What are these rights based on? Where do they come from? Why do Americans have the right to own guns when people in a lot of other countries don’t?
The reality is rights and laws are connected. If the Second Amendment was repealed, you’d find a lot of the right that you think you have would disappear with it.
That’s a mighty big if, only one Amendment has ever been repealed if I’m not mistaken.
Australia is widely touted as a model for “gun control laws”. Every Australian has the ‘right to own a gun’.
I’ll offer the same counterargument that I gave to D’Anconia: it’s a hollow argument to say that something should be legal because it is legal.
After all the right to bear arms wasn’t part of the Constitution when it was enacted. It’s an amendment. If you’re arguing the law is inerrant as enacted then the Second Amendment (along with all the others) shouldn’t exist.
The Constitution is just a law enacted by Americans. Laws are subject to change.
And I’ll offer the far more powerful conter-argument that I offered Scylla. Even when you look at the Australian model of a compulsory compensation scheme to remove 320,000 Semi Automatic Rifles from circulation, it still cost Australia roughly $400 million at the time and roughly 10% it’s estimated were never handed in and remain in circulation. Extrapolate that to American society, the compensation figure becomes billions of dollars and what makes you or anyone think the outcome in America would be any different?
Forget about overturning 2A - just focus on the real world physical implications of what’s being proposed here…
Only one Amendment has been directly repealed. But the Constitution has been changed twenty-seven times since it was first enacted. So it’s not like change is unprecedented.
I will agree that a lot of gun control laws that I’ve heard proposed would be violations of the Second Amendment.
All righty then, if 2A were repealed, how would this alleged right be legally defended and enforced?
Getting it on the table is how you get people to start thinking and talking about it. The repeated reminders, death by death, of why it needs to be done make it feasible to get it on the table.
When you start from a base question of ‘justify why should this be legal’ instead of ‘justify why should this be illegal’, you’re doing a good job of building a police state. In a free society, things should be legal by default and the burdern of proof on people who want to make them illegal. And answers should be based in the real world, not fantasy-land nonsense like:
Even in regimes with harsh gun control, criminals, the police, the military, and bodyguards for well-connected people have guns. So there’s no where that actually has “NO ONE” has a gun as a condition, so any argument based on the idea falls apart. Plus leaving weaker people at the mercy of violence from stronger people doesn’t exactly make me feel safer, and basing law on ‘what makes me feel safer’ leads to a lot of really bad results if someone doesn’t feel safe around black people or gays or Muslims or any other minority group.
I can’t parse what you’re saying here.
There is no good argument for guns with respect to people who are physically weaker than others. Societies where guns are prohibited or strictly controlled is my cite.
I don’t know what you’re trying to say with respect to minorities. That people who fear them should have guns? Should not have guns? Minorities should or should not have guns?.. what?..
I don’t understand this obsession with guns. Especially with mass shootings. The risk they pose to me is so small as to be non-existent. And certainly not sufficient to justify legislating away people’s hobbies.
Me either.
I don’t know if you know this, but it’s not ALL about YOU.
I shall use this excuse next time I’m stopped by a cop for doing a four wheel drift through an intersection. “Officer, aggressively driving my sports car is my hobby.”
If stamp collecting killed a hundred people a day, I’d be willing to consider making stamp collecting illegal.
Here’s the basic argument, with real world evidence, for why guns should be illegal (or at least less legal than they currently are in America).
The use of guns is a factor in a lot of deaths. Other countries have stricter laws on gun ownership and those countries have a much lower rate of gun-related deaths than we do. Many of these countries with gun regulations do not seem to suffer from a significant loss of liberties or rights in other areas and cannot be called police states.
We have a part time animal control officer, she works one day of the week. When an animal or group of animals is harrying my animals, it is harrying them right now and they will be DEAD by the time anybody could respond [as it was, a group of 3 ‘pets’ did over 250 stitches worth of damage to one of my show rams … and it took them the 5 or so minutes between hearing the ruckus and my getting onto the side porch with a weapon and killing them to kill 2 ewes and permanently maim my ram.] And the dick move is letting your pet dogs out to roam and kill other peoples animals.
