GOP: Gentlemen Gentlemen this is a mental health issue which is we can't ban 2A rights.
Everyone: Ok then give us better mental health?
GOP: Nope that's commie talk. Just get Jesus.
(Also shocked why people hate them)
I support the 2nd. I also support single payer healthcare, including dental coverage and expanded mental Healthcare services. Then again, I dont support Republicans.
If dems got off the 2A stuff they would get more voters ::cough cough:: Texas. I know people that are like yeah abortion is not a deal breaker for me but guns are. Mostly people who are too old to have kids anyway.
I'm sure Mass shooting will go down once we have social nets to get people the help they need. Guns are like Cars. Fine when used by responsible adults baaaad otherwise.
No one does these things because they have happy content lives.
Watching beto shoot himself in the foot with the gun grabbing line should have been a bigger indicator. Theres plenty of room for pro 2a dems and dems with complex views on the issue. Gun ownership is rising in both parties, dems faster than republicans. Dems cant pass laws even if they win, they can't afford to do stupid no chance moves that cost them seats.
If Dems focused on what actually would curb the violence, and dropped guns. They'd sweep the elections for decades.
Yeah this is how people get jaded or gets the conspiracy people out.
One problem was that the CDC was banned from studying the causes of gun violence from 1997 until 2018 due to the Dickey Amendment. We should have had big studies done to see just what the problems were (I'm sure it's not just one) and what solutions might give the best results while infringing on people's rights the least. Instead, even studying why gun violence was a problem was banned.
Thankfully, the Dickey Amendment was clarified (but not repealed) and gun violence research is allowed. Still, the studies aren't allowed to call for gun control so they are still hobbled. So while new proposals based on studies can be made, gun control won't be one of them even if it would be effective.
Our leadership has time and time again daid it's mental health, they know it. No research is needed.
Just expand mental Healthcare before the Joker movie becomes a reality.
No they where not, they weren't ever banned from studying gun violence. They just weren't allowed to use it as a way to sway public opinion...which is what the, at the time, acting leadership of the CDC wanted to do.
That's downright fantasy talk. Voters minds have been so poisoned that they don't give a shit about policy anymore. Republican politicians haven't had an actual platform for at least a decade.
Their platform is only to stimie any progress and protect the rich. They may say lots of words but one need only look at the way they vote and yet are still consistently reelected.
They say they'll fix things but never do even when they control both houses and the presidency. That should have been a republican free for all in 2016, but nothing of value happened for those two years. No immigration reform. No healthcare reform. No gun reform. Oh, but they did pass a tax reform bill and guess who that helped.
You said voters minds have been poisoned .. ... then went on a they they they rant proving your point. You get that, right?
My rant illustrated my point, yes, but I don't think it's the gotcha that you seem to think it is.
My point is that people are voting for politicians who are actively working against many of their constituents interests. And they're tending to vote that way because they believe politicians' words instead of observing their actions.
If you care to refute any of my points, feel free.
Yesbabsolutely. They'd win the nation if they dropped the anti gun platform.
Same, well said
I support legal safe gun ownership, usage, and training. I believe the second amendment doesn't apply anymore though. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." This is not true anymore. It was written in a time where standing professional armies weren't the norm by people who never expected the US to reach a state to have one.
Gun ownership should be protected by the 9th amendment to an extent though, as abortion and all of our other traditionally held rights are.
certainly looks like you would need to protect yourself against a soon-to-be dictatorship though
Very well could be true, which is part of why I don't mind (and appreciate when done properly) gun ownership. That doesn't change the fact that the wording of the second amendment is for something that isn't true anymore. Again, your rights are (or should be at least) protected by the 9th, which is much more important but most people haven't even heard of.
The basis of the 2nd is just not true anymore. It's like saying "physical currency, being necessary for the purchase of items, the right to possess coins shall not be infringed." It doesn't take into account the changes that may occur. We don't need militias to protect the nation anymore, since we have a professional army, and we don't need physical currency anymore, because most people don't use it now anyway.
Kinda funny actually, since we're starting to see a movement that looks to effectively ban physical currency by making it a headache.
Same motivation: surveillance and control.
I'm really happy with the level headed reasoning in this post and the replies. Feels like I'm not alone in thinking "gun bans are stupid" and "can't we address systemically WHY people feel the need to flame out in a blaze of violence, to reduce violence?"
Also BTW there's a "Socialist Rifle Association", and I might not agree with them on 100% everything obviously, I just think it's cool and they seem alright.
I just wish Dems would stop trying to ban any guns, and not because I'm against gun control, but because it's a losing issue. It's never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down. Given that that's fairly undeniable, why lose the people who organize and vote on this issue alone?
This has been said about many issues in the past. Effecting change isn't easy but giving up doesn't help. Americans support gun control. Only our crappy political system stands in the way.
On both sides, Republicans block any gun control, and Democrats only propose useless legislation
Americans support gun control. Only our crappy political system stands in the way.
What do you think the other person meant when they said, "It’s never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down."?
I disagree on giving up on a political issue only because it wouldn't pass right now. Politics is compromise. If you only take positions which are already on the line of compromise you've already lost.
This has been said about many issues in the past.
Which issues? Civil Rights? Gay marriage?
Those are issues in which the American people were opposed, and then societal views changed. As you pointed out, that isn't the case here. Americans already favor reform, but they aren't going to vote these people out based on the status quo.
Newtown was the wake up call, if nothing changes after a bunch of small children get massacred, you're not getting change. Not without wholesale changes. Proposing an AWB is political theater, nothing more.
If it's popular, why wouldn't the Democrats keep fighting for it?
Whether it will realistically happen anytime soon, yeah I'd say the odds are very low.
But let's not just give up as it can't ever happen.
Also "political theater" is like half of actual politics, so don't knock it too easily :P
It's the worst political theater. It makes it look like something is being done when it isn't. Gun sales go up and liberals feel good. More kids die.
So the solution is what?
We could start prosecuting people for breaking laws.
The solution is for law enforcement to properly enforce the existing laws that could have stopped countless shootings already.
My personal solution is not to worry about gun violence because it's extremely rare and highly unlikely to affect me. America is quite safe to live in for the majority of us.
My personal solution is not to worry about gun violence because it’s extremely rare and highly unlikely to affect me.
Oh, well as long as it is unlikely to affect you...
I mean illegal abortion is unlikely to affect me, so why should I give a shit, am I right?
That's really a bad comparison, because you're arguing for the point of taking away rights from Americans, by making reference to a right that was taken away (since it was never properly added to the Constitution). I support all rights for all Americans - we should all have the rights to bear arms and to privacy + bodily autonomy.
So instead of arguing to take away more rights, you should be arguing to add more rights. Lobby for the rights to privacy and bodily autonomy instead.
Make up your mind. Do you care about things that don't affect you or not?
Of course I do, and you should too. You should care about all the rights of Americans, just as I do and AS I ALREADY MENTIONED.
I have already addressed everything you mentioned previously, so now you're just pissing in the wind.
My personal solution is not to worry about gun violence because it’s extremely rare and highly unlikely to affect me
Your words.
I like how you ignore the first half of their comment then reply to the personal part, aka the non political half, and examine it as if it the only thing they said about gun violence at all.
I'm afraid at this point there's no legislation that will survive the Supreme Court. The next realistic move is to mirror the federalist society. Get enough judges appointed with the idea that the second does not protect personal gun ownership and reach a critical state.
If I could waive a magic wand without breaking the character of the US, we'd ban external magazines, have universal background checks, and stop federal funds from going to states that don't send information to the National Instant Check System. There's so much low hanging fruit. But even when SCOTUS wasn't busy boofing beers the Brady Campaign gave us shit laws designed to harass people, not reduce violence.
None of what you just proposed would reduce violence..
Frustrating the reload slows down active shooters. Solidifying the NICS means criminals can't just go to the next state over. And Universal background checks takes away the secondhand market from criminals as well.
A program to groom judges on this just like the conservatives did with Roe V Wade will do the most in the long term because we'll be able to have laws based on the actual amendment, not just a few words of it.
Yes...because no active shooters have ever made plans....and no active shooters have ever not been flagged correctly when they were prohibited already...and no one buys drugs on the black market cause that's illegal...and no one makes straw purchases which are already illegal.
RvW needs to be signed into a law, not used as a bargaining chip for votes for Democrats. They need to use their political capital to make it a federal law.
This isn't a good faith argument. The logical extent is that we can't stop every criminal so we should have no laws at all.
We already have laws for these things you listed... literally murder is illegal...so is buying or owning a firearm and being a prohibited person...you gonna make it double illegal? I'm not the one arguing in bad faith. You are
Right, first you argue we can't catch them all so we shouldn't have laws, and now your arguing that we just have to sit back and let them kill people.
it's a losing issue. It's never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down.
You know, that's exactly what people said about Roe v. Wade and about banning abortion.
Turns out that you can keep losing on an issue for 50 years, yet winning only once will drastically change the trajectory of the entire issue.
That's the opposite situation. Pro-life voters and pro-gin voters are the 2 largest single-issue voting groups in the country.
Look at it this way. If you swapped Trump and Biden's positions on abortion but changed nothing else, how many pro-choice Democrats would have voted for Trump?
Basically zero, right. Meanwhile, millions of pro-life Republicans would have flipped because abortion is the singular issue upon which they base their vote.
Guns are in the same boat. Hundreds of thousands of voters vote strictly based on their love of guns. There's no political advantage in the general election for being anti-gun, and the Dems are sacrificing a whole lot of seats to fight this losing battle.
pro-gin voters
I thought we resolved that with the end of Prohibition?
No he misspelled pro-gyn voters
Yeah nevermind that the constitution says "shall not be infringed"'
If abortion rights were in the constitution there would be no way of banning it, just as it is with firearms.
Actually it says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.*
It says nothing about procuring them. Banning gun sales is totally on the table. Plus, "arms" is kinda a funny word. It doesn't mean just guns. Yet most people would agree that I shouldn't be allowed to build bombs in my basement. Isn't that a violation of the second amendment?
Not to mention that whole well regulated militia part.
A reasonable interpretation would at the very least take that to mean a requirement to be eligible for the national guard and to consistently pass training and inspection with each action class of weapon you want to buy.
Hence the asterix on my paraphrasing of the Second Amendment. Ultimately, I think the founding fathers laid out general principles of society that we should adhere to, but that they expected us to care more about the intent of the Constitution than the actual exact words.
The founding fathers were slave oligarchs, fuck their opinions on anything to do with our country today
Throw out the whole constitution then. Human history is rife with suffering and hypocrisy. My ancestors chased people off this land at the point of a sword. Right now, we're overlooking the horrible exploitation of other human beings in China, Africa, India and others, to make luxury goods. The lens of history should acknowledge the status quo at the time, but not excuse it, and celebrate those who worked to advance human rights and conditions before their time.
Man imagine going to bat for the opinions of slave oligarchs.
Imagine condemning nearly everyone who has ever existed because they didn't live up to modern society's current understanding of humanity.
Imagine being too scared to do that in spite of everyone they made suffer and everyone else who knew it was wrong even then, because you somehow want to make defending slave oligarchs your hill to die on.
Then stop wearing your clothes, eating the food you buy and enjoying the place you live in...go live in the woods, because you're a hypocrite.
The article says guns should be ownable because they're necessary in a militia. The language never implies that guns should only be owned by militia members. The militia line is a justification not a requirement.
You seemed to have missed the part where that's the generous interpretation, the real interpretation is that since a militia is no longer necessary for the defense of our free state, civilian firearms ownership can just be banned entirely and that's perfectly constitutional.
Unless you want to argue that the strongest military in human history is insufficient defense of this free state.
Militias are still necessary for free states, especially since the Army is federal in nature, not a state organization. Now the militia helps ensure the security of the states from federal forces that would otherwise be left unchecked without so much as a means to stop a military dictatorship, which is the reason they didn't form a standing army when they wrote the constitution. The only thing that changed was who the militia would be fighting against, and that's a common interpretation. It very much aligns with the spirit of the law, preventing military dictatorship, for it to continue to exist.
That why right now independent militias are one of the greatest threats of domestic terrorism in this country, like that time those militias defended the free state by forming the more organized portions of the J6 riots that explicitly set out to end our free state and replace it with a militia dictatorship?
