I know that many gun rights advocates bristle at interpreting what the Founding Fathers “meant” when the Bill of Rights was written if it means that that interpretation will weaken their rights to own a gun. You can’t have it both ways. A literal reading gives a citizen the right to keep and bear arms. Period. As I said before, I accept this because I likewise rely on Constitutional rights for my own protection.
I appreciate your inclusion (this time) of the word ability. That was my disagreement with smiling bandit as well. I’m going to disagree that that was what you had said previously, and what you had said was what I was reacting to. Here is your earlier post (bolding mine):
If by this you had meant that I choose not to own a gun, as a right guaranteed to me, then you are absolutely correct. I just object to assassination being thrown in there as a right.
That is a nice admission. Most would never admit so.
Gunowners see constant attacks against their rights at the local, state and federal levels of government. Many new pieces of legislation are produced every year to try and chip away at the remaining rights gunowners have today. The NRA and other groups lobby the governments to stop these bills, and to promote gun friendly legislation as well.
Because the “government” is just men and women like the rest of us. It is not a monarchy that never changes. The government is just who happens to sit in the right chairs at that moment. The entire Bill of Rights is in place to keep the government in check, not just the 2nd Amendment. There is no question either as to what is recognized. The document is over 200 years old.
also UncleBeer: Thank you
I can definitely accept only a 1 hour wait.
But I think I would like to see the background check be more thorough. Fingerprinting is a little much and it goes against by belief in not treating people like criminals but maybe it should be up to the new Driver License standards at least.
I thought many states still had extremely easy to forge licenses.
I meant that you have chosen to not exercise your right to have a gun and assassinate the president. The gun is there to use as you as an individual see fit. If you choose to use that right to kill the president, then you excercised your right to the fullest.*
So lets expand my definition a bit: Your right is to own a weapon, and to use it. What you choose to use it for, you may not have the right to do, but the right to choose to do so is still a right, implicit in the fact that you are allowed to own and bear it. So you do have the right to own a gun and to use it to kill the president, you just don’t have the right to succeed or even make the attempt.
I still do not advocate assassinating the president
Sorry for the previous (albeit weak) venom. I think language matters. I KNOW that “I can’t see…” is commonly used figure of speech, meaning “I don’t understand…”
The important distinction between those statements is that “I can’t see…” trivializes the contrary evidence, and is typically indicative of a deeply entrenched opinion. “I don’t understand…” acknowlages (at least partial) responsibility for poor communication and invites further dialog.
My point is that the american people are granted “the right to keep and bear arms.”
Not "the right to keep and bear arms for which they can demonstrate a compelling need for sanctioned purposes to the satisfaction of those who fundimentally disagree with the keeping and bearing of arms. "
The US leads the world in handgun ownership with a staggering 29%, not surprisingly, they lead the list in murder rates with 8.4 per 100.000.
There seems to be extremely strong association between them. But perhaps the greatest weakness of the pro-gun argument is that only I percent of all murders are considered by the FBI to be justifiable homicide by firearm. Self-defense might be the intention of people who buy guns, but when these weapons actually get used, it’s almost always for murder.
When hanguns are used for self defense, they almost never are even fired. The sight of a gun is usually enough to make an attacker run or at least stop what they are doing. Therefore they don’t show up statistically as justifible homicide…since they arent homicides at all.
I’ve used a gun for defense several times and have never had to fire it.
In 199X the YYYY diet was invented, but by 200X the average weight of everyone in the US increased by Z%, thus the YYYY diet cannot be a reasonable weight loss plan!
A high crime rate in the US is an issue of personal freedom, a properly running justice system, poverty, education, immigration, etc. Given a homogenous group of peoples for a century and a less-fair police and jury system, the US could likely have just as low a crime rate as Japan or England. Decreasing the number of guns in the country is unlikely to have much effect on the murder rate. Killing people just isn’t all that hard (ignoring Rasputin.)
Knives are generally more lethal than guns (at their intended range) cite
Which would indicate that removing guns could just increase the number of fatalities assuming that most of the murderers were to switch to kitchen knives and metal pipes.
I will admit that the meme that a gun is more scary than just about anything (including a knife) may give some amount of criminals the extra courage to commit a crime if they gain possession of one. But for that same reason, it is reasonable to assume that the marks will be more prone to not struggle or antagonize the criminal. Which way it balances, you’re going to have to prove. But just because both numbers are large doesn’t mean that they have to have much connection to each other.
The quote “”“only I percent of all murders are considered by the FBI to be justifiable homicide by firearm.”""is not mine but comes from the FBI,if its nonsense its their nonsense.
Well, I could throw the bullets at people who annoy me. But they have a disconcerting tendency to pick them up and throw them back at me, and dang those suckers hurt!
No, best to have a gun and just shoot them. That seems to be the most efficient way.
