I think we have to agree on how we are using the term controversial.
Going forward in this conversation we can shorten the individual right to arms as what a lay person would understand, i.e. not connected to militia service. I think that is the majority view of the general public. Gallup supports that, sorta. I’m sure there are other polls but I haven’t looked it up. For this view to be considered controversial, what percent of the population (domestic) would need to oppose the individual right?
I’ll take the position that if something enjoys 70%+ support, it is not controversial. That would be a mainstream view. My personal descriptors go something like this:
<5% = Fringe
Between 6% and 30% is controversial or contentious
Between 31% and 70% is mainstream
Greater than 90% is overwhelming
*I totally made all those up. If you want to refine it somewhat, then we can haggle.
Fair enough. I suspect that most folks who want a repeal of the 2nd amendment are within the 25% of folks who want to ban handguns–but obviously any absolute will be wrong.
Bone, I’m finding that a recent poll finds 81% of people think that private gun sales and sales at gun shows should be subject to background checks, and 67% (almost meeting your 70% threshold) support a federal government database to track all gun sales. Do you think that the first proposal is uncontroversial, and the second one is almost uncontroversial?
Edit–I just reread how you’re defining controversial. You seem to be saying anything with 30% or more support is uncontroversial. For me, the mere fact that a significant number of people objects to something means that it’s controversial.
Otherwise you end up with weird results, in which two opposing positions are bitterly disputed in the marketplace of ideas, but neither of these ideas is controversial.
Back in #27, I stated that conservative Supreme Court justices would be perfectly able to find a right to gun carrying without explicit mention of guns in the constitution – just as other sorts of justices found a right to abortion without that being mentioned.
One reason the second amendment stinks is that it makes the US look bad. About two months ago, my younger son and I were in Taiwan, at dusk, after having walked over a low mountain. And the taxi companies we called said they didn’t serve the area. So for the first time in my life, at age 58, I hitched a ride. And we were quickly picked up by a couple who had never picked up hitchhikers before.* So of course we were extremely thankful. One thing I said was that I would have to repay their good deed by picking up a hitchhiker in the US. And of course they (both, luckily, being English speakers) said, no, don’t do that, they may have a gun. Yes they might still say that just from the movies, but the well known constitutional clause can’t help. All this IMHO idiotic second amendment does is foster an unattractive sense of moral superiority in American gun owners while making the US sound even worse that it is.
My son who lives there told me that even though Taiwanese hardly ever hitchhike themselves, they are known to pick up hitchhikers. Did I say that I love Taiwan?
That’s one of those so logical it ignores reality arguments. We all know that guns aren’t just another tool. I know that both sides of the debate like to use that when it serves but I think deep down we all know it’s crap. And clearly the authors of the constitution felt similarly as they didn’t guarantee the right to have a well regulated landscape crew armed with rakes.
I’m really not sure where I picked up how I am using the word but my usage is incorrect. Lhod yours is right and so I agree with your statement that these ideas are still controversial. I don’t expect anything will change that any time soon.
And since I’ve failed at not pursuing a hijack I’ll leave it at that.
I get what you’re driving at, though. “Controversial” does seem to have a connotation in a lot of contexts of something that’s outre or socially unacceptable. Otherwise, we wouldn’t really have sentences like “His opinions are controversial.” Because all opinions are inherently “controversial” if not everyone agrees. But we often see and use the word controversial to mean something more extreme than just “not everyone agrees.”
In other contexts, sure. But in this conversation, “not controversial” end up replacing “not ambiguous” to describe the Constitutional Individual Right to Bear Arms Regardless Of Militia Membership (CIRBAROMM for short), and I dispute the idea that CIRBAROMM is, in the sense of non-ambiguous, non-controversial. It’s at the center of a terrific controversy, with nearly equal number of Supreme Court justices coming down on either side of the controversy. The relevant definition of controversial is the one that applies to whether something is significantly disputed by a significant number of people, not the one that applies to whether an opinion is far out of the mainstream.
Sure. Power can be used for good or evil. The special thing about guns is that their power is decentralized, fairly cheap, and easy to use. They’re not like nukes, a telecom company, a police force or military, a high powered team of lawyers, or any of the powerful tools available exclusively to governments, corporations or the rich. They put a lot of power in the hands of the poor, marginalized, and ordinary – and that’s both liberating and scary, depending on one’s mood at the moment.
I think something similar could be said about the internet – but it will be much more true when we have cheap, user friendly, anonymous, mesh-networked servers anyone can install and maintain.
Nice try at giving a left-wing justification for a right-wing policy, but is it true?
If the sky-high US gun ownership rate does such a great job of empowering the poor, why is it that the US not only has the world’s highest incarceration rate, but, also, those in our prisons are overwhelmingly from impoverished families?
As for the implication that guns equalize the marginalized vis-à-vis the police, you aren’t taking into account that when the populous arms itself, the police respond in kind. In countries where hardly any civilians carry guns, hardly any police do either. The US not only has the most guns, but also the most SWAT teams that can outgun those poor and marginalized people whose welfare the gun lobby apparently cares more about that I ever imagined.
And there is a difference between right wing policies and things that right wingers tend to like. I know the difference might sound trivial, but it’s important. There’s nothing inherently liberal about Volvo.
I would think it extremely obvious that I don’t care what the opinion of the authors was, given that I think the 2nd Amendment was a mistake.
And guns are a tool. Cars are much more useful and have allowed much more freedom, yet they are not in the constitution. A constitution should be about ideology, not technology.
It has nothing to do with whether cars are more useful than guns. Guns are weapons. That is different than other “tools”. And the freedom to own weapons for self-defense (collectively and/or individual) is part of your nation’s founding ideology whether you want to call it a tool or not.
Eta: not sure if you’re aware but a lot of Europe used to have laws on sword ownership and even riding horses- precisely to stop the lower class from getting uppity. This IS an ideological amendment.
I don’t care what the founders intended. I’m not sure how to make this more clear. I don’t care. They were fallible dudes. I think they were wrong to put guns in the constitution. I think guns do not belong in the constitution. If the constitution said “You have a right to self-defense” that would be fine. Naming a specific tool is not.
I wasn’t pointing to their infallibility. The point is that the Federal government not having exclusive use of weapons is an ideological stance that merely involves a “tool”.
Yes, but not the ideological stance most people seem to think of nowadays. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to make a large standing federal army unnecessary, because a large standing federal army was presumed dangerous to domestic liberty. That is irrelevant today.
This ideology wasn’t in the Declaration of Independence. And it wasn’t in the Articles of Confederation. And it wasn’t in the original US Constitution. Instead, it was added when Rhode Island and North Carolina refused to ratify the original constitution unless a Bill of Rights was included.
The founding ideology of the US was that we should be ruled by men of property on this side of the Atlantic – which was equated to liberty – rather than men of property on the other side – which was equated to slavery. The idea that everybody, or at least everybody who was white, had a right to be armed, was fairly popular, but it’s a stretch to say it was part of the founding ideology.