So called 'lone wolf' shooters do more terrorism than militias they just don't call it terrorism because they paint it as a personal issue despite them listening to the same media personalities, having the same theories, and going to the same online spaces. There are more mass shootings that qualify as terrorism, weather they're called as such or not, than there is militia violence. Also idk what lessons you wanna pull from J6 considering to my knowledge none of the insurrectionists shot a firearm. You're trying to tell me how dangerous militias are with guns yet it seems the most dangerous thing they did, they did without guns.
No it's not, everything the founders wrote about was directly designed to keep people armed and under no situation shall they be disarmed. Go read some of their papers. This has been chewed a million times and the anti-2a crowd still thinks regulated is the same meaning today as it was back then.
The founders were slave oligarchs, the tyranny they were keeping the citizens armed to defend against was Haiti.
What the fuck are you talking about....do you just make shit up in your head? They wanted everyone armed because they just fought and defeated the world's strongest military at the time...
If that was genuinely the reason a significant faction of them wouldn't have been arguing in favor of trade deals with them instead of France, the country that basically won the war for us at sea.
The fuck does having trade with other countries have anything to do with gun ownership?
The well regulated part means functional and effective.
The reasonable interpretation is that the founders didn't want a federal standing army because of the temptation towards tyranny such federal power would create, and instead expected the states to draft their citizens into militias in response to threats. These citizens were expected to arrive self-armed, knowing how to use their gun, with ammunition, and with initial rations. Citing the militia acts for this, you can verify that the government saw everyone of able body as members of the militia. The militias could then slot into a temporary federal army when needed, and then sent home after the threat has passed. The "shall not be infringed" was to prevent the federal and state governments from disarming their citizens, and the temptation of tyranny over a helpless population.
We have since become the world's largest military power through constitutional amendment and stretching of interpretation, but there has been no update to the 2nd. It doesn't matter that a citizen militia can't match the US military today like everyone likes to argue, we shouldn't selectively enforce constitutional rights. Full stop. If you want to change it, get a constitutional amendment passed modifying the 2nd. If you can't pass that threshold, then you don't have the support you think you do. If you want to guarantee people trained, offer free training and make it attractive to do this training or include it in our compulsory education system so everyone gets it by default. By the way, everyone is already eligible for the national guard, it is essentially the current active volunteer militia. What you can't do is make people join the national guard to be able to keep and bear arms.
If you want to just scrap the country like your later comments on this thread indicate, go find uninhabited land and found your own country that doesn't have a constitution and can be completely redesigned at your will. Or steal some from any current inhabitants if you can, and if you find that palatable or find a group you don't think deserve their country.
Imagine just for a second, that they drop the issue and gain control of all 3 branches and then actually do something about it rather than constantly struggling to win because of single policy voters.
The only thing tougher to imagine than dems winning supermajorities and all three branches is the dems doing something with it. Hard to imagine the people who fund splinter dems like Manchin wont just do the same thing to a dozen dems instead of two.
Roe had good results, but it wasn't a good decision.
Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision.
Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach to difficult legal questions were not surprised, however, to hear her say just the opposite, that Roe was a faulty decision. For Ginsburg, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion was too far-reaching and too sweeping, and it gave anti-abortion rights activists a very tangible target to rally against in the four decades since.
Ginsburg and Professor Geoffrey Stone, a longtime scholar of reproductive rights and constitutional law, spoke for 90 minutes before a capacity crowd in the Law School auditorium on May 11 on “Roe v. Wade at 40.”
“My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
“Roe isn’t really about the woman’s choice, is it?” Ginsburg said. “It’s about the doctor’s freedom to practice…it wasn’t woman-centered, it was physician-centered.”
Yes, there's no way Roe would have been overturned by that Congress or that Supreme Court (50 years ago). Just like this Congress and Court will not allow significant gun control. Republicans gerrymandered districts and refused to seat a justice, thereby changing those things. Thank you for proving my point.
They kept pushing it as an issue they care about, and eventually they got through. If they didn't, they wouldn't.
Well, Democrats have been pushing the AWB in Congress for about 30 years now, the first 10 it was law, then it sunset, and they kept pushing....and they have lost a ton of ground in that fight, just like abortion. Because while they were introducing bills, Republicans were remaking Congress and the judiciary. But sure, let's propose more pointless legislation... it'll work this time.
That's how politics generally works, you push for the issue for decades and if you're relentless enough you either finally push through it or you die. You also can and probably need to do all other things but you never stop pushing.
Seriously. Pivot to mental health funding or something. At least that has a chance of passing and even if it doesn't cut down on shootings it will still help people.
It's also a lightning rod issue that turns more voters away than it attracts.
Sure there are staunch anti-gun people under the Democrats' tent but they're not the kind of people who will vote Republican if the party suddenly scaled back or ended its decades long futile efforts at gun bans.
On the other hand there are a ton of white working class voters on the suburban-rural fringes of swing states who would absolutely at least consider a Democrat if the party wasn't so easily cast as "gun grabbers and job killers who only care about minorities".
You get a pro-union, pro-legal-gun Democrat on a ticket who speaks on issues affecting rural whites as much as they do urban non-white voters (who are equally important), and you'd have a winner in many of these areas where they've been quite red, but not so rabidly Trumpy as other areas.
Even moreso if that's a change that happened at the party/platform level.
I feel like from a campaign strategy standpoint, guns are just a lose-lose for the Democratic party. Playing to a base that would be loyal anyway for other reasons, even if the party dropped that position completely (which would not only eliminate a deal breaker issue for rural Democrats but also eliminate a cornerstone of the GOP platform in "protecting the second amendment"). Unless they did a complete about face and suddenly became as cozy with the NRA as Republicans, anti-gun voters might be upset, but they're still voting blue.
After all there's still abortion, electoral reform, racial justice, the environment, education, foreign policy, infrastructure, legal weed, LGBT rights, healthcare, and a host of other issues where the Dems are still their people.
Same thing with abortion and marijuana on the other side. If Republicans could lighten up on that stuff Democrats would never win an election again.
It cuts both ways.
The same can be said for literally every issue.
"Oh if only the Democrats stopped talking about abortion, electoral reform, racial justice, the environment, education, etc. they'd be more appealing to certain voters!"
Capitulating on a widely supported issue just to possibly attract a minority group of voters is a show of weakness.
It's also known as Appeasement. Liberals that always compromise on everything, especial their core beliefs, are basically part of the problem.
I'd be fine with changes to all manner of healthcare and insurance coverage, including single payer.
Plus if they focused on mental health and preventive measures they could maybe bring over some fire arms enthusiasts, who otherwise vote republican or atleast get them to not vote.
Mind you the effectiveness may be scattershot at times since its alot easier to get the guy going postal than it is to get the an ideologically motivated shitbag.
Republicans block efforts for increased healthcare of any kind let alone mental health. They also block preventative measures like red flag laws.
It’s not a mental health issue. There are people with mental health issues all over the civilized world and those countries don’t deal with mass shootings weekly, even if the citizens are allowed access to guns. It’s the relatively unrestricted access to firearms with minimal to no oversight of gun owners, and no rules to secure said firearms.
Okay and? This was my point, ya aint gonna get a solid backing for any type of gun control due to the courts. I support firearms licensing, so long as its about as easy/hard as getting a drivers licence. The thing is though that going "its the guns" while technically true is about as helpful as going "its cause of capitalism" great youve found the problem now what practical solution do you have?
My point was moreso to give an example of what the Dems could do to syphon votes from the republicans. The current "lets ban guns" shtick clearly aint working so come up with a better solution. I think folks who make their identity all about firearms are stupid, but that also means they should be easy to be made apathetic on voting at minimum.
You're both right. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. There are more guns than people in the US so to reduce gun suicide we must work both sides of the issue.
"minimal oversight and rules" he says. Tell us you've never bought a gun without telling us.
Please don't speak about things you have no clue on. There are plenty of rules and restrictions. The fact that our federal government can't or doesn't enforce them properly means the law abiding citizen should suffer?
The fuck outta here with that nonsense.
Yeah. You don’t know anything about my firearms knowledge, and that’s fine with me. I don’t give a damn about some dick measuring contest over whatever is in someone’s arsenal.
What oversight? Most rural places you pass a nominal background check at best. Buy your gun, and nobody bothers you about it again. Urban areas? Yeah, more rules; but again, fill out the paperwork, pass the background checks, buy your gun and that’s it. The majority of rules apply to handguns. I can head on down to my local gun shop and pick up a deer rifle with almost no hassle at all. Or maybe you mean a tax stamp? Same story. Fill out the paperwork, pass the check, pay the money, get the gun.
Yet again, nobody pays attention to what you do with the gun once you have it. That’s the oversight part I’m talking about. Nobody is making you re-test for anything. There’s no license to maintain to own a long gun or even a handgun in the vast majority of places.
I’m not even going to touch CCW because that’s not buying a gun or owning a gun, that’s how you carry it.
What is apparent is that you haven’t a clue what real oversight is. Gun ownership in the rest of the civilized world is highly regulated, licensed, tested, and monitored. So is how the firearm is stored, where and when it can be transported and used.
So “get outta here with that nonsense” when you consider a single background check or a tax stamp “monitoring” your ownership.
This is the other side of the argument that I don't really understand. There shouldn't be "monitoring" of your ownership. A law abiding citizen going in, filling out a background check and proving they aren't prohibited from owning a gun and then buying said gun and ending their involvement with the government from that point on is just normal. We are innocent until proven guilty. We have a right to privacy. We have a right against unwarranted searches. Exercising one of your other constitutional rights shouldn't and doesn't mean you give up others.
The government shouldn't be monitoring it's citizens with regular check-ins, making sure they are good worker drones. I don't understand the desire for the government to dictate or arbitrate every action you take, because the government doesn't care about you as an individual. Allowing the government to monitor your personal life is a distopian trope for a reason. I don't want to live in a police state like the UK or China, and our own police state is already bad enough.
Well, law abiding citizens shouldn’t shoot up schools, concerts, or businesses. But that doesn’t matter when it’s a right to own guns, because somehow magically a law abiding citizen with guns suddenly isn’t so law abiding, but gun owners never really want to deal with that. Wash their hands and walk away.
Just dropping the whole basis of our legal system because lives could be in jeopardy, just throw out innocent until proven guilty and your right to privacy. Let me guess, you also disagree that it is better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man be convicted, especially if the crime is severe enough?
Law abiding citizens shouldn't steal, use illegal substances, or assault people either, but that doesn't matter because a statistically significant percentage of people suddenly aren't so law abiding. Are you prepared to allow law enforcement to regularly enter your home and inventory your property to match with receipts backed up by your pay stubs to make sure your not stealing anything or committing fraud, while also ensuring you don't have any drugs? How about regular interviews with your friends, family, and coworkers to make sure you always conduct yourself in a upstanding manner? Having to get evidence and/or reasonable articulable suspicion to search your person or property prevents police from stopping you from commiting crime before you do it.
You want to buy whipped cream? People can use those cannisters illegally. You need to go to a drug counselor for an evaluation, and pass a drug screen proving you aren't a drug user of any kind, then you can get a permit. It needs to be renewed every year to make sure you remain sober.
A guy down the block broke the law by driving drunk, but you law abiding drivers never really want to deal with that by putting interlock systems in all motor vehicles and requiring the cops to do a blood draw, breathalyzer and field sobriety test before you are allowed to drive anywhere. Just wash their hands and walk away as if they couldn't prevent people they don't know from driving drunk.
What do you propose? Just accept the massacres?
Advocate for shit that would actually change things.
Enforce our ban on domestic abusers owning firearms. We already passed it, but no one enforces it. It would eliminate a huge chunk of gun violence in the nation, but its not as appealing to the mob as the "assault style" ban.
Or both?
One is favored by both sides of the aisle and has already been passed. There are yet more measures that are favored by a vast majority of the population and have data to support their effectiveness. We should start with the low hanging fruit before we start climbing the tree.
I guess I'd ask you the same question. I don't have a proposal because I don't think any of it will make it through Congress. And if it somehow made it through Congress, the Supreme Court would strike it as unconstitutional.
Short of voting out these members of Congress and balancing the court, there's no hope of reform. So drop the issue to appeal to more voters. Win more elections, balance the court, then you're in a position to effect change.
Also, AWBs are pretty useless. They tend to grandfather in existing weapons and they exclude handguns, which are the weapon used most often to commit murder. Magazine limits, which were in the 1994 law, were the only piece to show a genuine reduction in violent crimes.
I guess my proposal would be to repeal and replace 2a. Probably won't happen until the silent gen and the boomers are gone.
I strongly disagree with you, but I definitely give you credit for at least actually saying it.