And I happen to have the right to defend my home against people breaking and entering. If you bash in my front door, you get a warning shot and verbal warning to leave. You don’t leave, you die, simple as that. If all you are after is a tv then you deciding to shoot me - you deserve to die.
Now subtract the invisible costs of gun violence–the costs to all law enforcement agencies in dealing with gun crimes, the cost to the justice system of prosecuting them, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Schools wouldn’t have to dip into their already meagre budgets for armed guards, for another example. The cost of a buyback plan isn’t so imposing anymore. Who knows, there might even be a net gain for you as a taxpayer. Win-win, right?
For a “real world physical implication”, look no further than your own post. If ten percent of gun owners decided to break the law and hang on to their guns, that’s a ninety percent reduction in firearms in circulation. It isn’t perfect, but if you want perfection, you’ll have to wait till you get to heaven. Here in the real world, we have to live with “better”.
BTW, I’m sure you don’t have to be reminded how effective Australia’s buyback program was in reducing the killing of innocent people. And guess what? The bad guys haven’t taken over, even with their ten percent of illegal guns. There is another real world implication of a buyback program, and it didn’t lead to lawless anarchy as some self-serving parties would frighten you into believing.
About the same as if I had a machine gun.
A murderous psychopath doesn’t have to give you a chance to get your weapons. If you, mdcastle, are one of those 2nd amendment nuts with a gun in every room of the house, that won’t do you any good if your attack is even semi-competent. All they have to do is wait for you to step outside and snipe you. Or sneak in while you’re asleep. Or just open fire on your bedroom from outside - did you upgrade your walls to ballistic glass and armor your windows? Hell, do you even own body armor?
Most 2nd amendment nuts have all the guns in the world, but no real alarm system, nothing to stop an intruder breaking down a door, no body armor, and essentially would die in seconds in any real gunfight.
If you’re the exception and sleep in a bunker, good for you, but most I know of don’t have the resources for that.
That would be a legitimate point to make in Sudan and Somalia, but you’re in arguably the greatest nation ever. Is American society so weak that law and order can’t be maintained if citizens don’t have guns? Really?
And how is it that guns are the only way to stay safe in America? Are you sure there are no other options?
It isn’t necessarily “better”. It was pointed out upthread but you have to repeat it a million times. Guns are just tools and necessary ones. There is a reason that the Las Vegas attacks are referred to as the deadliest gun attack in U.S. history. Do you know where a bigger one was as recently as 2011? Good ole Scandinavia that people here seem to love as an idea. Norway to be precise. That attack was a mixture of bombs and simply hunting young people down with guns but the guns were the major tool used (69 deaths out of 77). He is being punished severely for it though. Anders Behring Breivik now has his video game playing and hiking hours a little restricted these days in a prison that is nicer than most people’s houses.
There is no good way to prevent against lone wolf attacks if someone is smart enough. They can do it with trucks, fertilizer bombs, posion, fire or firearms. Some people are just very clever no matter what they have available. It is a sad fact of life that atrocities happen and there is sometimes no good way to stop them. The beauty of this life story is that everyone dies at the end and there is nothing you can do about it. What I would like to see is a reduction in the number of accidental gun deaths due to irresponsibility. I think that is an achievable goal.
The 2nd amendment is not about hunting but that is still a very necessary use for them. Deer alone account for billions of dollars worth of property damage a year (mostly car collision and crop damage) but also kill about 200 people directly in the U.S. alone just because it is impossible to avoid some of them run they run straight in front of your vehicle out of nowhere. They also transmit Lyme disease (4 cases so far in my family alone; one resulted in permanent, severe disability). Their population has to be kept in check for the health of their population and for human safety. Combine that with coyotes and other animals that thrive around the fringes of human population and you have a real problem. Many people will never see a Grizzly bear in the wild but I can guarantee that you will see deer, coyotes and lots more if you hang out in my yard for a few days and I live in the suburbs. Their population has to be kept in check. Thank a hunter the next time you see one because they are helping prevent a bigger disease and property damage epidemic than already exists. Guns are the best tool for keeping the population under control under the yearly guidance from the state wildlife commission.
