right vs. granting a right vs. denying a power to infringe a right. Just in case the reader, i.e. the ordinary citizen, couldn’t figure this out after 9 tries, the 10th basically says "look, if you wanna know if the gov’t has a certain power, just start on page 1 and read to here. If you don’t find it “enumerated” then the answer is "‘no’ and if you really really want this U.S. gov’t to have a certain power, you have to amend this constitution to say so.
In this sense, repealing the 2nd amendment technically won’t, according to the 10th amendment, grant the US government power to infringe upon the right to possess this particular means of killing. However, it does so practically because the tenth has been pretty much ignored by most citizenry and government, especially since it defers non-enumerated powers to the States, an idea that in the 20th century has become viewed as quaint or politically incorrect.
In closing, I am of the opinion that the secular humanist and “Godless” are not really so Godless at all. It’s just that Government is their God as opposed to some etheral entity that seems to elude definition. The points of view that “God-given right” sentiment reflects either hysterical or irrational thinking and that Government grants rights to individuals is consistent with this.
I, and millions of other people – after all, in a country as populous as the U.S., a small minority is millions of people – think that the right to self-defense is as important as religioius freedom and trial by jury. Personally, I think those two rights and the Second Amendment are far more important than freedom of the press.
Change the wording in the above to: People who want to write slash fiction are a small minority in our population. There is no obvious reason why they should have a constitutionally guaranteed right to pursue their hobbies. People who want to write about gay relations are a small minority in our population. There is no obvious reason why they should have a constitutionally guaranteed right to pursue their hobbies.
Since you are give to sweeping statements about millions of people, could we please see a cite? I could name a reason that has not yet been presented on this board.
I live in a large, rural county that has a small sheriff’s department that, among other things, must patrol a political body about 540 square miles in area. It’s not a question of trusting the police; it’s the fact that, if there is an emergency, they may take up to 45 minutes or more (based upon personal experience when a young lady rear-ended my truck) to respond. Even if they drive like bats out of hell, they may still need 20 minutes to respond if it is late at night and they have gone to the county’s extremes, or are breaking up trouble at the bars (not an infrequent occurence). A couple of summers ago, we had a man accused of murdering a woman running around loose in the woods (he was able to evade the police that you apparently think are infallible) for several months. That is one reason why weapons are scattered throughout my house.
Also, if the police cannot catch one man who knows how to live off the land, at least in the summer months, I think your latter statement that a militia cannot challenge the police militarily is absurd.
I agree with Thomas Jefferson in the Declaraion of Independence that a populace is morally justified in violent overthrow of a tyranny.
Therefore, IMO and contrary to your latter assertion in this post, it is completely defensible.
Sorry, but my right to self-defense is OF PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE to ME, nor am I going to balance it against anything. I also am very glad, especially in these days of Bush & Ashcroft, that the Constitution protects my right from a Congress that is beholden to special-interest groups and that has supinely ceded its right to declare war to the executive branch.
Since the Second Amendment has been part of the Bill of Rights for more than 200 years, obviously the American Constitution is not a suicide pact.
This is just so much piffle. In the first place, how many of those people with AK-47’s opposed Saddam, how many were neutral, and how many favored him. More importantly, did they have those weapons during his regime, or did they pick them up after Saddam’s conscripts threw them away? Without cites, this statement is meaningless.
As for flamethrowers et al., a good shot with a rifle could nail a soldier with a flamethrower long before the flame was brought to bear. Tanks? By all means, use them in urban guerrilla war. After all, I, and many others, know of something called a Molotov cocktail.
Furthermore, it would appear the Kurds and other grouple have apparently been able to resist Saddam quite well; after all, some sections of Iraq were under their control despite the Iraqi army.
I don’t think that any militia group would whip the American army in a stand-up fight, but if the government seriousily pissed off a sizable majority of the populace, winning a guerrilla war is not unthinkable. Having a military much better armed than the populace is not a guarantee of staying in power; look at the collapse of the USSR or Russia’s inability to totally suppress the Chechnayan rebels.
The main reason why the militias have no chance of winning a guerilla war is that they lack popular support. I daresay most Americans think that, on the whole, the government does at least a fair-to-middlin’ job of protecting our rights and promoting the general welfare.
OK, let’s get a few things straight.
I responded tro catsix’s remarks which seemed to say that there was not a single irresponsible gun owner out there, with the plain fact that they do exist.
In steps good ol’ El Jeffe, who takes my comments to mean that a well-regulated State Militia would exist solely to punish gun owners for child handgun deaths, which I’ve already pointed out would not be the point, and now we have a lovely argument over whether teen gang deaths should be included in the tragic deaths over which gun owners would be punished.
And this in response to a post suggesting that the 2nd Amendment be left right where it is!
Yer not exactly doing anything to dispel the notion that gun lovers are just a tad paranoid 
Legislating disarmament is one thing. Disarming a population is another. It won’t happen.
It presupposes this right, but it might do so in error of fact. If it is a right, then it cannot be destroyed nor created by mere state fiat. If it is a privilige, then it can.
Of course, if one believes that rights can be created or destroyed by mere state fiat, then one must admit that governments that do not permit “civil rights” have no obligation, whatsoever, to extend such.
Okay, so we have the right to bear arms. So what is an arm exactly? Basically, I’d say that its an object that is used to inflict damage against person or object. Basically its an object of destruction of life or property. It can be a knife, or it can be an ICBM. An arm is a boxcutter when used properly. If you are fighting someone and you have a tool to help you fight. It is an arm. So, if we have the right to bear arms, then why can’t we legally have an ICBM? Why can’t we have a M1 Abhrams tank? Why can’t we have an M 16? Because at some point and sometime, someone decided that it was too potent. Since when did we decide that there was a limit to the potency of the arms that we can bear? Well, why can’t we decide to lower the potency of the arms that are allowed. Since when does it allow the posession of firearms? The constitution says nothing of firearms. So it is basically a sliding scale.