Most that I've had this discussion with insist they don't want to touch the second amendment and revoke the rights of law abiding gun owners... then most of their ideas both won't solve gun violence while also stripping millions of people who've never broken a gun law of their rights without due process.
Guns are one issue where I strongly break with the Typical American Left™, but if you're going to be anti-gun, I absolutely give you credit for having the wherewithal to just say what you really want.
Well, I also said "replace." Something that's clearer and won't be misinterpreted like the "well-regulated militia."
Something that's under control like they have in most other developed countries where you can still own a weapon in many instances, but it's much safer and gun-related crime is way down.
I'm just, under no circumstance, willing to accept the massacres of children or other innocent people. And pretending it has nothing to do with the weapons is just disingenuous.
And pretending it has nothing to do with the weapons is just disingenuous.
Your virtue signaling aside, I feel it's disingenuous to pretend it does come down to the weapons.
Americans have owned millions of guns throughout its entire existence. Why all the shootings in the news now?
I guess the guns finally got serious about their mind control plot to wipe out all the humans.
Why all the shootings in the news now?
Mental illness and easy access to weapons is a toxic combination not found in other developed countries. That's why.
Some variation on this is the inevitable outcome. It's same story as with say, universal health care. We already know the solution, we just have assholes and people stuck in the past preventing it. At some point, most of them will die off and society moves on.
Universal health care has been on the national stage since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Over a century and not much to show for it.
The problem with eventually is that there's no measure of success, since you can never be wrong, it's just not eventually yet.
How many countries have pulled it off? It's laughable to think it is impossible here. Everything I've suggested has already been implemented elsewhere. It's pretty logical to assume it can happen here too.
I assume you've pivoted now to universal healthcare...but I'm not sure. No one said it's impossible, for that matter, no one said gun control is impossible. Just that it won't pass a Republican controlled legislative body, and I assume it would be struck down by the Supreme Court...same as gun control. Change both of those (Congress & Court) and you've got a chance.
The point is that opposition to both is not some permanent feature of the US government. Nor will the SCOTUS always be far right.
You could save so much time if you just turned your account into a bot that replied as follows:
Eventually! Eventually! Eventually!
There comes a point when you become just a white nationalism apologist. As such, you can go fuck yourself.
There comes a point when you become just a white nationalism apologist.
What are you talking about? The fact that I've repeatedly asked you when and how we can effect change under your model, and you've ignored the questions and repeatedly stated that it will eventually happen (as if by magic), that makes me a white nationalist apologist??? Congratulations, I didn't think you could make a more idiotic reply, but you did it! Good for you!
As such, you can go fuck yourself.
Further proof your vapid comments are as empty as your mind.
I don't think any generation of 3/4 of the states is ratifying that.
Maybe, maybe not.
Or you know, actually interpret the way it was written. Most "gun enthusiasts" are not part of a "well regulated militia".
A well stocked library, being necessary and proper for the literacy of a nation, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed.
That wouldn't limit the ownership of books to just librarians or people with library cards, it clearly applies to all people.
What if libraries stopped existing because they were completely replaced by something else? Militias stopped existing when we created a standing army. Or, if you want to be charitable, they've evolved into "National Guard" who are often armed. They are also well-regulated, as the amendment requires.
Also, this analogy is shit, you can't take someone's life in a split second, without a thought, with a fucking book. Give me a break.
The American/English language is awesome. We've got these great rules with sentence structure and grammar that makes things super easy once you learn the tricks.
A well regulated Militia**,** being necessary to the security of a free State**,** the right of the people to keep and bear Arms**,** shall not be infringed.
Little English trick for you. Remove the words between the commas and see if the sentence makes sense.
"A well regulated Militia shall not be infringed." - Looks pretty good.
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, shall not be infringed." - Still looks good and justifies the reason.
"A well regulated Militia, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." - Still looking good and provides context as to WHO the Militia is.
We put it all together and get
A well regulated Militia (which is needed for security) (made up of people with guns) is a right granted to the State.
If we add the missing comma to your initial statement before the word 'shall'.
Yes, the way your statement is written it would contain books to libraries and would not EXPLICITY provide such protections (book ownership) to individuals. It does not limit individuals, but it does not grant them special rights either.
If "the founders" had wanted everyone to be able to buy a gun they would not have included the word Militia. They're authorizing States the rights to form their own National Guard. Keep in mind, they are NOT saying the average person cannot have a gun. It is my belief that during these times of 'unrest' that they wanted at least some form of local army to defend against invasion. Folks that get training on weapon use and military tactics.
Also some food for thought, nowhere in the 2A or Constitution is the word "ammunition". So if the government so wished, they could simply make possession of primers illegal.
Read your statement again and now it makes sense why you think what you think. It's the comma you either left off intentionally or conveniently. Commas matter.
Edit: The 2A does not GRANT or DIMINISH an individuals' right to arms as it never addresses the subject. It only GRANTS the right to those members of the Militia.
A well regulated militia shall not be infringed sounds pretty meaningless to me. Can a well regulated militia take my car since they can't be infringed? Can they openly kill anyone not in the militia? Can you not get speeding tickets if you join a militia? Adding being necessary to the security of a free state, does not clarify anything.
The actual subject in the sentence is "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." If the Founders wanted it to be only members of a militia, they could have said members, militias, their, or almost anything other than the people.
Just because you do not comprehend the statement, does not make it untrue.
The SUBJECT of that statement is "Militia". The statement self-justifies, then defines, then acts upon it.
Your question response goes on to further expose your misunderstanding. Don't get me wrong, this is not an attack on you. If there's any blame to your misunderstanding, it lies in the school system.
The Second Amendment grants members of the Militia, the right to keep their guns in their home. AS noted by another commenter, that would be the National Guard in today's terms. In Founders terms, it was minutemen.
All the 2A does is exempt Militia members from State or Federal Laws if those laws prohibit gun possession. It also exempts them if they require the discharge of that weapon in duty of preserving the Free State. This means if the Chinese military drops a paratrooper over a National Guardsman's home, they are exempt from prosecution for shooting at them.
Here's the best part. If we repealed the second amendment, nothing would change. It never granted an individual rights to begin with so revoking it would not take those rights away.
As ass backwards as your understanding of sentence structure is and as intentionally obtuse an interpretation of the words "the people" as "the militia" instead of as "the people" like every other use of those words in the Bill of Rights, it doesn't matter even if we agree with your assertion
The 2A does not GRANT or DIMINISH an individuals' right to arms as it never addresses the subject. It only GRANTS the right to those members of the Militia.
10 USC: The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
Basically you are saying disarm only women and the elderly. That seems a little discriminatory, but you do you. Broadly speaking here, everyone is part of the militia. The militia is the citizens of the country. And if you want to argue that this doesn't mean the people get to keep their arms when not actively participating in militia action like everyone seems to do when this is pointed out, please see the relevant legislation from the same time period as the 2nd Amendment.
Second Militia Act of 1792: How to be armed and accoutred. provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.
Clear intention that every citizen should arm themselves with military hardware, ammunition, and know how to use it. You didn't use bayonets for hunting, this was "modern military hardware" for the day. This was not authorization to be allowed to arm militias. The US was not even allowed to have a standing army, only a permanent navy was allowed, the armed citizenry was the army as needed. And all this is moot because the premise of the 2nd being only for militia members is, again, faulty.
Sure but we've proven incapable of that. Repeal it and replace it with something that cannot be misinterpreted.
Because it wasn't the reauthorizing of the assault weapons ban, it was an entirely new version of... The same measures we had 2 decades ago...
The fuck are you talking about it would never pass Congress or the supreme Court, it's the same damn thing we already had you muppet.
Are you under the impression the politics of 1994 are remotely similar to 2023? Have you read the Supreme Court cases of Heller (2008) or Bruen (2022)?
Name call all you want, but you're the one tragically out of touch. This Congress, especially the Republican majority in the house would NEVER pass this bill. SCOTUS has completely changed gun rights in this country since 2008. First finding an individual right to gun ownership, then drastically reducing those gun limitations that are allowable under the 2nd amendment.
I suggest you do some reading before spouting nonsense. Your comment somehow states the bill is simultaneously "entirely new" and also the "same damn thing". Muppet.
Those things will all vanish eventually. We currently have the most conservative SCOTUS in basically a century, and the Republican party is near-fascist politically. These are not sturdy foundations for a legal concept. The truth is, society has never accepted murder and cruelty as a necessary part of society. It's always just a handful of elitists or bigoted fanatics holding society back.
Eventually, many of our current laws and customs will become viewed as the next version of Jim Crow or anti-LGBT laws, and become so unpopular they get repealed. Some take decades to go down, but they always go down. The concept of gun rights will be one of them.
Eventually, eventually, eventually...
Eventually a space alien from over 100 light years away will be named Steve and be president of Earth. You can't prove me wrong, because... eventually!
Because everything today is exactly as it was when the US constitution was first ratified...
This is anti-progress thinking. It's laughable that you actually think basic legal reforms can't happen.
This is anti-progress thinking. It's laughable that you actually think basic legal reforms can't happen.
No one said basic legal reforms can't happen, you're creating a strawman. I said that this Congress and this Supreme Court will not allow gun control. If you disagree, by all means let me know where my error lies.
Also, let me know the path to passage rather than vague statements about eventually. Eventually is weasel language that means you have no confidence in what you're saying; if you did, you'd tell me when and how that can be accomplished.
No one said otherwise. But you won't have this congress and this SCOTUS forever.
And again, it is basic legal reform. It is not some hard problem. And since nearly every Western country has both universal health care and gun control, it is pretty feasible for those ideas to spread to the US at some point. All your doing is apologizing for the modern incarnation of racist violence.
The court's opinion swung one way in 15 years. It can swing back in another 15. Three of the 4 oldest justices are Republicans and it only takes 2 being replaced with Democrats to flip the court. Totally within the realm of possibility.
You have to change Congress too. But you're still talking about 15+ years, and multiple conservative justices dying, and being replaced by liberal justices, and the reverse not happening.
So can we agree that we can hold off on the AWB for like 20 years?
No, we can't even agree on that unfortunately. This country is divided in several ways where there is no acceptable compromise and gun control is one of them.
Scalia's vote in Heller (singled him out because it was openly against his so-called "originalist" school of thought) undid far more than just fifteen years of precedent.
Oh absolutely. Heller was exceptional in its stupidity. My point was just what the current court does, a future court can always undo.
Disagree. The solution is to push for as much gun control as possible, until eventually the dam breaks and the 2A dies. In the long run, gun ownership in the US will resemble how it works in other Western countries, which is to say not much at all.
Disagree. The solution is to push for as much gun control as possible,
That's essentially nothing.
...until eventually the dam breaks and the 2A dies.
And I think elephants should fart rainbows, but both of our proposals lack any consideration of how we make that happen.
In the long run, gun ownership in the US will resemble how it works in other Western countries, which is to say not much at all.
Eventually? There are roughly 400 million guns in this country...how many generations is "eventually"?
I'm not even disagreeing with you, but hoping doesn't make it happen. How do we get there? What are the steps? Does your projected path take into account the systemic impediments?
It's the same story as every other form of cruelty or injustice in American history. People look abroad, realize that such a problem never existed or was solved elsewhere, and eventually will push for the same type of reform in the US.
It doesn't matter how long it takes or how hard it is. It's the same story as every other big accomplish of the past, whether it's ending slavery or women's voting rights. They took decades to happen, but they all eventually happened.
Again, that's all great, but how does it happen? What are the steps to take? Saying it will eventually happen seems even more dismissive than saying it can't happen given current conditions.
When half the country is literally fascist, sure you can admit it isn't going to happen anytime soon. But that is a temporary phenomenon. Eventually, all of them will die. At some point, the US will be a country run by normal people. You're going to have large-scale agreement for major reforms.
The US is getting more stupid and polarised as school funding is diverted and people sign their heels in against civil discourse. It will be a long time before it is run by normal people.
I wouldn't cry if guns were banned entirely, but given the culture the US population has been sold for generations, common sense gun control that works handily in other countries simply won't work in the US. We're not wired that way.
The best chance we have is pulling the tug o' war rope as hard as possible just to maintain the status quo. We're not fighting for reform, we're fighting not to backslide.
As the saying goes, "this too shall pass." No one can say when, but major political shifts always happen after a while.
That saying depends on the just world fallacy. Unfortunately, no, all things don't necessarily pass.
I've got a saying for you that's famously used to describe every moment in Russian history: "...then it got worse."