Where are you getting your data? Mine (warning: .pdf!) says otherwise. While it’s preliminary data, it puts firearm homicides at an age-adjusted 4.0/100,000 for 2003 (the most recent year for which data is available). I’ve been looking at the NIHS reports for almost 10 years now, and there’s not a whole lot of variance between the preliminary and final reports; at least not where firearms stats are concerned.
The only international comparison I’ve seen is now several years out of date. Do you have a newer one you might care to share with us?
First, people buy firearms for many different reasons; you’d have to look carefully at firearms sales by type to get some indication of the purpose behind firearms purchases. If someone buys a Thompson Contender, it’s probably not for home/self-defense.
Self-defense is the intention of people who buy guns for self-defense; hunting is the intention of people who buy guns for hunting; target shooting is the intention of people who buy guns for target shooting.
Saying that weapons that are purchased with the intention of self-defense are used to commit murder is is correct (and axiomatic) only when the perpetrator dies, since even a justifiable homicide is still a homicide. I deliberately used the word “perpetrator” instead of victim, since almost anyone on the receiving end of “justifiable homicide” was most likely trying to commit a major felony (armed robbery, rape, murder, etc.,).
What do you call it when you shoot someone in self-defense, and they live? If we counted those people, would that self-defense rationale gain any more credence? How about Defensive Gun Uses, of which the lowest estimate (at last count, some years ago) was somewhere around 80,000/year? A DGU may be anything from shooting and killing a perpetrator, to telling someone breaking into your house, “I have a gun, and will shoot you!” and then the perp runs away.
There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that this would in any way reduce firearms crime. Unless you can prove that a restriction will have a benefit that outweighs its cost, we shouldn’t be discussing it.
Now it’s done through a telephone call to the NICS (National Instant Check System) database in whatever state the purchase is being made in. Purchaser fills out some paperwork, supplies name, driver’s license, SSN, and swears on the BATF 4473 Affidavit that they are a US citizen with no criminal record and no record of involuntary commitment to a mental institution. FFL holding dealer calls NICS number, enters driver’s license number. NICS responds with SSN and either an approval number for the purchase which is then applied to the paperwork, or a denial.
It usually takes about 3 minutes.
Whose new driver’s license standards? All I have to do in PA to renew my driver’s license is show up at the PennDoT Driver Licensing Center with the old one, the letter that says I’m up for renewal, and my smiling face.
OK I have no choice but to concede that point to you…the site i checked was not credible.
but even on these figures the difference with the rest of the world is still enormous
murders population
Australia: 65 per year----------20 mil
Canada: 165 ----------32
France: 255 --------- 60
United Kingdom: 68 ---------- 60
Germany: 381 ---------- 82
Japan: 39 ---------- 127
United States: 11,127---------295
Am I saying that the reason for this is the gun laws? not entirely, but they are a contributing factor. There have been a few times (in my younger years) that if I had access to a gun things might have ended worse than a black eye and a bruised face.
In theory, the United States aims for the Swiss model, a large, well defended citizenry armed and stable. In practice, we’ve had problems reaching this because of constant immigration and social change. And I believe the murder rate essentially shot through the roof in the 60’s and 70’s as gangs began entering the drug trade and bought weapons to kill off rivals.
Allow me to be more specific. I probably should have been. It’s neither a moral or legal right, certainly not a Constitutional right. But it is a right, founded in laws more basic than either anything created by man: the laws of physics. You hit a man hard enough, and he dies.
It’s not a nice law. There is no appeal, and there is no recourse. You can’t plead off to a lesser charge, and the prosecution is swift and the judge cold-hearted. Advanced medicine can let us beg for mercy. Sometimes. And then only if the law wasn’t pushed very far.
But I’ll say one thing for it: it’s fair law. It doesn’t hide behind words, and it doesn’t have any legaleze in it. Everyone knows this law implicitly, and the judge and jury are absolutely honest and impartial.
I would like to make a fundamental correction to this far-too-common misperception.
The Bill of Rights attached as the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States grants no rights to the American people; the Bill of Rights instead draws boundaries around what the authors saw as the fundamental and inherent rights of man—boundaries which the federal goverment promises it won’t cross (unless and until those boundaries have been duly revised by the process for doing so set forth in Article V of the Constitution). There was, in fact, a rather large public debate over the desirability and necessity of a Bill of Rights at all before it was passed in 1791.
Those in favor of attaching a Bill of Rights adhered to the argument I’ve outlined above—it would serve as the ultimate boundaries describing the limits of federal law to restrict the rights of man.
Many leading figures, however, were dead set against a Bill of Rights because they thought the federal government would use the boundaries described there as the pratical limits of government power; they thought that a Bill of Rights would serve in actual practice to augment federal government power and could be used as a tool to place more and greater restrictions on the fundamental and inherent rights of man.
Two-hundred fifteen years later, it is still impossible to determine which faction was correct.
Forging a license wouldn’t do any good. The license that is presented as identity is verified against the state’s license database. A forged license wouldn’t exist in the state database and would not be granted permission to purchase.