An explanation of what was intended when the Constitution was written here.: In Colonial times “arms” usually meant weapons that could be carried. This included knives, swords, rifles and pistols. Dictionaries of the time had a separate definition for “ordinance” (as it was spelled then) meaning cannon. Any hand held, non-ordnance type weapons, are theoretically constitutionally protected. Obviously nuclear weapons, tanks, rockets, fighter planes, and submarines are not.
It basically hasn’t changed. So, why does it need to be a “sliding scale”? And why should it not include firearms?
The historical truth about the human condition is that individual man (senso lato) yearns for liberty, i.e. access to rights. Real infringement or abridgement can only be imposed by another party. In order to cast off restriction, this other party has to be, in current military parlance, “neutralized”. Death is the only 100% effective neutralizer. Treaties, Lennon-esque idealism, and love-fests have so far proven to be ineffective. In order to reverse encroachment with certainty, the encroacher has to be killed. The 2nd amendment specifies that the US gov’t shall not encroach upon this only sure means an individual has to secure his/her rights.
Curiously, if the gov’t did have the power of encroachment upon the right to secure rights, then by (admittedly protracted) extrapolation, the gov’t could encroach upon all rights including the right for the individual to have a government. By this reasoning, repeal of the 2nd amendment would be the potential suicidal trip-wire in the pact.
The hypothetical about private gun ownership not matching the advanced technologicy of the government’s armed forces is a fun debate, but it isn’t relevant to this one. The relevant question is: If it becomes necessary to neutralize the empowered collective from enslaving the individual or the non-empowered collective, shall the potential slave have the surest means, however meager it may seem, to do so? My answer is ‘yes’.
Funny thing, one of my best friends in college, a gun control advocate, rejoiced at the assassination attempt on Reagan.
Regulating or outlawing of weapons in America, is a relatively new thing. It is something that our founding fathers never gave any thought about doing.
For most of our country’s history, an American citizen could own any weapon he wanted to, including the most powerful weapon in the world - a fully armed battleship. Private citizens did indeed own cannons. Several presidents(Addams, Jefferson, Madison, etc.) solicited help from private citizens who owned battleships in time of need. Even the confederates sought out help from citizens from the south who owned battleships.
In fact, an American citizen could own any weapon he wanted to from 1776 until 1934(when machine guns and sawed off shotguns were first regulated). The 1968 gun control law regulated heavier military weapons such as mortars and bazookas. In 1967, any citizen could legally buy a mortar thru the mail for $19.95 and a bazooka cost 59.95. Shells and rockets were $5.00 a piece.
The fact that for 150 years, no weapon was illegal to own or posses, that no laws were passed preventing citizens from owning any weapon, clearly shows what the founding fathers meant, and what everyone believed until 1934, 1968 when bazookas and mortars were made illegal, and 1970 when dynamite was made illegal.
My family bought dynamite at the hardware store in town, with no permits, no license, no age limit, and no reason to tell the clerk why we wanted it(we used dynamite to blow up stumps and rocks - but we never used fireworks - too dangerous).
FYI, machine guns are still legal in America, they are just regulated now, not outlawed. All you have to do is to get a federal permit for $200. I know people who legally own machine guns, and I have shot 17 different kinds so far. I really dont want one(can’t think of any reason why I want one), but if I did, I could easily buy one.
Um… My post was an answer to futureman’s question about what “arms” were defined as, not about regulation of said arms. And I’m well aware of how regulation/prohibition is relatively recent, and I definitely know what is required for a Class III license.
Preaching to the choir, anyone?
There is a very simple rebuttal to the OP. No guns, no freedom. Without the reality of weapons of all kinds, there would ultimately be no freedom. Dispute this if you choose, for I lack a cite (other, that is, than all recorded American History) the reality is that the people with the guns and the money will rule the people without those things. The right to bear arms remains essential to the protection of all other rights, for the failure to insure the god given rights, means relinquishing those self-same rights.
In order to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there needs to be people on the gates of the city with guns, ready at a moments notice to take the life of someone intent on the cessation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is what our government does for us, to a point.
Should it happen that absolute power, should corrupt absolutely (as we all know it does) and those charged with our protection, begin to oppress our freedoms, how, might I ask, does one continue to enjoy freedom, other than to fight for it? How then, does one most efficiently fight for freedom against an invader? Rocks? knives? Spears? I doubt it.
Since this is Great Debates, and formal debates are often organized with a topic stated as
“Be it resolved that…”
It is entirely appropriate that a thread use these terms. Perhaps you have never attended a formal debate in real life.
I think you meant to say infer rather than imply – that the author is pompous, demeans the strength of his argument etc. The misunderstanding of the difference between “infer” and “imply” is a common mistake.
I tend to lean toward this viewpoint. While I am not associated with the NRA, I believe it is something of a duty to be able to defend yourself and your family. The right to do this is above the laws of our country.
Guns are legal in Germany too, its just that they are very restricted, just like automatic weapons are restricted here.
Well, anyway. As much as I would like to see less guns around, I don’t think we should appeal the 2nd ammendment. We’ve never appealed anything from the Bill of Rights, so I think it does more good than bad. Sure, it can be argued that it may be a little dated with the guns thing, but I’d rather not set a precedent that the Bill of Rights can be adapted. Next thing after we repeal teh 2nd, then we’ll have people wanting to repeal the illegal search and siezure bill (forget which one). Then maybe we’ll start snipping here and there.
Plus America is never going to get rid of its guns until something really bad happens.