It's foolish to think things will just fix themselves. We're hurtling full speed into climate apocalypse. Like you realize that isn't just going to "pass" right?
US isn't Russia. Nor is this something no one else has ever done. It's basically an argument from nihilism to claim that commonly solved social problems are unsolvable or aren't part of natural progress in society.
Climate doomerism is also a form of nihilism BTW, although it is off-topic.
I didn't say we're Russia. If that's what you took from my comment, then you definitely missed the point.
I don't know why you think it's some kind of gotcha, I know what nihilism is.
Hopefully soon.
Probably not without help.
And now you have lost anyone who like me would be open to voting Democrat more often instead of third party, because I don't want to flat out lose my 2A rights. I don't want to vote Republican because I don't want to lose other rights in the slide towards religious fascism either. If every side is running on a platform of pick which rights you least want to lose, at least I'll have my guns for protection when the fascists do successfully pull a coup and society collapses.
Yeah, same pro-fascist shit as always. Seen your type a thousands times now.
Let me know how your Democrat recruiting pans out when you call everyone who disagrees with abolishing the 2nd amendment pro-fascist. Really winning hearts and minds, and doing that "big tent" proud. Worked great in 2016, definitely didn't need any of those "deplorables" to join up and there were no lasting consequences.
God I hate our 2 party system. Can't get universal modern healthcare and universal basic income while also keeping gun rights.
Same-old closet fascist shit you always hear. It's pretty obvious you don't care how many people die. So none of your rhetoric holds up to scrutiny.
Ok, this a a good reminder not to give possible trolling the benefit of the doubt. Even though it's feeding the troll: gun rights are not only for the far right. Marx realized the need for robust gun rights, this is nothing new. "Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." Don't trust the state and the police to protect you, especially if you are a minority or revolutionary. The police have no legal duty to protect you.
We are not obligated to believe in Marx either. In fact, last I check nearly everyone agreed he was wrong on a lot of things. It's all outdated extremist rhetoric, regardless of where it came from.
All too often the sad but true story about the US of A.
Wow it's almost like if you immerse yourself in nonsense and hyperbole then it will permeate every space you visit. Who would have thought?
It's your feed and your preferences dude, false equivalency if I've ever seen one.
You wanna fix American politics and with that nearly all other problems with it?
Stop the "winner takes all" system you have right now.
You'll get a hundred political parties that have to compete with eachother. People will start voting more because now there are parties they can actually agree with and you get rid of this "always nearly 50/50" bullshit and one big party that blocks any proposal to actually improve the country
Want to stop the bank on assault rifles? Good luck stopping 20 parties
Banning specific guns is pure theater, even if it passes. There's zero real safety in it.
Speaking on behalf of the rest of us, we think it would be cool if we tried to see if it would go differently before we just accept the opinion of random people on the internet with zero proven credentials to weigh in on the subject.
If that’s okay with you.
America had an assault weapon ban previously and during that time is when school shootings actually started.
Could you tell us exactly what shooting you believe “started” them all? Because according to the article, lives were saved ass a result of the ban.
Columbine was the start of the modern school shooting phenomenon. To this date mass shooters, even outside of school settings, follow the blueprint they started in the 1999 assualt of a school. The tactics, motivation, and planning for Columbine seperates it from more than most of the previous civilian gun violence, and the mass shooters that follow look more like the Columbine shooters than they look like the shooters who came before them.
Really? Prove it. You're statement is full of hot air. Pure posturing.
Is that why there are very few shootings in other developed countries where gun control is also infinitely stricter?
Like Mexico where the schools have been hardened since the 80s and there are millions of guns and criminals?
Try again. The "Western nation" schtick is incorrect and getting stale.
other developed countries
Try again.
Ah yes, the famously developed and first world country of Mexico!
It's not like Mexico is stuck in development hell thanks in large part to it's larger northern neighbor exercising their significantly larger influence upon them or anything
You're so insecure about shit that's bad about the US, it's kinda pathetic to see you on every comment thread poorly defending the US
Absolutely not. That was Gabby Giffords, and Mark Kelly is her husband.
Their grand kids don’t go to the schools that get shot up.
you ever notice that when a vote is 49-51 conservatives win whether they're the 49 or the 51? Or how if it looks like they're gonna lose the vote by a large enough margin to actually lose that they can just prevent a vote from happening at all? You ever wonder how the government dare call itself "representative" and then ignore something that 92% of us want?
The Constitution was designed to make change difficult because the founders feared a strong government. It's unfortunately a design feature. It's why it's harder to actually address a problem instead of preserving the status quo.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans moved to block a ban on assault-style weapons put forward by Democrats on Wednesday, as the United States recorded the highest number of mass shootings for the second year in a row.
The motion, put forward by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, would have reauthorized the Assault Weapons Ban, which first passed in 1994 and expired 10 years later.
The ban covers certain semi-automatic firearms and large capacity ammunition magazines, and ushered in a decrease of deaths from gun violence while it was in place.
"The American people are sick and tired of enduring one mass shooting after another," Schumer said on Wednesday in a speech bringing the motion to the floor.
"Americans have a Constitutional right to own a firearm," he said in a speech on the Senate floor, arguing that the bill was about "trying to label responsible gun owners as criminals."
The most recent high-profile killing happened in Lewiston, Maine, where 18 people were shot by a U.S. Army reservist who committed suicide shortly after the shooting spree.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 45%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Conservatives won’t stop standing in the way of progressive gun control until school shootings become a national attraction.
“Hey look kids! A school shooting! So glad we took this vacation to rural America!”
They won't do it until one of their kids is a victim and suddenly it affects them personally. And even then, only one vote will change.
That's their M.O. They don't care when their policies are actively hurting other people so long as they aren't affected.
So your stance is that only liberal kids get victimized?
Their stance is that conservatives are babies who took the miraculous and precious human ability to empathize with other beings and stunted it with with a bunch of half-assed morality stories about how the world is supposed to work that have nothing to do with reality.
All kids are victimized but most conservatives don't care until it's their kid specifically. Kind of like most political issues that people who have empathy care about.
So conservatives don't care if the children of liberal parents are victims?
No they don't. They immediately jump to "they must have deserved it."
If you honestly believe that you are so full of hate your judgement is off.
Then maybe they should do something.
I didn't say I believe that, it's what conservatives believe.
Let me simplify this for you:
So conservatives don't care if the children of liberal parents are victims?
That right there is my point. What are the deaths of a few children so long as there are zero restrictions placed on gun ownership? They won't care until it affects them in a very personal way. The people with the capacity to change things are presently choosing not to. One has to wonder what would finally cause them to do something.
And I'm not even asking for anything crazy like the assault weapons ban that has been floated recently. We can't even get the most reasonable legislation passed.
Our answer to "more gunmen" cannot be "more guns". Or, rather, it can, but take a look around. How's that working out for us?
Wow. Just wow. There was an attempt.
You're seeing what you want to see my man, not what's actually written. Try again.
For $150 a person, you can be taken through a school, wearing a bullet proof vest, during an active shooter drill!
The Republican party is a criminal and terrorist organization. At this point, this is literally political terrorism.
How many more people have to be killed while going about their daily lives?
An unlimited amount, because nothing will make the US change. Kids being massacred in school, nothing. Concert-goers being plowed down from a hotel window, nothing. Bowlers killed while enjoying a game, nothing.
Apparently no price is too high and Americans will seemingly prioritize their weapons over everything else.
Freedom is paid for in blood, check your history.
The US must be very free then with all the massacred school children to pay for it. Enjoy your freedom, chump.
Why is it that my guns are the problem here? I'm a law abiding citizen and yet people think taking my guns away will stop mass shootings?
I fail to see any logic here. I'm not going to give up MY freedoms when others can't behave properly. You'll never catch me shooting at innocent people, so why is it that all these politicians want to restrict MY guns?
We need more responsible citizens carrying firearms, so if whacko decides to shoot at Innocent people they get readily clapped and the mass shooting is over.
Trained armed police, security, citizens, etc. the thug, thief, ought to fear quick and equal or greater force.
I would even say that I am pro-store owners dropping looters and mass thieves. A few of those instances, where people get dropped, and maybe the idea of such theft won't be so appealing anymore.
100% agree
And harden schools. We piss money away to Ukraine and Israel. Bail large corporations out left and right...
Mexico has had hardened schools since the 80s. Lots of guns, lots of criminals.
If ever you needed any indication that both political parties do not give a flying FUCK about the average citizen and children; it's the fact that hardening schools "costs too much."
Disgraceful.
Because it's never your guns until it is.
I'm sure the owner of every firearm that's been used in a mass killing would have brought that exact question if they had been asked.
All of those guns proceeded to become part of the problem, why should we ever just take your word that yours won't?
This isn't about your guns. It's about guns.
This isn't about you. It's about us.
It's such an absurd argument to equate guns with freedom - most free people live without them just fine.
Why is it that not allowing you to own certain types of guns is an infringement on your freedom, yet the ability to drink alcohol before 21, or buy a manpad, or inject heroin into your veins not an equal violation of your freedom?
It won't change until people fill the streets. The supreme court has interpreted a right to be in a state militia as the right to carry a gun anywhere. That kind of power bows to nothing less.
Good
It’s a small price to pay so we can have dorky looking fake machine guns when a tyrannical leader sends waves of drones and infantry.
Can we not make that the only plan to fight tyranny? I mean, that shit rarely pops up out of nowhere.
It's hilarious to me that you think your semi auto AR-15 is going to do shit against the US Army in the first place. Lmao
So the US has never had any issue with guerilla warfare when the adversaries had mostly small arms? Cool it with the American exceptionalism.
Not to mention using an army on the people they swore to protect is so vastly different than something like vietnam. Imagine if during the Vietnam conflict the VC lived in the same country as the president, the generals, and their families. These people have no idea how revolutions actually work to claim it couldn't happen here.
It's not even that, it's shocking to me because most of the people who love guns are on the side of the fascists anyway. Fight the government? They're going to vote for the authoritarians.
Work cited is crackpipe on this. 76% of americans have access to a firearm right now. I dont need to be a rocket scientist to tell you that if this were a party issue we would only ever have rep presidents.
That's the point. Average citizens banding together against the government is bad. Average citizens scared of the government and their fellow heavily armed neighbors = good.
I'm a gun owner and i use them solely to hunt. Nothing more, nothing less.
No one thinks like that or talks like that. No one imagines using arms like that. This sort of thinking is a "gotcha you stupid people" sort of thing.
Anyway, trying to correct this nonsense is exhausting. Posted about it last night if you want a look.
Yeah, there's thousands of Palestinians that would agree with you. Oh wait, they can't because they're dead.
Is this the "Jews would have defeated the Nazis if they had guns" argument?
Yeah, how else can I shoot artillery strikes out of the air when the government comes for me? /s
According to the article it's the same AWB from the Clinton years.
They can fuck right off. It's not what we need. We need to ban external magazines. This cosmetic shit is bullshit and just posturing to make gun owners suffer.
We need to withhold all federal funding from states that do not send information to the NICS system and we need universal background checks.
Banning external magazines works because every rifle can be retrofitted by welding a magazine in place and loading with stripper clips.
Edit - ITT people who think they have a right to carry guns everywhere but are too afraid to write a reply.
Edit 2 - And apparently most of the ones willing to reply fall into the camp of pretending to care as they've laser focused on one word. No I'm not going to change it. Being a nuisance is not the objective. Cathartic release is not the objective. Cutting gun violence is the fucking objective.
Lol "suffer." Man, take your head out of your ass and go fuck yourself. People, CHILDREN, are fucking dying.
This cosmetic shit is bullshit and just posturing to make gun owners suffer.
"Suffer" in what way? Having to find a new hobby? Having to use a different boom toy instead of the cool boom toy they want to use? Those poor, poor gun owners!
Compared to the actual suffering of the dying kids and their parents, who do you think has it worse?
The old AWB literally bans certain guns by name and certain cosmetic parts. That's it. They can rename the childkiller 2000 into childkiller 3000 while reworking the buttstock to fit around the thumb hole clause. It literally drives more gun sales, not less.
And it grandfathers in all the guns already out there. It's a fucking nuisance law, not a solution. It's not even a step in the right direction because I can buy an AWB legal hunting rifle and run it with old 30 round magazines for the same effect as the scary black gun with a fore grip and flash hider.
How do you read shit like "make external magazines illegal and weld all the guns so they can't take them" and think this guy likes the gun lobby?
Think for half a second. Read beyond the fucking title.
