There have been an uncountable number of 2nd Amendment debates through the years(7.2 septillion on this board alone) about the meanings of “militia”, “arms”, “well regulated” etc., but in my personal opinion these debates are not being argued in good faith by those actually believe that it doesn’t really matter how the 2nd Amendment is finally interpreted because they have a right to whatever weaponry they think they need (Natural Law, Natural Rights, God-Given Rights etc.) and 2nd Amendment be damned. I think it is a dishonest waste of everyone’s time to argue for hours on end about definitions and original intent and the Feds vs. the States etc., only to state, long after opponents have argued and cited in good faith, that it doesn’t matter anyway because you have the right to your firearms no matter how the 2nd Amendment is interpreted. If you truly believe this to be true, I think it would be more honest to lead with that and skip the rest that you don’t really think matters.
Yeah I feel this way pretty much about EVERY debate that invokes the original intent of the founding fathers. It doesn’t really make any difference in the here and now what they may have intended.
Not the point, which is that any debate about the 2nd Amendment is a waste of time if you already believe that you have the right to your weaponry no matter what it says.
Even if there is a good debate to be had - its very hard to put that cat back in the bag at this point in our history.
We need a culture change - not a legal change.
Again, this isn’t about good debate, bad debate or effective debate.
This is about dishonest debate, specifically about arguing on and on about the finer points of the 2nd Amendment, then declaring much later that it doesn’t matter anyway because you’ve got a superlegal right to your weapons no matter what the 2nd says.
First, let me get my personal circumstances on the table. I own five pistols, have had a concealed carry permit for about ten years, and I usually carry a pistol where and when it is legal for me to do so. I am also what most in my home state of Ohio would call a bleeding-heart liberal.
With that out of the way, I’ll address your point from my vantage point in the heart of the gun culture: rural southern Ohio, the Appalachian part. I know people who have AR-15-style rifles buried in their back yards. I know people who are perfectly capable of passing an NICS background check at a gun store who have amassed large gun collections without ever subjecting themselves to NICS, because they don’t want the government to know about their guns. They buy their guns from individuals. The fringiest of these people probably fit your description, they are going to keep their guns no matter what happens in the courts or in the congress or with the 2nd.
Most of the gun owners I know care deeply about the 2nd and the way it was re-interpreted in the Heller decision. They feel that they have an important individual right that was strongly affirmed by Heller. I believe that these people would comply with whatever changes are made to the current legal environment.
I’m in another category, I guess. I am not intellectually or emotionally invested in owning guns. I tried target shooting with a .22 pistol about fifteen years ago and found that I enjoy it. When I began investing in rental properties, I found myself in a few situations that got me to thinking about arming myself, so I did so legally. I would readily comply with any restrictions that might come along.
The factor most likely to move the needle in the situation in the US, in my opinion, is the percentage of households that own at least one gun, which was 43% in 2018. That number has been going down for quite a while, even as ridiculous numbers of guns continue to be sold. When that number hits the low thirties, I expect the 2nd amendment to be repealed. Prior to that, I expect some pretty serious restrictions, which were explicitly permitted by Heller, to be enacted state by state, maybe even nationally.
I know from personal experience that the people you are talking about exist, but I don’t think they are as common as you think. They are loud, though.
Isn’t it in equally bad faith to argue the meaning of the 2nd when your end position is “even if that was what was intended, the 2nd doesn’t fit today’s modern world”?
Is it necessarily dishonest to believe that you have a right to something on multiple grounds, but to recognize that one particular basis would be more decisive, and more likely to convince others, than the other, and so to argue it first and foremost?
And does anyone think they’re going to convince the person they’re arguing with to change their mind, then and there? That the answer is most likely to be “no” does not mean there isn’t a potential benefit to spread the message (hopefully backed up by data and a good argument) to a wider audience.
Personally, I think the biggest problem with 2nd amendment debates isn’t the good faith or lack there of of the participants, but rather that we who favor gun control fail at the outset by so often allowing the discussion to be framed in the context of what are really only a sliver of the wider issue when compared to the bulk of gun violence cases. That is, this fetish we have (on both sides of the debate) for dissecting mass shootings, which necessarily entails a discussion of the motives of individual mass-murdering assholes, and opens the door for speculation about what could have been done to stop them before or during the event if only…
That’s the wrong way. The discussion, if it is had, should focus on the bulk of gun deaths caused by less-than-mass shootings, and yes, even suicide. As a side benefit, maybe we could convince people to see the mentally ill as predominantly victims of our gun culture, rather than perpetrators.
Oh by the way, if pro-gun commenters don’t get to argue their case first on legal, then on moral or other (like, natural rights) grounds without being considered “dishonest,” then does that apply to the gun control crowd too? Because when I get into these discussions, I do so with a belief that the 2nd amendment has in the past been interpreted to allow for greater control of firearms, but I don’t allow my argument to be blunted by limiting it to merely what the 2nd amendment allows: I believe that everything should be on the table, including amending the constitution. I also believe firearms do more harm than good on more occasions than not.
In short, if you believe that the constitution should be amended—that is, you DON’T think there is a natural right or a moral imperative or whatever to own firearms—does that mean you can’t also argue that firearms should be restricted because the constitution, in your reading, allows it? Are YOU dishonest when you shift from making a constitutional argument to a moral-based argument to a practical argument based on crime statistics? I think not.
