Which shows why Newsom’s idea is not a “stunt.” He’s trying to move the conversation forward. Sure, it looks politically impossible at this time (and it does) but so did gay marriage 20 years ago.
Okay, I’m not clear on what you’re saying. Are you saying the first step is building public support for gun control or are you saying the first step is enacting gun control laws that fall within the limitations of the Second Amendment?
Maybe we disagree on the meaning of calling this a stunt. I feel proposing this amendment is a stunt because I don’t see any realistic possibility that the amendment will be enacted. If it’s purpose is to get people talking about gun control then it’s a stunt.
Yeah, I guess it is a stunt, but without any pejorative meaning
Political stunt, a type of publicity stunt intended to sway public opinion on a political issue.
I’m saying that one of the first steps (before the step of an amendment, certainly) is legislation that will help to build public support for gun control. For instance, we could allow the governmental agencies that study causes of death to study firearm-related causes of death. That’s not, in itself, a gun control measure, but it could help move the needle of public opinion.
And yet, even that would ignite howls of protest from the right, along with lawsuits that might very well be upheld by this SCOTUS.
Hence the need to amend the constitution, which can’t be done without baby steps like this, which can’t be done without amending the consti … (sighs in despair)
Yeah – the more hardcore pro-gun faction in America in this the year AD 2023 leans in the direction that they want “shall not be infringed” to mean that any federal limitation even the existence of BATF itself is unconstitutional, and that no state or locality can restrict public carry in any way (so-called “constitutional carry” which is something that never existed). Even Scalia’s own Heller language is worthless to them.
Amending the Constitution on this issue is practically impossible. You’d need to get a huge supermajority of the voters to support it.
The way to get meaningful gun control is to elect Presidents who will appoint Supreme Court Justices who will rule that “well regulated” means that the government can regulate gun ownership however it pleases, without restriction. Is that consistent with the language of the text or the intent of the Framers? No, but so what?
And dying of it.
Newsoms law wont do much.
No. Lots of states have laws on gun control, and Biden recently rammed thru a bill.
Right, several states- such as CA- already have laws like that. They still have plenty of murders. But those are not bad ideas, and may prevent some,
Yep.
Less actually- 3% includes ALL rifles. My WAG it is about 2%
Why not repeal the 1st also? Religions abuse it, along with hate groups.
They already can. They just cant push for gun control, like the highly biased CDC attempt quite some time ago.
As you can see above the FBI does it annually.
Because it serves a vital purpose, unlike the second, which is just an embarrassment.
Just curious, when would you say it became an embarrassment?
Probably the first time someone used a gun to murder a bunch of children in a school, and we didn’t do anything about it because “my gun rights!”
So the 1800’s?
im thinking after the next ca gov election which is going to be his last term due to limits he’s getting ready for the senate and a prez run …
The first real mass shooting at a school was in 1966.
Though it was at a university, so I don’t think that qualifies as “children”.
There were a couple of incidents at schools at the very end of the 1800s where 4-6 people were killed, but those were along the lines of shootouts between multiple people at a high school. Victims in both cases were a mix of adults and older high school students.
The first incident I see that qualifies as “someone using a gun to murder a bunch of children in a school” wasn’t until 1998. 2 students murdered 4 other students and a teacher at a middle school.
A year later Columbine happened, and then they became more and more common until it’s now an almost regular thing.
So not only is this a relatively recent phenomenon, it’s almost entirely a 21st century phenomenon.
I was coming to post this as well.
That was the list I was using, funny enough. 
I interpreted “bunch of children” to mean “more than two”.
I don’t know if embarrassment is the word I’d use but I’d say the meaning of a right to own a fire-arm is a lot different now than it was back in 1789 when a fire-arm meant a flintlock.
Funny how you never see people who claim to believe in originalism apply that principle to the Second Amendment. Bring guns into the debate and suddenly conservatives turn into living constitutionalists.
Thats just your opinion.
We didnt arrest and prosecute the killer?
Studies have shown the school shooting are influenced heavily by media coverage. Thus, we muzzle the media and less school shootings. Simple.
And back then “Freedom of thew press” meant an old school hand cranked press. Not the radio, TV or internet. Fox news, and conservative talk radio have done a LOT to spread hate and lies. Let’s shut them down.
You probably meant this as some kind of gotcha question, but there’s a very simple answer - 2008. Every court in this nation’s history repeatedly held that the 2nd amendment did not protect individual gun rights, until Heller invented new “rights” from whole cloth.
From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment concluded it did not guarantee an individual right to a gun. The first to argue otherwise, written by a William and Mary law student named Stuart R. Hays, appeared in 1960. He began by citing an article in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine and argued that the amendment enforced a “right of revolution,” of which the Southern states availed themselves during what the author called “The War Between the States.”
If one delves into the claims these scholars were making, a startling number of them crumble. Historian Jack Rakove, whose Pulitzer-Prize winning book Original Meanings explored the founders’ myriad views, notes, “It is one thing to ransack the sources for a set of useful quotations, another to weigh their interpretive authority. … There are, in fact, only a handful of sources from the period of constitutional formation that bear directly on the questions that lie at the heart of our current controversies about the regulation of privately owned firearms. If Americans has indeed been concerned with the impact of the Constitution on this right … the proponents of individual right theory would not have to recycle the same handful of references … or to rip promising snippets of quotations from the texts and speeches in which they are embedded.”
In the end, it was neither the NRA nor the Bush administration that pressed the Supreme Court to reverse its centuries-old approach, but a small group of libertarian lawyers who believed other gun advocates were too timid. They targeted a gun law passed by the local government in Washington, D.C., in 1976—perhaps the nation’s strictest—that barred individuals from keeping a loaded handgun at home without a trigger lock. They recruited an appealing plaintiff: Dick Heller, a security guard at the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, who wanted to bring his work revolver home to his high-crime neighborhood. The NRA worried it lacked the five votes necessary to win. The organization tried to sideswipe the effort, filing what Heller’s lawyers called “sham litigation” to give courts an excuse to avoid a constitutional ruling. But the momentum that the NRA itself had set in motion proved unstoppable, and the big case made its way to the Supreme Court.
On June 26, 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to own a weapon “in common use” to protect “hearth and home.” Scalia wrote the opinion, which he later called the “vindication” of his judicial philosophy.