It sounds like you possibly didn't read my question. "Suffer" in what way, exactly? How do you read "'Suffer' in what way?' and go on a tangent about renaming guns? Did you not say "This cosmetic shit is bullshit and just posturing to make gun owners suffer."? Did I misinterpret what you said?
You lost the entire context of it and just went with the catharsis of gun nuts having to spend more money on less than perfect guns. The point was the catharsis doesn't help victims of gun violence.
I asked for clarification on something you said. The context of my question is what you said, which is why I conveniently quoted it for you. My question does not relate to the general point you're making but to this one sentence which I believe I made more than clear through my following-up questions. You seem to prefer to pretend not to understand that in order to worm out of the question, possibly because you're aware that what you said is a slight exaggeration.
Also, what do you believe "catharsis" means?
No what you're missing is I don't care about the single sentence. If that was all there was to the post then that's all I would have posted.
Yes, it was already obvious you have a problem addressing a stupid thing you said. I'm sure you're not really all that black and white, you're just having a hard time being wrong and admitting it.
No one- and I mean no one- has it harder than someone who has 12 rifles that look like they were designed for military use but can't buy a 13th because of some stupid law that is designed to cause them literal physical pain.
Those dead kids wish they had it so bad.
Oh my God dude, you too? You usually actually read posts. How about instead of concentrating on being a nuisance to gun owners and the industry we pass some laws that work. Like maybe these things from that comment you responded to-
Stop sending any federal funds to states that don't give prohibited possesor information to the National Instant Background Check System
Ban and make illegal all external magazines. Existing weapons to be retrofitted by welding a block and installing an internal magazine.
Institute Universal Background Checks.
No, instead we're over here discussing if the Remington 21a hunting rifle can be sold with thumb hole, fore grip, and pistol grip. Or if Remington has to design weird shapes and bumps to provide the same functionality without actually being those things. Meanwhile, the kids you care so much about and the gun suicides that make up more than half of gun deaths are still happening.
This is what pisses me off about the 2A debate. One side wants to sacrifice people for their ego and the other side wants to do no more than pretend they're doing something about it.
As long as gun owners don't suffer. That's the main thing. We have to end their suffering! Poor gun owners!
Right. Clearly you don't want to actually do anything. Just complain. Great.
I just want to end the suffering! Of gun owners! Because they're the real victims.
Christ winces bearing the weight of humanity's original sin on the cross when contemplating the thought of having to go to the range to shoot non moving targets at a faster rate.
external magazines - you have no clue what you're talking about.
universal background checks.
Again you have no idea what you're talking about. My heart aches for people like you full of opinions on a topic, yet completely lacking in basics of said topic.
No expertise at all. Just a decade in the military doing grunt jobs. Nothing happens until we materially affect the speed with which semi auto weapons can fire, and their spread in the country. Revolvers and bolt action weapons are perfectly fine, even as militia weapons.
"here durr, I served my opinion matters more" you supported the corporate machine while likely pushing 3 MOA chump.
Lmao. Sure buddy. Whatever you want to believe.
What I KNOW is serving doesn't make you an expert marksman. Most barely pass basic quals, so don't spout that like some sort of badge of honor.
Oh so now you have to score expert on the shooting range to understand how semi auto weapons function? The gatekeeping just keeps getting deeper and deeper. I guess years of Infantry training and combat experience are just nothing compared to that guy who got 36/40 on the range.
We could just ban all guns, unless you're part of a well organized militia. No need to worry about cosmetics or any real particulars that way.
No, you couldn't. Familiarize yourself with 10 U.S. Code § 246 which actually defines exactly what the militia (both organized militia and unorganized militia) are:
I don't have demographic data to reference, but I imagine the United States has a LOT of male citizens between the ages of 17 and 45.
Fun fact, that's because of a SCOTUS ruling in the 1940's. They just arbitrarily decided that the militia was everyone.
If we want to get originalist about this the well regulated militias refers to men of a town who were in good standing and drilled regularly under official supervision. They were also subject to call up by the town, county, state, and federal governments.
The only things we have with that structure are the Reserves and National Guard.
Well perfect. Looks like we've got a definition for "organized militia" (literally another word for "well-regulated militia". Don't waste your time I'm not going to get into a semantics argument about this). "Unorganized militia" became obsolete when we created a standing army.
Here is the definition you linked to since it appears as though you stopped reading about 2/3 through:
the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia;
So it looks like we do have a well-regulated militia, and it's called the National Guard. Thanks for the additional evidence that the Heller decision was bullshit!
You won't debate the semantics because you would lose said debate and because you know it is germane.
I imagine you know full well that the meaning of "well-regulated" as used in the BOR and "organized" as used in the USC are not the same, and your suggestion that they are is nonsense. The former refers to training and armament. The latter is used to describe the part of the militia that is also part of the National Guard and that which is not.
As you seem to think I have not read it, here is the entirety of it:
(a)The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b)The classes of the militia are—
(1)the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2)the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
I suggest it is you who either did not read it, or doing so, did not understand it. If you are
A) a citizen of the Unites States
B) Male and
C) in the age range of 17-45 (with some variance for NG)
then you are a member of the unorganized militia.
If only we had 2 centuries of precedence to back any of this up. Oh wait, we do...
Heller completely changed how we interpret the second amendment, in a way we never had previously. You can pretend that this is what was intended, but the actual reality is that the interpretation of 2a to refer to individual ownership of firearms started with Heller in 2003.
Is that so? I'll be wanting a citation for that assertion. In the interim, you might read the following. It presents an actual informed, expert opinion on the subject at hand:
An individual right to own a gun for personal protection is an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. But for most of U.S. history, there was little actual legal framework to support any such interpretation of the Second Amendment. It wasn't until a relatively recent Supreme Court decision that this all changed.
[...]
the case that bears his name redefined gun ownership, as it marked the first time the Supreme Court affirmed an individual right to gun ownership that was separate from the "militia clause" in the Second Amendment.
(Emphasis mine)
Thanks! I'll look it over after I get home.
“for most of U.S. history, there was little actual legal framework to support any such interpretation of the Second Amendment. It wasn't until a relatively recent Supreme Court decision that this all changed.”
The article you linked to bases its premise on that statement, which is demonstrably incorrect. Any review of the debates on the BoR of the day, in particular of the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers will have little difficulty in discerning the intent of the founders. Concerning court interpretations, as I am not as erudite as most, I'll refer you to this. It is taken from a constitutional commentary from the University of Minnesota Law School (https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1275&context=concomm):
"From the enactment of the Bill of Rights through most of the twentieth century, the second amendment seems to have been understood to guarantee to every law-abiding responsible adult the right to possess most ordinary firearms. Until the mid-twentieth century courts and commentaries (the two earliest having been before Congress when it voted on the second amendment) deemed that the amendment "confirmed [the people] in their right to keep and bear their private arms," or "their own arms."
In a 1939 case which is its only full treatment, the Supreme Court accepted that private persons may invoke the second amendment, but held that it confines their freedom of choice to militia-type weapons, i.e., high quality handguns and rifles, but not "gangster weapons" such as sawed-off shotguns, switchblade knives and (arguably) "Saturday Night Specials. " In the 1960s this individual right view was challenged by scholars who argued that the second amendment guarantee extends only to the states' right to arm formal military units. This states' right view attained predominance, and was endorsed by the ABA, the ACLU and such texts as Lawrence Tribe's American Constitutional Law. During the 1980s, however, a large literature on the amendment appeared, much of it rejecting the states' right view as inconsistent with the text and with new research findings on the legislative history, the attitudes of the authors, the meaning of the right to bear arms in antecedent American and English legal thought, and the role that an armed citizenry played in classical liberal political philosophy from Aristotle through Machiavelli and Harrington to Sidney, Locke, Rousseau and their various disciples. Indicative of the current Supreme Court's probable view is a 1990 decision which, though focusing on the fourth amendment, cites the first and second as well in concluding that the phrase "right of the people" is a term of art used throughout the Bill of Rights to designate rights pertaining to individual citizens (rather than to the states)."
There is an easily traced history regarding the Second, clearly showing the intent to protect a naturally-existing right of the individual against incursion by government.
I don't actually care. Guns are dumb. I'm just being obtuse for the sake of shitting in gun ownership.
State militia. Those were the well regulated militias being referenced. Johnny's anti government friends club does not count.
GOP: Gentlemen Gentlemen this is a mental health issue which is we can't ban 2A rights.
Everyone: Ok then give us better mental health?
GOP: Nope that's commie talk. Just get Jesus. (Also shocked why people hate them)
I support the 2nd. I also support single payer healthcare, including dental coverage and expanded mental Healthcare services. Then again, I dont support Republicans.
If dems got off the 2A stuff they would get more voters ::cough cough:: Texas. I know people that are like yeah abortion is not a deal breaker for me but guns are. Mostly people who are too old to have kids anyway. I'm sure Mass shooting will go down once we have social nets to get people the help they need. Guns are like Cars. Fine when used by responsible adults baaaad otherwise. No one does these things because they have happy content lives.
Watching beto shoot himself in the foot with the gun grabbing line should have been a bigger indicator. Theres plenty of room for pro 2a dems and dems with complex views on the issue. Gun ownership is rising in both parties, dems faster than republicans. Dems cant pass laws even if they win, they can't afford to do stupid no chance moves that cost them seats.
If Dems focused on what actually would curb the violence, and dropped guns. They'd sweep the elections for decades.
Yeah this is how people get jaded or gets the conspiracy people out.
One problem was that the CDC was banned from studying the causes of gun violence from 1997 until 2018 due to the Dickey Amendment. We should have had big studies done to see just what the problems were (I'm sure it's not just one) and what solutions might give the best results while infringing on people's rights the least. Instead, even studying why gun violence was a problem was banned.
Thankfully, the Dickey Amendment was clarified (but not repealed) and gun violence research is allowed. Still, the studies aren't allowed to call for gun control so they are still hobbled. So while new proposals based on studies can be made, gun control won't be one of them even if it would be effective.
Our leadership has time and time again daid it's mental health, they know it. No research is needed. Just expand mental Healthcare before the Joker movie becomes a reality.
No they where not, they weren't ever banned from studying gun violence. They just weren't allowed to use it as a way to sway public opinion...which is what the, at the time, acting leadership of the CDC wanted to do.
That's downright fantasy talk. Voters minds have been so poisoned that they don't give a shit about policy anymore. Republican politicians haven't had an actual platform for at least a decade.
Their platform is only to stimie any progress and protect the rich. They may say lots of words but one need only look at the way they vote and yet are still consistently reelected.
They say they'll fix things but never do even when they control both houses and the presidency. That should have been a republican free for all in 2016, but nothing of value happened for those two years. No immigration reform. No healthcare reform. No gun reform. Oh, but they did pass a tax reform bill and guess who that helped.
You said voters minds have been poisoned .. ... then went on a they they they rant proving your point. You get that, right?
My rant illustrated my point, yes, but I don't think it's the gotcha that you seem to think it is.
My point is that people are voting for politicians who are actively working against many of their constituents interests. And they're tending to vote that way because they believe politicians' words instead of observing their actions.
If you care to refute any of my points, feel free.
Yesbabsolutely. They'd win the nation if they dropped the anti gun platform.
Same, well said
I support legal safe gun ownership, usage, and training. I believe the second amendment doesn't apply anymore though. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." This is not true anymore. It was written in a time where standing professional armies weren't the norm by people who never expected the US to reach a state to have one.
Gun ownership should be protected by the 9th amendment to an extent though, as abortion and all of our other traditionally held rights are.
certainly looks like you would need to protect yourself against a soon-to-be dictatorship though
Very well could be true, which is part of why I don't mind (and appreciate when done properly) gun ownership. That doesn't change the fact that the wording of the second amendment is for something that isn't true anymore. Again, your rights are (or should be at least) protected by the 9th, which is much more important but most people haven't even heard of.
The basis of the 2nd is just not true anymore. It's like saying "physical currency, being necessary for the purchase of items, the right to possess coins shall not be infringed." It doesn't take into account the changes that may occur. We don't need militias to protect the nation anymore, since we have a professional army, and we don't need physical currency anymore, because most people don't use it now anyway.
Kinda funny actually, since we're starting to see a movement that looks to effectively ban physical currency by making it a headache.
Same motivation: surveillance and control.
I'm really happy with the level headed reasoning in this post and the replies. Feels like I'm not alone in thinking "gun bans are stupid" and "can't we address systemically WHY people feel the need to flame out in a blaze of violence, to reduce violence?"
