Just to clarify, you believe the 2nd is anachronistic, not the right it protects? Because where there are no gun rights, governments also tend to ban pepper spray and stun guns from being owned by civilians. And yet the people are still supposed to somehow not get raped, robbed, or killed before the police come. That sounds like a very modern problem to me.
That’s most of the world you’re describing, and they do tend to have much lower crime rates. Perhaps that’s an effect, not a cause?
Higher or lower crime rates are irrelevant. Do people have a right to effectively defend themselves or not?
How many other countries have an entrenched minority caste comparable to African-Americans, who both commit and are the victims of crime at something close to ten times the rate of the majority caste?
I’m more interested in the problem of women being overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of random assaults and intimidation when out and about alone than men. Many countries have taken away the most plausible tools with which to defend themselves from male predators. And that’s an issue that’s the same everywhere. There is no safe place in the world to be a woman. So women especially are disproportionately harmed by laws outlawing self-defense.
I don’t really think you want to go there. But you just did, didn’t you?
Is data always irrelevant? Or only if it disproves your claim?
When discussing consequential outcomes of public policy, there are only facts. Your straw man about free speech fails because free speech is widely recognized as a fundamental right in the framework of a free society, and it doesn’t typically have a direct relationship to violence (and speech can be and is restricted in cases where it does). Gun ownership is not so recognized, and it has a close and persistent relationship with violence.
First, that’s not what many constitutional scholars believe is the meaning of the Second Amendment. Second, is it your assertion that every other first-world country on earth has managed to provide the aforementioned protection for their citizens, or it is your assertion that they are just letting their citizens down and letting them be murdered in their own homes? If it’s the latter, please note the murder rate in the US vs those other countries.
Third, and related to that second point but an important point on its own, is that if your overriding concern is self-defense, how do you protect the gun owner from himself? That is, how do you protect the gun owner from the consequences of his decision to have a gun in the home that, as concluded by numerous studies, increases by many multiples the probability of a gun fatality in the home, due to accident, to a hostile or jealous marital partner acting against the other, or to an errant child?
How do you know that would be the result of such a re-writing? I’ve already commented on the counter-factual nature of what Americans believe about guns. Counter-factual beliefs generally tend to become more grounded in reality over time, as has been happening with climate change beliefs.
And note that the issue here isn’t the ability to own a gun, it’s the idea of gun ownership as an absolute right. No one is suggesting (or at least I’m not) that people should not be able to apply for and be vetted and licensed for gun ownership.
Not all those things are necessarily illegal, but some of them or certain variants of them are regulated in many jurisdictions, and it’s directly related to their potential for use in committing crimes such as armed robberies. And what you find in those jurisdictions where guns and similar offensive weapons are regulated is that the associated rates of violent crime are significantly lower.
Which facts are these, and do you have a cite for them?
Data is irrelevant when discussing the virtues of rights. Unless the number of murders, rapes, assaults, and robberies is zero, then potential victims have a right to defend themselves, or the authorities have an obligation to protect them(not TRY to protect them using limited resources).
I’m not an absolutist on the 2nd amendment, I do believe the language of the law allows reasonable regulation of firearms. But what I’m getting at here is whether humans have the right to defend themselves using means that are actually effective. I mentioned before that nations that heavily restrict guns don’t limit themselves to guns. They also tend to ban pepper sprays, stun guns and many types of knives.
The crime rates are not relevant. Any crime rate above zero necessitates the ability to defend oneself from predators. As for what constitutional scholars believe, even if the 2nd amendment does not explicitly protect a right to self defense, it would still be covered under the 9th. Who can dispute that self defense isn’t a natural human right enshrined in the Constitution? Much as the 4th implies a right to privacy, the 2nd implies a right to self defense.
Governments were not created to protect people from themselves. They were created to protect people from stronger people out to take their stuff and hurt their family(if not take them away as well).
Gun ownership is not an absolute right, but it is a right that undue burdens cannot be imposed on. Sure, you can make it so that people have to be qualified to own guns, that’s reasonable(although not necessarily politically possible in an environment where liberals have not conceded a right of an individual to own a gun). What you can’t do is ban guns wholesale as many cities have tried to do. Heller does not prevent regulation, it prevents bans. So I’m not sure why there would be any hurry to reverse that decision, unless what Democrats actually want is to take away guns.
Lower, yes, but criminals still acquire the means to gain an advantage over their victims. I can understand from a group perspective why you’d want to reduce crime overall, even if it means individual victims are worse off. But those individual victims caught in a back alley without pepper spray matter too. ILM, Individual Lives Matter.
I’ve combined your first response and your last response together as I believe they address essentially the same issue and I can give a single answer to both.
One key question is whether such restrictions on guns and certain other weapons create a net overall benefit to society and the individuals in it by the extent to which it reduces violent crime. And I would hasten to add that the right of self-defense with reasonable and proportionate force is recognized in the nations that restrict or regulate such weapons.
But closely related to this is what happens in the opposite situation, where there is a relative lack of regulation. What the data shows is higher rates of armed violent crime and what becomes essentially an arms race between citizens and criminals that only begets more violence, and greater probability that the criminal and/or the victim will be killed, which is not helpful to anyone – especially if a homeowner overreacts and shoots an innocent or non-threatening person and ends up being charged with murder, which has happened. As far as criminals gaining an armed advantage over victims, one can surmise that that will happen there, too, because a criminal who routinely uses guns in doing criminal stuff will likely be a good deal more skilled in using it than the typical citizen.
As noted, the right of self-defense still exists, but the absence of sufficient regulation simply leads to overall higher violent crime and an arms race between citizen and criminal in which the criminal tends to have the advantage.
Some may subscribe to this ideology but it’s demonstrably not true in the modern era. If it were true, it would not be permissible for governments to mandate the use of seat belts, to prohibit the possession and use of dangerous drugs, to support the entire regime of restricted prescription drugs or virtually the entire power of the FDA on everything from drugs to food additives, or even to engage in something as mundane as prohibiting swimming in dangerous waters.
It’s hard to see how Heller benefited DC since the city was responding to an epidemic of gun violence that was almost entirely centered on handguns. I suspect that any attempt to regulate them to similar effect to keep them out of the hands of criminals would run up against that exact “undue burden” problem. No one seriously wants to “take away guns” but I think there’s a good deal of fact-denial among politicians and many voters with respect to how well a uniform national program of gun regulation would, over time, go to addressing these hot spots of gun crime. In its absence, local regulations are of at least some moderate help, even if it just assists in enforcement.
A perfectly reasonable question, which many believe has been answered- in the negative. Gun control laws will by definition have the most effect on the law-abiding (where it’s not needed) and the least effect on those already breaking the law. I have yet to see a proposal, short of dramatically limiting the legal possession of firearms, that would do anything concrete to make it harder for criminals to obtain guns.
I’d have to see what data you’re referring to, but the wide adoption of “Shall Issue”- and in many states even dropping all permit requirements- has not led to the “Dodge City” scenario so confidently predicted by gun control advocates.
It’s hard to see how making handguns ever more “illegaller” benefited DC. Murder was illegal, assault with a deadly weapon was illegal, carrying was illegal, possession of a gun by a convicted felon was illegal- at that point, extra gun laws were like issuing pollution citations to the ovens at Dachau.
No, but they do want to keep cutting back and cutting back on gun possession until they see their strategy work; which will probably be never.