I have asked the moderators to review the thread and decide if they feel there’s a problem with people going off topic here and what direction they may wish to give.
Got it in one! Restrictions are key. We need to restrict gun ownership. Licensing and registration, limits on the sorts of guns one can own, and limits on where one can take them. These are all things that help stop the mass proliferation of firearms and increase in violent crime that results.
Sure there is! Unless I misunderstand you. Do you mean that it isn’t currently politically viable? Or that it is physically impossible? Or something in between?
I don’t think we should ban guns. I think we should regulate guns and have more restrictions on them.
As you acknowledged, other countries are more restricted on gun ownership and they don’t have school shootings in those countries. So that tells me more restrictions are a good idea.
Do you support or oppose more restrictions on gun ownership?
Secondly–
Have you ever heard of Morgan’s Riflemen? Most soldiers in the Revolutionary War used inaccurate muskets, but some used rifles. The rifle was the elite infantry weapon of the day, and many soldiers came to the war with their own personal weapons.
This would be equivalent today of a brand-new recruit showing up to boot camp with a fully-automatic rifle that he brought from home–because that’s what’s used today in the infantry.
And let’s not forget letters of marque, which allowed individuals to own and operate warships. The modern equivalent would probably be something similar to this.
Except the constitution of most states also have the right to bear arms in them, and most of them are clear that it is an individual right as is the 2nd Amendment per the unorganized militia in the federal code.
Sans the 2nd Amendment there is still an individual right to bear arms in most states and attempts to trump those rights by the feds are in opposition of the 10th Amendment.
Seems to me the left cannot get it’s agenda accomplished without dismantaling most, if not the entire bill of rights.
That’s strange – every other civilized democracy on earth seems to manage to have exactly “the agenda of the left” with respect to gun control while retaining constitutional protections of all the other rights and freedoms, and thereby enjoying a more peaceful society with all the same freedoms, but without shooting each other every day. I wonder how they do that?
Hey, the 2nd Amendment doesn’t talk about an “unorganized” militia at all - it talks about a “well regulated” militia. An “unorganized” militia is the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE of a “well regulated” militia. There aren’t enough eye roll smilies in the world…
That’s certainly a tactic that states use to try to nullify gun legislation, but that tactic would be undone completely by a new amendment as is the subject of this thread, because that regulation would then be a power that the constitution is explicitly giving to the federal government. Hence why there’s the idea of having an amendment in the first place.
You feel the 10th Amendment makes guns a state issue. So you would have no problem is New York, for example, decided to use its state authority to prohibit gun ownership. And the federal government would have to authority to overrule New York on this because guns are a state issue.
There have been successful attempts to limit federal gun control legislation by citing the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not given to the federal government in the US Constitution are reserved for the states.
The 2nd Amendment grants the right to bear arms, and the federal government has an obligation to protect that right. A total ban on gun ownership as implemented by a state would not be granted by the 10th Amendment, since it stands in the way of the 2nd.
There is wiggle room between banning guns and putting restrictions on gun ownership, and some states have used that to have more restrictive laws (again, without going so far as to outright ban guns).
The proposed 28th Amendment as outlined in the OP of this thread would explicitly give the federal government the power to implement nationwide gun ownership restrictions, and no state can object on 10th Amendment grounds at that point.
I’d strongly support such an amendment, but I don’t think we can even come close to passing it.