Also BTW there's a "Socialist Rifle Association", and I might not agree with them on 100% everything obviously, I just think it's cool and they seem alright.
I just wish Dems would stop trying to ban any guns, and not because I'm against gun control, but because it's a losing issue. It's never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down. Given that that's fairly undeniable, why lose the people who organize and vote on this issue alone?
This has been said about many issues in the past. Effecting change isn't easy but giving up doesn't help. Americans support gun control. Only our crappy political system stands in the way.
On both sides, Republicans block any gun control, and Democrats only propose useless legislation
What do you think the other person meant when they said, "It’s never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down."?
I disagree on giving up on a political issue only because it wouldn't pass right now. Politics is compromise. If you only take positions which are already on the line of compromise you've already lost.
Which issues? Civil Rights? Gay marriage?
Those are issues in which the American people were opposed, and then societal views changed. As you pointed out, that isn't the case here. Americans already favor reform, but they aren't going to vote these people out based on the status quo.
Newtown was the wake up call, if nothing changes after a bunch of small children get massacred, you're not getting change. Not without wholesale changes. Proposing an AWB is political theater, nothing more.
If it's popular, why wouldn't the Democrats keep fighting for it?
Whether it will realistically happen anytime soon, yeah I'd say the odds are very low.
But let's not just give up as it can't ever happen.
Also "political theater" is like half of actual politics, so don't knock it too easily :P
It's the worst political theater. It makes it look like something is being done when it isn't. Gun sales go up and liberals feel good. More kids die.
So the solution is what?
We could start prosecuting people for breaking laws.
https://www.newsweek.com/42-rejected-gun-background-checks-2020-had-felony-convictions-1603064
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/19/gun-buyers-lie-and-try-only-12-prosecuted-editorials-debates/1288699002/
The solution is for law enforcement to properly enforce the existing laws that could have stopped countless shootings already.
My personal solution is not to worry about gun violence because it's extremely rare and highly unlikely to affect me. America is quite safe to live in for the majority of us.
Oh, well as long as it is unlikely to affect you...
I mean illegal abortion is unlikely to affect me, so why should I give a shit, am I right?
That's really a bad comparison, because you're arguing for the point of taking away rights from Americans, by making reference to a right that was taken away (since it was never properly added to the Constitution). I support all rights for all Americans - we should all have the rights to bear arms and to privacy + bodily autonomy.
So instead of arguing to take away more rights, you should be arguing to add more rights. Lobby for the rights to privacy and bodily autonomy instead.
Make up your mind. Do you care about things that don't affect you or not?
Of course I do, and you should too. You should care about all the rights of Americans, just as I do and AS I ALREADY MENTIONED.
I have already addressed everything you mentioned previously, so now you're just pissing in the wind.
Your words.
I like how you ignore the first half of their comment then reply to the personal part, aka the non political half, and examine it as if it the only thing they said about gun violence at all.
I'm afraid at this point there's no legislation that will survive the Supreme Court. The next realistic move is to mirror the federalist society. Get enough judges appointed with the idea that the second does not protect personal gun ownership and reach a critical state.
If I could waive a magic wand without breaking the character of the US, we'd ban external magazines, have universal background checks, and stop federal funds from going to states that don't send information to the National Instant Check System. There's so much low hanging fruit. But even when SCOTUS wasn't busy boofing beers the Brady Campaign gave us shit laws designed to harass people, not reduce violence.
None of what you just proposed would reduce violence..
Frustrating the reload slows down active shooters. Solidifying the NICS means criminals can't just go to the next state over. And Universal background checks takes away the secondhand market from criminals as well.
A program to groom judges on this just like the conservatives did with Roe V Wade will do the most in the long term because we'll be able to have laws based on the actual amendment, not just a few words of it.
Yes...because no active shooters have ever made plans....and no active shooters have ever not been flagged correctly when they were prohibited already...and no one buys drugs on the black market cause that's illegal...and no one makes straw purchases which are already illegal.
RvW needs to be signed into a law, not used as a bargaining chip for votes for Democrats. They need to use their political capital to make it a federal law.
This isn't a good faith argument. The logical extent is that we can't stop every criminal so we should have no laws at all.
We already have laws for these things you listed... literally murder is illegal...so is buying or owning a firearm and being a prohibited person...you gonna make it double illegal? I'm not the one arguing in bad faith. You are
Right, first you argue we can't catch them all so we shouldn't have laws, and now your arguing that we just have to sit back and let them kill people.
Go home.
You know, that's exactly what people said about Roe v. Wade and about banning abortion.
Turns out that you can keep losing on an issue for 50 years, yet winning only once will drastically change the trajectory of the entire issue.
That's the opposite situation. Pro-life voters and pro-gin voters are the 2 largest single-issue voting groups in the country.
Look at it this way. If you swapped Trump and Biden's positions on abortion but changed nothing else, how many pro-choice Democrats would have voted for Trump?
Basically zero, right. Meanwhile, millions of pro-life Republicans would have flipped because abortion is the singular issue upon which they base their vote.
Guns are in the same boat. Hundreds of thousands of voters vote strictly based on their love of guns. There's no political advantage in the general election for being anti-gun, and the Dems are sacrificing a whole lot of seats to fight this losing battle.
I thought we resolved that with the end of Prohibition?
No he misspelled pro-gyn voters
Yeah nevermind that the constitution says "shall not be infringed"' If abortion rights were in the constitution there would be no way of banning it, just as it is with firearms.
Actually it says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.* It says nothing about procuring them. Banning gun sales is totally on the table. Plus, "arms" is kinda a funny word. It doesn't mean just guns. Yet most people would agree that I shouldn't be allowed to build bombs in my basement. Isn't that a violation of the second amendment?
Not to mention that whole well regulated militia part.
A reasonable interpretation would at the very least take that to mean a requirement to be eligible for the national guard and to consistently pass training and inspection with each action class of weapon you want to buy.
Hence the asterix on my paraphrasing of the Second Amendment. Ultimately, I think the founding fathers laid out general principles of society that we should adhere to, but that they expected us to care more about the intent of the Constitution than the actual exact words.
The founding fathers were slave oligarchs, fuck their opinions on anything to do with our country today
Throw out the whole constitution then. Human history is rife with suffering and hypocrisy. My ancestors chased people off this land at the point of a sword. Right now, we're overlooking the horrible exploitation of other human beings in China, Africa, India and others, to make luxury goods. The lens of history should acknowledge the status quo at the time, but not excuse it, and celebrate those who worked to advance human rights and conditions before their time.
Man imagine going to bat for the opinions of slave oligarchs.
Imagine condemning nearly everyone who has ever existed because they didn't live up to modern society's current understanding of humanity.
Imagine being too scared to do that in spite of everyone they made suffer and everyone else who knew it was wrong even then, because you somehow want to make defending slave oligarchs your hill to die on.
Then stop wearing your clothes, eating the food you buy and enjoying the place you live in...go live in the woods, because you're a hypocrite.
The article says guns should be ownable because they're necessary in a militia. The language never implies that guns should only be owned by militia members. The militia line is a justification not a requirement.
You seemed to have missed the part where that's the generous interpretation, the real interpretation is that since a militia is no longer necessary for the defense of our free state, civilian firearms ownership can just be banned entirely and that's perfectly constitutional.
Unless you want to argue that the strongest military in human history is insufficient defense of this free state.
Militias are still necessary for free states, especially since the Army is federal in nature, not a state organization. Now the militia helps ensure the security of the states from federal forces that would otherwise be left unchecked without so much as a means to stop a military dictatorship, which is the reason they didn't form a standing army when they wrote the constitution. The only thing that changed was who the militia would be fighting against, and that's a common interpretation. It very much aligns with the spirit of the law, preventing military dictatorship, for it to continue to exist.
That why right now independent militias are one of the greatest threats of domestic terrorism in this country, like that time those militias defended the free state by forming the more organized portions of the J6 riots that explicitly set out to end our free state and replace it with a militia dictatorship?
So called 'lone wolf' shooters do more terrorism than militias they just don't call it terrorism because they paint it as a personal issue despite them listening to the same media personalities, having the same theories, and going to the same online spaces. There are more mass shootings that qualify as terrorism, weather they're called as such or not, than there is militia violence. Also idk what lessons you wanna pull from J6 considering to my knowledge none of the insurrectionists shot a firearm. You're trying to tell me how dangerous militias are with guns yet it seems the most dangerous thing they did, they did without guns.
No it's not, everything the founders wrote about was directly designed to keep people armed and under no situation shall they be disarmed. Go read some of their papers. This has been chewed a million times and the anti-2a crowd still thinks regulated is the same meaning today as it was back then.
The founders were slave oligarchs, the tyranny they were keeping the citizens armed to defend against was Haiti.
What the fuck are you talking about....do you just make shit up in your head? They wanted everyone armed because they just fought and defeated the world's strongest military at the time...
If that was genuinely the reason a significant faction of them wouldn't have been arguing in favor of trade deals with them instead of France, the country that basically won the war for us at sea.
The fuck does having trade with other countries have anything to do with gun ownership?
The well regulated part means functional and effective.
The reasonable interpretation is that the founders didn't want a federal standing army because of the temptation towards tyranny such federal power would create, and instead expected the states to draft their citizens into militias in response to threats. These citizens were expected to arrive self-armed, knowing how to use their gun, with ammunition, and with initial rations. Citing the militia acts for this, you can verify that the government saw everyone of able body as members of the militia. The militias could then slot into a temporary federal army when needed, and then sent home after the threat has passed. The "shall not be infringed" was to prevent the federal and state governments from disarming their citizens, and the temptation of tyranny over a helpless population.
We have since become the world's largest military power through constitutional amendment and stretching of interpretation, but there has been no update to the 2nd. It doesn't matter that a citizen militia can't match the US military today like everyone likes to argue, we shouldn't selectively enforce constitutional rights. Full stop. If you want to change it, get a constitutional amendment passed modifying the 2nd. If you can't pass that threshold, then you don't have the support you think you do. If you want to guarantee people trained, offer free training and make it attractive to do this training or include it in our compulsory education system so everyone gets it by default. By the way, everyone is already eligible for the national guard, it is essentially the current active volunteer militia. What you can't do is make people join the national guard to be able to keep and bear arms.
If you want to just scrap the country like your later comments on this thread indicate, go find uninhabited land and found your own country that doesn't have a constitution and can be completely redesigned at your will. Or steal some from any current inhabitants if you can, and if you find that palatable or find a group you don't think deserve their country.
Imagine just for a second, that they drop the issue and gain control of all 3 branches and then actually do something about it rather than constantly struggling to win because of single policy voters.
The only thing tougher to imagine than dems winning supermajorities and all three branches is the dems doing something with it. Hard to imagine the people who fund splinter dems like Manchin wont just do the same thing to a dozen dems instead of two.
Roe had good results, but it wasn't a good decision.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-offers-critique-roe-v-wade-during-law-school-visit
Yes, there's no way Roe would have been overturned by that Congress or that Supreme Court (50 years ago). Just like this Congress and Court will not allow significant gun control. Republicans gerrymandered districts and refused to seat a justice, thereby changing those things. Thank you for proving my point.
They kept pushing it as an issue they care about, and eventually they got through. If they didn't, they wouldn't.
Well, Democrats have been pushing the AWB in Congress for about 30 years now, the first 10 it was law, then it sunset, and they kept pushing....and they have lost a ton of ground in that fight, just like abortion. Because while they were introducing bills, Republicans were remaking Congress and the judiciary. But sure, let's propose more pointless legislation... it'll work this time.
That's how politics generally works, you push for the issue for decades and if you're relentless enough you either finally push through it or you die. You also can and probably need to do all other things but you never stop pushing.
Seriously. Pivot to mental health funding or something. At least that has a chance of passing and even if it doesn't cut down on shootings it will still help people.
It's also a lightning rod issue that turns more voters away than it attracts.
Sure there are staunch anti-gun people under the Democrats' tent but they're not the kind of people who will vote Republican if the party suddenly scaled back or ended its decades long futile efforts at gun bans.
On the other hand there are a ton of white working class voters on the suburban-rural fringes of swing states who would absolutely at least consider a Democrat if the party wasn't so easily cast as "gun grabbers and job killers who only care about minorities".
You get a pro-union, pro-legal-gun Democrat on a ticket who speaks on issues affecting rural whites as much as they do urban non-white voters (who are equally important), and you'd have a winner in many of these areas where they've been quite red, but not so rabidly Trumpy as other areas.
