Not sure if it’s been mentioned yet but, even if the feds abolished the second amendment Texas still has Article 1, Sec 23 and I’m sure other states have similar legislation.
We’d probably see migration both to and from firearm states, with a net change in gundeaths near zero.
But, perhaps many of these firearm states roughly form into a contiguous region, and most reject federal authority to regulate firearms in their state(s). That could get interesting.
Most states have a 2A analog in their state constitutions. Both MA and IL, two of the bluest of the states, do. Granted, amending a state constitution is less fraught than amending the US Constitution, but it is still a hurdle. I suspect all 50 states would each have to in order to support onerous restrictions or confiscations.
The question about the effect of gun availability and suicide is widely studied, and has a well-known and accepted answer, which makes this observation relevant:
13. The public does not understand the importance of method availability, (Harvard Injury Control Research Center, review, reporting *Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. *
The review goes on to report Hemenway D. “35. Ecological studies as well as case-control studies are important in understanding the connection of guns and violent death”, that is, yes, gun violence is more complicated than just gun ownership.
And speaking of gun ownership, here’s an interesting factoid: Assuming 300,000,000 guns and 36,000 gun deaths per year, one person is killed for every 8,333 guns in existence.
Then, when you figure that some 60% of gun deaths are self-inflicted, the threat to the public is even smaller, one death per 20,800 guns.
Then when you subtract the number killed while in the commission of a crime, the disparity in the ratio becomes even greater.
So if your primary goal is to make sure people kill themselves in some manner other than with guns, and you don’t want anyone killed by people defending themselves from home invasion/attack/hijacking/robbery, then going after guns would seem like a good idea.
On the other hand, if your concern is primarily the threat that guns pose to the public at large (the primary argument coming from the anti-gun crowd these days) it seems that your concern is largely misplaced as gun ownership itself is nowhere near as dangerous as the anti-gun crowd would have us believe.
Yes, but in order to make the numbers look more scary they have to include suicides in “gun deaths”.:dubious:
Of course. One can always count on exaggerated numbers and/or deceptive semantics when impassioned lefties are afoot.
That might be accurate if “lefties” was replaced by “people.”
It would take 38 of them to ratify a new amendment abolishing the second, as I understand it. If they got a minimum vote it would leave 12 states for everybody to run away to with their guns.
Restriction and confiscation happens with weed in a majority of states all the time.
I still figure on migration and zero overall change in deaths.
Is this like when statistics are posted showing how much higher other forms of death are but just giving stats for rifle deaths instead of all types of firearms? Ghod knows I’ve gotten that Facebook glurge often enough.
You are not understanding. If 2A is abolished, it is abolished for all 50 states, not just the ones that ratify the abolishing amendment. There are no “12 states left to run to”.
For the purposes of this thread, the abolishing 2A does not make guns illegal: it merely eliminates the part of the Constitution that prevents the states and Congress from placing strong restrictions on gun ownership.
To get support from 67 Senators, 290 Representatives (a joint resolution, meaning the President does not have a veto) and 38 statehouses, some sort of extreme watershed event would have had to happen – I am going to guess that, in such a situation, the people who flee to protect their arsenals would be a very small minority.
The US has a very high homicide rate and especially gun homicide rate compared to other developed countries. Those are the important stats here.
I would not expect the “death rate per gun” to be particularly high though. It’s completely disingenuous. Even in a warzone, where most guns are procured explicitly for the purpose of killing, the majority of guns probably don’t kill anyone, probably not even the majority of bombs (though of course ‘people killed per bomb dropped’ may be very high).
Or put it this way; it’s kind of like saying “What’s the concern with asbestos? The chance of living in a house with asbestos walls causing a diagnosed disease at some point in life is only 1/200!” – 1/200 is still an unacceptably high number and a heck of a lot of people being affected.
I’m working on the assumption that the states that didn’t ratify( surely there would be at least one hold out) wouldn’t be compelled to change their own constituitions and regulations, becoming a sort of haven if they chose to be.
I suppose the SCOTUS could drastically change it from what it is now as well, which isn’t abolishment, but may have the same effect, that opens the door to more extreme regulation, in this case the same fleeing minority might not be so small.
It’s very good evidence that the ubiquity of guns is not responsible for the number of gun deaths that occur, especially once you subtract suicides and deaths that occur to bad guys in the commission of crime.