All sides in a debate should be permitted, nay expected, to argue their position on multiple grounds without being accused of dishonesty for the mere fact that they think they’re right for a lot of reasons, even as you think they’re wrong for a lot of reasons.
I think guns do more harm than good and should be more tightly controlled on practical grounds. I also believe the constitution, as written, can be taken to allow for some additional regulation. I also believe the constitution can and should be amended to allow for still more control. I also don’t believe there is such a thing as natural law, at least as commonly held by advocates of such a thing. I “can’t wait” to learn which of those points I’m allowed to advance in good faith, and which would be “dishonest” because they didn’t come first.
Yep…and if I wanted to talk about all the different ways people can argue dishonestly I would have made that my point in Title and OP. I just want to put some boundaries on this one conversation so that it doesn’t go off in twenty different directions.
I agree with the OP, virtually no American today buys or owns guns thinking “I need to become part of a well-regulated militia.” They do it for self-defense, or sport, or hunting, or some other motive, but it sure isn’t for the 2nd Amendment.
THIS is the problem you see? The dishonesty of a few people who basically say that they don’t care how it’s interpreted because they feel they have some sort of natural right to a gun (or any gun or any weapon or whatever the fuck you are talking about)? THIS is the real issue with debates on this subject on this board?
I don’t think there are sufficient :rolleyes: for this. Of all the things that are an issue with these debates, you are picking one that is just fucking stupid and silly and probably coming from a small handful of posters. Geez man, seriously?? 
¿porque no los dos? It’s not like an argument need only stand on one leg. The support for the right to arms and defense is well founded on multiple levels. I mean:
There are strong arguments, A, B, C, etc. and you are asserting that pushing A and not leading with B is dishonest? That is weak sauce.
See post #10.
I see it, but I don’t see your purpose in pointing it out. When there are multiple avenues of argument available, you think it’s dishonest for people to argue in ways you don’t like. Good luck with that.
I don’t perceive the difficulty the OP does.
Sure, there might be some percentage of gun rights people who argue 2d amendment, but would believe they have some other more basic right to guns.
The fact that they feel they have OTHER arguments ought not prevent them from advancing the constitutional argument.
Similarly, gun regulation advocates may advance their interpretation of the 2d amendment, while feeling they have countless other reasons for their opinion.
The discussion of individual rights necessarily includes a discussion of the bases for those rights.
And, in the US, even an imperfectly worded 2d Amendment provides some not inconsequential support.
Personally, I’m a huge advocate of individual privacy.
But privacy doesn’t even get mentioned - instead, it is considered within the penumbra of expressly protected rights.
Don’t know about you, but if I were advancing a legal argument, I’d generally take an express constitutional grant that is subject to varying interpretations in light of problematic phrasing/punctuation, over an unstated penumbra.
But all the problems about whether or not there is a right to bear arms are basically irrelevant, because even constitutionally protected rights can be regulated.
Classic examples - hate speech, or shouting "“Fire!” in a crowded theater.
So where is Congress, in terms of proposing even de minimis regulation of the right to bear arms?
On edit - what Bone said.
If I have multiple different arguments, why can’t I determine which I offer first?
And - given the significance of Constitutional protection - why oughtn’t I lead with that?
I agree that such debates are pointless but disagree about the reason; It’s not reasonable to start from the position that the second amendment has no significant legal effect (something like ‘it protects the right of the government to arm it’s own soldiers’), refuse to listen to any of the counter arguments, then claim that people are arguing in bad faith when they don’t accept that position. And because such threads start from such a bad position, people who are actually interested in discussing the topic are going to either skip the thread or make some argument then lose interest, leaving just the less reasoned posters to keep the thread going. I think it is a dishonest waste of everyone’s time to start a debate about ‘what does this piece of law mean’ when it doesn’t matter what arguments or evidence people present about the meaning or intent of the law, and that in the end you’re just going to loop back to ‘we should enact the widespread gun bans that I want’ regardless of what the law means.
If you believe there’s a natural right to self protection or whatever that extends to gun ownership, you probably think the 2nd Amendment was framed to protect it, and should be interpreted consistently with it. If someone is arguing about how it has been interpreted of late, or that the words simply cannot support that interpretation, it is still consistent to raise the natural right argument.
For the record, I don’t agree with those arguments. But I strongly disagree that they are dishonest.
Interesting note on that: while one can say that the 3rd amendment is outdated since quartering troops in private homes isn’t a practice modern governments engage in, no one argues ‘the third amendment is outdated, and therefore the government can quarter troops in people’s homes’. In the one ‘recent’ (three and a half decades ago now) case where it came up, the Federal Court actually ruled that it was still fully effective, and that it was incorrect for the government to house soldiers (National Guardsmen) in the employee housing of the striking prison guards. (Though it did have little practical effect; the ruling amounted to ‘they shouldn’t have done that, but since there was no precedent for this it was reasonable for them not to know they shouldn’t have’. )
We are only talking about one form of dishonest debate - the form where someone debates the Second Amendment but doesn’t really care what it says. Is that dishonest for everyone, or just for one side?
If it’s for everybody, then shouldn’t the OP have led off by saying that there is no right to keep and bear arms and it doesn’t matter what the Second Amendment says?
Regards,
Shodan