Even moreso if that's a change that happened at the party/platform level.
I feel like from a campaign strategy standpoint, guns are just a lose-lose for the Democratic party. Playing to a base that would be loyal anyway for other reasons, even if the party dropped that position completely (which would not only eliminate a deal breaker issue for rural Democrats but also eliminate a cornerstone of the GOP platform in "protecting the second amendment"). Unless they did a complete about face and suddenly became as cozy with the NRA as Republicans, anti-gun voters might be upset, but they're still voting blue.
After all there's still abortion, electoral reform, racial justice, the environment, education, foreign policy, infrastructure, legal weed, LGBT rights, healthcare, and a host of other issues where the Dems are still their people.
Same thing with abortion and marijuana on the other side. If Republicans could lighten up on that stuff Democrats would never win an election again.
It cuts both ways.
The same can be said for literally every issue.
"Oh if only the Democrats stopped talking about abortion, electoral reform, racial justice, the environment, education, etc. they'd be more appealing to certain voters!"
Capitulating on a widely supported issue just to possibly attract a minority group of voters is a show of weakness.
It's also known as Appeasement. Liberals that always compromise on everything, especial their core beliefs, are basically part of the problem.
I'd be fine with changes to all manner of healthcare and insurance coverage, including single payer.
Plus if they focused on mental health and preventive measures they could maybe bring over some fire arms enthusiasts, who otherwise vote republican or atleast get them to not vote.
Mind you the effectiveness may be scattershot at times since its alot easier to get the guy going postal than it is to get the an ideologically motivated shitbag.
Republicans block efforts for increased healthcare of any kind let alone mental health. They also block preventative measures like red flag laws.
It’s not a mental health issue. There are people with mental health issues all over the civilized world and those countries don’t deal with mass shootings weekly, even if the citizens are allowed access to guns. It’s the relatively unrestricted access to firearms with minimal to no oversight of gun owners, and no rules to secure said firearms.
Edit: well, here we go again.
https://abc7.com/unlv-active-shooter/14148302/
Okay and? This was my point, ya aint gonna get a solid backing for any type of gun control due to the courts. I support firearms licensing, so long as its about as easy/hard as getting a drivers licence. The thing is though that going "its the guns" while technically true is about as helpful as going "its cause of capitalism" great youve found the problem now what practical solution do you have?
My point was moreso to give an example of what the Dems could do to syphon votes from the republicans. The current "lets ban guns" shtick clearly aint working so come up with a better solution. I think folks who make their identity all about firearms are stupid, but that also means they should be easy to be made apathetic on voting at minimum.
You're both right. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. There are more guns than people in the US so to reduce gun suicide we must work both sides of the issue.
"minimal oversight and rules" he says. Tell us you've never bought a gun without telling us.
Please don't speak about things you have no clue on. There are plenty of rules and restrictions. The fact that our federal government can't or doesn't enforce them properly means the law abiding citizen should suffer?
The fuck outta here with that nonsense.
Yeah. You don’t know anything about my firearms knowledge, and that’s fine with me. I don’t give a damn about some dick measuring contest over whatever is in someone’s arsenal.
What oversight? Most rural places you pass a nominal background check at best. Buy your gun, and nobody bothers you about it again. Urban areas? Yeah, more rules; but again, fill out the paperwork, pass the background checks, buy your gun and that’s it. The majority of rules apply to handguns. I can head on down to my local gun shop and pick up a deer rifle with almost no hassle at all. Or maybe you mean a tax stamp? Same story. Fill out the paperwork, pass the check, pay the money, get the gun.
Yet again, nobody pays attention to what you do with the gun once you have it. That’s the oversight part I’m talking about. Nobody is making you re-test for anything. There’s no license to maintain to own a long gun or even a handgun in the vast majority of places.
I’m not even going to touch CCW because that’s not buying a gun or owning a gun, that’s how you carry it.
What is apparent is that you haven’t a clue what real oversight is. Gun ownership in the rest of the civilized world is highly regulated, licensed, tested, and monitored. So is how the firearm is stored, where and when it can be transported and used.
So “get outta here with that nonsense” when you consider a single background check or a tax stamp “monitoring” your ownership.
This is the other side of the argument that I don't really understand. There shouldn't be "monitoring" of your ownership. A law abiding citizen going in, filling out a background check and proving they aren't prohibited from owning a gun and then buying said gun and ending their involvement with the government from that point on is just normal. We are innocent until proven guilty. We have a right to privacy. We have a right against unwarranted searches. Exercising one of your other constitutional rights shouldn't and doesn't mean you give up others.
The government shouldn't be monitoring it's citizens with regular check-ins, making sure they are good worker drones. I don't understand the desire for the government to dictate or arbitrate every action you take, because the government doesn't care about you as an individual. Allowing the government to monitor your personal life is a distopian trope for a reason. I don't want to live in a police state like the UK or China, and our own police state is already bad enough.
Well, law abiding citizens shouldn’t shoot up schools, concerts, or businesses. But that doesn’t matter when it’s a right to own guns, because somehow magically a law abiding citizen with guns suddenly isn’t so law abiding, but gun owners never really want to deal with that. Wash their hands and walk away.
Just dropping the whole basis of our legal system because lives could be in jeopardy, just throw out innocent until proven guilty and your right to privacy. Let me guess, you also disagree that it is better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man be convicted, especially if the crime is severe enough?
Law abiding citizens shouldn't steal, use illegal substances, or assault people either, but that doesn't matter because a statistically significant percentage of people suddenly aren't so law abiding. Are you prepared to allow law enforcement to regularly enter your home and inventory your property to match with receipts backed up by your pay stubs to make sure your not stealing anything or committing fraud, while also ensuring you don't have any drugs? How about regular interviews with your friends, family, and coworkers to make sure you always conduct yourself in a upstanding manner? Having to get evidence and/or reasonable articulable suspicion to search your person or property prevents police from stopping you from commiting crime before you do it.
You want to buy whipped cream? People can use those cannisters illegally. You need to go to a drug counselor for an evaluation, and pass a drug screen proving you aren't a drug user of any kind, then you can get a permit. It needs to be renewed every year to make sure you remain sober.
A guy down the block broke the law by driving drunk, but you law abiding drivers never really want to deal with that by putting interlock systems in all motor vehicles and requiring the cops to do a blood draw, breathalyzer and field sobriety test before you are allowed to drive anywhere. Just wash their hands and walk away as if they couldn't prevent people they don't know from driving drunk.
What do you propose? Just accept the massacres?
Advocate for shit that would actually change things.
Enforce our ban on domestic abusers owning firearms. We already passed it, but no one enforces it. It would eliminate a huge chunk of gun violence in the nation, but its not as appealing to the mob as the "assault style" ban.
Or both?
One is favored by both sides of the aisle and has already been passed. There are yet more measures that are favored by a vast majority of the population and have data to support their effectiveness. We should start with the low hanging fruit before we start climbing the tree.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/
I guess I'd ask you the same question. I don't have a proposal because I don't think any of it will make it through Congress. And if it somehow made it through Congress, the Supreme Court would strike it as unconstitutional.
Short of voting out these members of Congress and balancing the court, there's no hope of reform. So drop the issue to appeal to more voters. Win more elections, balance the court, then you're in a position to effect change.
Also, AWBs are pretty useless. They tend to grandfather in existing weapons and they exclude handguns, which are the weapon used most often to commit murder. Magazine limits, which were in the 1994 law, were the only piece to show a genuine reduction in violent crimes.
I guess my proposal would be to repeal and replace 2a. Probably won't happen until the silent gen and the boomers are gone.
I strongly disagree with you, but I definitely give you credit for at least actually saying it.
Most that I've had this discussion with insist they don't want to touch the second amendment and revoke the rights of law abiding gun owners... then most of their ideas both won't solve gun violence while also stripping millions of people who've never broken a gun law of their rights without due process.
Guns are one issue where I strongly break with the Typical American Left™, but if you're going to be anti-gun, I absolutely give you credit for having the wherewithal to just say what you really want.
Well, I also said "replace." Something that's clearer and won't be misinterpreted like the "well-regulated militia."
Something that's under control like they have in most other developed countries where you can still own a weapon in many instances, but it's much safer and gun-related crime is way down.
I'm just, under no circumstance, willing to accept the massacres of children or other innocent people. And pretending it has nothing to do with the weapons is just disingenuous.
Your virtue signaling aside, I feel it's disingenuous to pretend it does come down to the weapons.
Americans have owned millions of guns throughout its entire existence. Why all the shootings in the news now?
I guess the guns finally got serious about their mind control plot to wipe out all the humans.
Mental illness and easy access to weapons is a toxic combination not found in other developed countries. That's why.
Some variation on this is the inevitable outcome. It's same story as with say, universal health care. We already know the solution, we just have assholes and people stuck in the past preventing it. At some point, most of them will die off and society moves on.
Universal health care has been on the national stage since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Over a century and not much to show for it.
The problem with eventually is that there's no measure of success, since you can never be wrong, it's just not eventually yet.
How many countries have pulled it off? It's laughable to think it is impossible here. Everything I've suggested has already been implemented elsewhere. It's pretty logical to assume it can happen here too.
I assume you've pivoted now to universal healthcare...but I'm not sure. No one said it's impossible, for that matter, no one said gun control is impossible. Just that it won't pass a Republican controlled legislative body, and I assume it would be struck down by the Supreme Court...same as gun control. Change both of those (Congress & Court) and you've got a chance.
The point is that opposition to both is not some permanent feature of the US government. Nor will the SCOTUS always be far right.
You could save so much time if you just turned your account into a bot that replied as follows:
There comes a point when you become just a white nationalism apologist. As such, you can go fuck yourself.
What are you talking about? The fact that I've repeatedly asked you when and how we can effect change under your model, and you've ignored the questions and repeatedly stated that it will eventually happen (as if by magic), that makes me a white nationalist apologist??? Congratulations, I didn't think you could make a more idiotic reply, but you did it! Good for you!
Further proof your vapid comments are as empty as your mind.
I don't think any generation of 3/4 of the states is ratifying that.
Maybe, maybe not.
Or you know, actually interpret the way it was written. Most "gun enthusiasts" are not part of a "well regulated militia".
A well stocked library, being necessary and proper for the literacy of a nation, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed.
That wouldn't limit the ownership of books to just librarians or people with library cards, it clearly applies to all people.
What if libraries stopped existing because they were completely replaced by something else? Militias stopped existing when we created a standing army. Or, if you want to be charitable, they've evolved into "National Guard" who are often armed. They are also well-regulated, as the amendment requires.
Also, this analogy is shit, you can't take someone's life in a split second, without a thought, with a fucking book. Give me a break.
The American/English language is awesome. We've got these great rules with sentence structure and grammar that makes things super easy once you learn the tricks.
A well regulated Militia**,** being necessary to the security of a free State**,** the right of the people to keep and bear Arms**,** shall not be infringed.
Little English trick for you. Remove the words between the commas and see if the sentence makes sense.
"A well regulated Militia shall not be infringed." - Looks pretty good.
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, shall not be infringed." - Still looks good and justifies the reason.
"A well regulated Militia, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." - Still looking good and provides context as to WHO the Militia is.
We put it all together and get
A well regulated Militia (which is needed for security) (made up of people with guns) is a right granted to the State.
If we add the missing comma to your initial statement before the word 'shall'.
Yes, the way your statement is written it would contain books to libraries and would not EXPLICITY provide such protections (book ownership) to individuals. It does not limit individuals, but it does not grant them special rights either.
If "the founders" had wanted everyone to be able to buy a gun they would not have included the word Militia. They're authorizing States the rights to form their own National Guard. Keep in mind, they are NOT saying the average person cannot have a gun. It is my belief that during these times of 'unrest' that they wanted at least some form of local army to defend against invasion. Folks that get training on weapon use and military tactics.
Also some food for thought, nowhere in the 2A or Constitution is the word "ammunition". So if the government so wished, they could simply make possession of primers illegal.
Read your statement again and now it makes sense why you think what you think. It's the comma you either left off intentionally or conveniently. Commas matter.
Edit: The 2A does not GRANT or DIMINISH an individuals' right to arms as it never addresses the subject. It only GRANTS the right to those members of the Militia.
A well regulated militia shall not be infringed sounds pretty meaningless to me. Can a well regulated militia take my car since they can't be infringed? Can they openly kill anyone not in the militia? Can you not get speeding tickets if you join a militia? Adding being necessary to the security of a free state, does not clarify anything.