And I have to say that I get really tired of other countries’ gun death rates being brought up in relation to that in the U.S. The U.S. is different than other countries in many ways. One might even say it’s exceptional, given the large number of things that have been invented or discovered here that are now commonplace around the world and in our economic and military power. But be that as it may, we don’t have the same history as other countries and we have different and more large-scale societal problems than do most other countries, especially given developments of the last 50 years or so.
And speaking of the last 50 years, it’s worth noting that the homicide rate has only recently returned to the level that was common in the 50s and 60s, and that vastly increased gun ownership and the publicity surrounding it plays a significant role in having reduced the rate of homicide to its family-values era levels.
Further, I’ve yet to hear anyone advance any sort of gun control or gun elimination plan that includes any sort of reasonable theory as to how to keep guns out of the hands of the country’s criminals. It simply isn’t possible to round up all the guns in the country and virtually all of those would be rounded up are those belonging to law-abiding citizens, which of course means that we’d be even more at the mercy of gun toting bad guys. And like I said upthread, guns are excellent protection against home invasion and its accompanying consequences such as rape, robbery, beatings, etc. Without the ability to own guns for their defense people would largely be defenseless against home invasion whether the miscreant armed with guns, knives, ball bats, crowbars or whatever.
I don’t know that that is very good evidence. Fewer guns does mean fewer gun deaths. I also do not lie disincluding “bad guys” who did not commit a capital crime, yet were executed anyway. Suicides, I can go either way on, but it is a fact that gun suicides are easier and more effective than other forms.
And I disagree that we cannot learn anything from others who have solved a problem we still struggle with. Copy them exactly, maybe not, but learn from what they have done, what has worked, what hasn’t, and adopt that into our unique american culture, sure.
Two parts of that. Most gun control plans that are brought up by actual people interested in reducing gun violence do not involve removing all civilian access to guns, but rather simply listening it, and ensuring that the armed populace is a well trained and stable populace.
Also, guns don’t stay in the hands of criminals forever. They lose them, they toss the guns after they use them, or they get caught with them, or they shoot each other and die with them. If the supply of guns going into the hands of criminals can be decreased, by making people secure their guns better so they are not as easily stolen, and not allowing people to sell guns to people that they don’t know if they are allowed to have a gun or not, will reduce the supply going into the hands of criminal dramatically.
No state would be compelled to change their own constitution. But that would be irrelevant,
[INDENT]Article VI §2***[COLOR=“Black”]This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States** which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.*[/COLOR][/INDENT] if Congress were to enact restrictions on firearms, the states would be compelled to adhere to federal law. The state constitutions only affect the laws that the states may enact.
Right, the holdouts are out of luck.
Mississippi didn’t ratify the 13th Amendment until 1995, but that doesn’t mean slavery was legal there until then.
States could be more restrictive than the Feds, either in statute or in their constitutions, but not less so.
However, simply vacating the 2nd (or rewriting it) isn’t the same thing as making guns illegal…it just means that an individual right to keep and bear arms is no longer protected by the Constitution. Even if laws making firearms completely illegal were enacted at a federal level I’m not sure that individual states couldn’t figure out ways around it, if they really wanted too. Marijuana is illegal at the federal level but some states have made it legal, even recreationally. I suppose it would be a matter of what enforcement or other pressure the federal government was willing to bring to bear on states that didn’t go along. I don’t see that Trump et al have had a lot of success doing this against the states who have legalized MJ, so not sure how the gun thingy would work out either.
It would definitely be a sea change in the US, however, if there was enough push behind getting rid of the 2nd, so I’m thinking it might be a moot point regardless. If there was that sort of traction behind such a push then the vast majority of citizens AND legislators would be behind either very heavy restrictions or out right bannings of whole categories of guns, and it would almost certainly be pretty much across the board support for those measures.
No- that is incorrect. The USA is about smack dab in the middle. Sure with a vague qualifier such as “developed” countries, you can define “developed” as anything you want. :dubious:
Not in the USA. But how about “fewer deaths” rather than fewer gun deaths". And of course “gun deaths” will include the bogus suicide numbers.
Keep on moving those goal posts.
And, how about both? If gun deaths go down by 100, and all other forms of violent death go up by 15, that’s a plus. You can point at those 15 knife/strangle… whatever murders all you want, but the total number of people killed by violent activity would be lower. People don’t use guns because they are making an aesthetic choice, they use them because they are the easiest and most efficient way to kill people.
And you refuse to acknowledge that guns make suicide much easier and effective, because otherwise your numbers would look even worse than they already do if you don’t include them.