That said, I am not opposed to all gun control. I hate dumbasses with guns as much as anyone. Bump stocks should be illegal because it is really just modifying a semi-automatic to be a fake machine gun with the same end result. Gun education should be mandatory (and free if necessary) but I am not willing to go much further than that. To the OP, it is obvious that you don’t know much about firearms. That is a very common problem even among journalists. I would suggest that you actually go to a shooting range and learn something about them before you start on your crusade. Most gun owners are reasonable and responsible but they react about as well to someone telling them what needs to be done as someone referring to their Prius as a turbocharged diesel.
People who are physically weaker can defend themselves against people who are physically stronger using tools like guns. You want to prohibit that, I believe that even people who are weak, sick, or handicapped have as much right to defend themselves as a stronger person. “Societies” isn’t a cite, provide and actual cite or don’t call it one.
The poster used ‘it makes me feel safer’ as a justification for restricting people’s rights. There are a lot of people who feel safer restricting the rights of blacks, muslims, gays, and other minorities, and their argument of “it makes me feel safer” is equally valid.
You have multiple premises tied up in this argument that I don’t agree with and that you haven’t made an argument for. I do not agree with the implicit assertion that ‘gun-related deaths’ is a statistic we should be worried about independently, ‘deaths’ would be much more reasonable; that is, if you reduced gun-related deaths by 1000 but increased non-gun-related deaths by 2000, I would say that you we are worse off, but you would say that we are better off. There is also an implicit assertion that increased gun control reduces gun deaths, which is not actually borne out by real-world evidence, and which you’ve provided no evidence to back (the case of Mexico, for example, seems to strongly counter your assertion). This is especially noteworthy since most of the proposed gun control measures are of a sort that would only affect law-abiding gun owners and not people who acquire guns illegally, like the 1996 Assault Weapon Ban.
Beyond your incorrect premises, you’ve actually provided no evidence to back your assertions despite saying that you have. That is pretty typical in gun control arguments, there’s a lot of people making bald assertions not backed by actual evidence.
The risk that they pose is small, but, a spree shooter is still the most likely way I get bullets energetically addd to my body, so it is worht looking into.
Besides, it’s an inconvenience to me that our communities have to make accommodations for the fact that guns are easy for a spree shooter to get. A local municipality just spent millions building an observation tower so that people could go up there and look around, and has now announced that it will be closed for any and all events that would attract people to the area.
That’s an example of the sort of accommodation that the public is forced to make, because the gun owners refuse to make any accommodation. One of my employees was going on today about how upset her daughter is that she isn’t allowed to go to a concert, because her mother is concerned about her safety in the wake of the shootings. Is that rational, I don’t know, but people aren’t always rational when it comes to their children’s safety.
At the same time, mathematical models tend to stuff like this comes in waves, and continues to build until something is done to reduce it. IMSA, I predict that Las Vegas will not be an isolated event, and that there will be “aftershocks”. Not a single thing has been done to reduce the ability for someone to replicate the lv shooter’s attack. Even if a trifle is offered in banning the sale of “bump-stocks” that only make s a tiny dent, as it would not require the thousands that were purchased in the wake of the mass murderer’s advertisement for them to be returned.
If I walked into a gun store right now, and told them to set me up with the same guns that the las vegas murderer had, they’d not blink an eye, but instead would start pulling down rifles for me to try out and purchase, and make sure that I don’t forget my bump-stock.
Got a dog of your own?
Far better than a gun to protect your flock. As you said, by the time you were even aware of the commotion, 2 animals were dead, and one gravely injured. Get a dog, and it’ll be on the problem much sooner.
Better for home protection as well. Is your gun going to wake you up because an intruder came in?
Home invaders avoid houses with dogs. You can’t point a gun at a dog to hold it at bay, it doesn’t understand the threat. Shooting a dog, unless you manage to kill it quickly, is going to piss it off, and even if it has taken a mortal injury, will still cuase quite a bit of damage to an intruder. They know this, and avoid houses with dogs, and will very quickly leave a property upon discovering one.