The actual subject in the sentence is "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." If the Founders wanted it to be only members of a militia, they could have said members, militias, their, or almost anything other than the people.
Just because you do not comprehend the statement, does not make it untrue.
The SUBJECT of that statement is "Militia". The statement self-justifies, then defines, then acts upon it.
Your question response goes on to further expose your misunderstanding. Don't get me wrong, this is not an attack on you. If there's any blame to your misunderstanding, it lies in the school system.
The Second Amendment grants members of the Militia, the right to keep their guns in their home. AS noted by another commenter, that would be the National Guard in today's terms. In Founders terms, it was minutemen.
All the 2A does is exempt Militia members from State or Federal Laws if those laws prohibit gun possession. It also exempts them if they require the discharge of that weapon in duty of preserving the Free State. This means if the Chinese military drops a paratrooper over a National Guardsman's home, they are exempt from prosecution for shooting at them.
Here's the best part. If we repealed the second amendment, nothing would change. It never granted an individual rights to begin with so revoking it would not take those rights away.
As ass backwards as your understanding of sentence structure is and as intentionally obtuse an interpretation of the words "the people" as "the militia" instead of as "the people" like every other use of those words in the Bill of Rights, it doesn't matter even if we agree with your assertion
10 USC: The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
Basically you are saying disarm only women and the elderly. That seems a little discriminatory, but you do you. Broadly speaking here, everyone is part of the militia. The militia is the citizens of the country. And if you want to argue that this doesn't mean the people get to keep their arms when not actively participating in militia action like everyone seems to do when this is pointed out, please see the relevant legislation from the same time period as the 2nd Amendment.
Second Militia Act of 1792: How to be armed and accoutred. provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.
Clear intention that every citizen should arm themselves with military hardware, ammunition, and know how to use it. You didn't use bayonets for hunting, this was "modern military hardware" for the day. This was not authorization to be allowed to arm militias. The US was not even allowed to have a standing army, only a permanent navy was allowed, the armed citizenry was the army as needed. And all this is moot because the premise of the 2nd being only for militia members is, again, faulty.
Sure but we've proven incapable of that. Repeal it and replace it with something that cannot be misinterpreted.
Because it wasn't the reauthorizing of the assault weapons ban, it was an entirely new version of... The same measures we had 2 decades ago...
The fuck are you talking about it would never pass Congress or the supreme Court, it's the same damn thing we already had you muppet.
Are you under the impression the politics of 1994 are remotely similar to 2023? Have you read the Supreme Court cases of Heller (2008) or Bruen (2022)?
Name call all you want, but you're the one tragically out of touch. This Congress, especially the Republican majority in the house would NEVER pass this bill. SCOTUS has completely changed gun rights in this country since 2008. First finding an individual right to gun ownership, then drastically reducing those gun limitations that are allowable under the 2nd amendment.
I suggest you do some reading before spouting nonsense. Your comment somehow states the bill is simultaneously "entirely new" and also the "same damn thing". Muppet.
Those things will all vanish eventually. We currently have the most conservative SCOTUS in basically a century, and the Republican party is near-fascist politically. These are not sturdy foundations for a legal concept. The truth is, society has never accepted murder and cruelty as a necessary part of society. It's always just a handful of elitists or bigoted fanatics holding society back.
Eventually, many of our current laws and customs will become viewed as the next version of Jim Crow or anti-LGBT laws, and become so unpopular they get repealed. Some take decades to go down, but they always go down. The concept of gun rights will be one of them.
Eventually, eventually, eventually...
Eventually a space alien from over 100 light years away will be named Steve and be president of Earth. You can't prove me wrong, because... eventually!
Because everything today is exactly as it was when the US constitution was first ratified...
This is anti-progress thinking. It's laughable that you actually think basic legal reforms can't happen.
No one said basic legal reforms can't happen, you're creating a strawman. I said that this Congress and this Supreme Court will not allow gun control. If you disagree, by all means let me know where my error lies.
Also, let me know the path to passage rather than vague statements about eventually. Eventually is weasel language that means you have no confidence in what you're saying; if you did, you'd tell me when and how that can be accomplished.
No one said otherwise. But you won't have this congress and this SCOTUS forever.
And again, it is basic legal reform. It is not some hard problem. And since nearly every Western country has both universal health care and gun control, it is pretty feasible for those ideas to spread to the US at some point. All your doing is apologizing for the modern incarnation of racist violence.
How? Eventually! When? Eventually! Why? Eventually! Who? Eventually! What? Eventually!
The court's opinion swung one way in 15 years. It can swing back in another 15. Three of the 4 oldest justices are Republicans and it only takes 2 being replaced with Democrats to flip the court. Totally within the realm of possibility.
You have to change Congress too. But you're still talking about 15+ years, and multiple conservative justices dying, and being replaced by liberal justices, and the reverse not happening.
So can we agree that we can hold off on the AWB for like 20 years?
No, we can't even agree on that unfortunately. This country is divided in several ways where there is no acceptable compromise and gun control is one of them.
Scalia's vote in Heller (singled him out because it was openly against his so-called "originalist" school of thought) undid far more than just fifteen years of precedent.
Oh absolutely. Heller was exceptional in its stupidity. My point was just what the current court does, a future court can always undo.
Disagree. The solution is to push for as much gun control as possible, until eventually the dam breaks and the 2A dies. In the long run, gun ownership in the US will resemble how it works in other Western countries, which is to say not much at all.
That's essentially nothing.
And I think elephants should fart rainbows, but both of our proposals lack any consideration of how we make that happen.
Eventually? There are roughly 400 million guns in this country...how many generations is "eventually"?
I'm not even disagreeing with you, but hoping doesn't make it happen. How do we get there? What are the steps? Does your projected path take into account the systemic impediments?
It's the same story as every other form of cruelty or injustice in American history. People look abroad, realize that such a problem never existed or was solved elsewhere, and eventually will push for the same type of reform in the US.
It doesn't matter how long it takes or how hard it is. It's the same story as every other big accomplish of the past, whether it's ending slavery or women's voting rights. They took decades to happen, but they all eventually happened.
Again, that's all great, but how does it happen? What are the steps to take? Saying it will eventually happen seems even more dismissive than saying it can't happen given current conditions.
When half the country is literally fascist, sure you can admit it isn't going to happen anytime soon. But that is a temporary phenomenon. Eventually, all of them will die. At some point, the US will be a country run by normal people. You're going to have large-scale agreement for major reforms.
The US is getting more stupid and polarised as school funding is diverted and people sign their heels in against civil discourse. It will be a long time before it is run by normal people.
I wouldn't cry if guns were banned entirely, but given the culture the US population has been sold for generations, common sense gun control that works handily in other countries simply won't work in the US. We're not wired that way.
The best chance we have is pulling the tug o' war rope as hard as possible just to maintain the status quo. We're not fighting for reform, we're fighting not to backslide.
As the saying goes, "this too shall pass." No one can say when, but major political shifts always happen after a while.
That saying depends on the just world fallacy. Unfortunately, no, all things don't necessarily pass.
I've got a saying for you that's famously used to describe every moment in Russian history: "...then it got worse."
It's foolish to think things will just fix themselves. We're hurtling full speed into climate apocalypse. Like you realize that isn't just going to "pass" right?
US isn't Russia. Nor is this something no one else has ever done. It's basically an argument from nihilism to claim that commonly solved social problems are unsolvable or aren't part of natural progress in society.
Climate doomerism is also a form of nihilism BTW, although it is off-topic.
I didn't say we're Russia. If that's what you took from my comment, then you definitely missed the point.
I don't know why you think it's some kind of gotcha, I know what nihilism is.
Hopefully soon. Probably not without help.
And now you have lost anyone who like me would be open to voting Democrat more often instead of third party, because I don't want to flat out lose my 2A rights. I don't want to vote Republican because I don't want to lose other rights in the slide towards religious fascism either. If every side is running on a platform of pick which rights you least want to lose, at least I'll have my guns for protection when the fascists do successfully pull a coup and society collapses.
Yeah, same pro-fascist shit as always. Seen your type a thousands times now.
Let me know how your Democrat recruiting pans out when you call everyone who disagrees with abolishing the 2nd amendment pro-fascist. Really winning hearts and minds, and doing that "big tent" proud. Worked great in 2016, definitely didn't need any of those "deplorables" to join up and there were no lasting consequences.
God I hate our 2 party system. Can't get universal modern healthcare and universal basic income while also keeping gun rights.
Same-old closet fascist shit you always hear. It's pretty obvious you don't care how many people die. So none of your rhetoric holds up to scrutiny.
Ok, this a a good reminder not to give possible trolling the benefit of the doubt. Even though it's feeding the troll: gun rights are not only for the far right. Marx realized the need for robust gun rights, this is nothing new. "Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." Don't trust the state and the police to protect you, especially if you are a minority or revolutionary. The police have no legal duty to protect you.
We are not obligated to believe in Marx either. In fact, last I check nearly everyone agreed he was wrong on a lot of things. It's all outdated extremist rhetoric, regardless of where it came from.
My feed:
All too often the sad but true story about the US of A.
Wow it's almost like if you immerse yourself in nonsense and hyperbole then it will permeate every space you visit. Who would have thought?
It's your feed and your preferences dude, false equivalency if I've ever seen one.
You wanna fix American politics and with that nearly all other problems with it?
Stop the "winner takes all" system you have right now.
You'll get a hundred political parties that have to compete with eachother. People will start voting more because now there are parties they can actually agree with and you get rid of this "always nearly 50/50" bullshit and one big party that blocks any proposal to actually improve the country
Want to stop the bank on assault rifles? Good luck stopping 20 parties
It's called First Past The Post system.
CPG Grey has a series of fun videos explaining why we have shity politicians. https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/
Banning specific guns is pure theater, even if it passes. There's zero real safety in it.
Speaking on behalf of the rest of us, we think it would be cool if we tried to see if it would go differently before we just accept the opinion of random people on the internet with zero proven credentials to weigh in on the subject.
If that’s okay with you.
America had an assault weapon ban previously and during that time is when school shootings actually started.
You mean this?
Could you tell us exactly what shooting you believe “started” them all? Because according to the article, lives were saved ass a result of the ban.
Columbine was the start of the modern school shooting phenomenon. To this date mass shooters, even outside of school settings, follow the blueprint they started in the 1999 assualt of a school. The tactics, motivation, and planning for Columbine seperates it from more than most of the previous civilian gun violence, and the mass shooters that follow look more like the Columbine shooters than they look like the shooters who came before them.
Really? Prove it. You're statement is full of hot air. Pure posturing.
Is that why there are very few shootings in other developed countries where gun control is also infinitely stricter?
Like Mexico where the schools have been hardened since the 80s and there are millions of guns and criminals?
Try again. The "Western nation" schtick is incorrect and getting stale.
Try again.
Ah yes, the famously developed and first world country of Mexico!
It's not like Mexico is stuck in development hell thanks in large part to it's larger northern neighbor exercising their significantly larger influence upon them or anything
You're so insecure about shit that's bad about the US, it's kinda pathetic to see you on every comment thread poorly defending the US
Nothing will change until it’s their grandkids who get mowed down.
It doesn't even change when they get shot. Just ask Steve Scalise.
Ask James Brady.
James Brady didn't then go on to vote in congress against measures that would have prevented the man who shot him from having done so.
That was my point.
You said: It doesn't even change when they get shot.
Oh, gotcha.
Sorry for the confusion.
Honestly, it was probably me. It usually is. :)
Wasn't there some Congress Lady that got shot in the face and was still like "I support guns..." 🤦♂️
No, that was Giffords and she went on to found a gun control organization.
Giffords.org
Absolutely not. That was Gabby Giffords, and Mark Kelly is her husband.
Their grand kids don’t go to the schools that get shot up.
you ever notice that when a vote is 49-51 conservatives win whether they're the 49 or the 51? Or how if it looks like they're gonna lose the vote by a large enough margin to actually lose that they can just prevent a vote from happening at all? You ever wonder how the government dare call itself "representative" and then ignore something that 92% of us want?
The Constitution was designed to make change difficult because the founders feared a strong government. It's unfortunately a design feature. It's why it's harder to actually address a problem instead of preserving the status quo.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans moved to block a ban on assault-style weapons put forward by Democrats on Wednesday, as the United States recorded the highest number of mass shootings for the second year in a row.
The motion, put forward by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, would have reauthorized the Assault Weapons Ban, which first passed in 1994 and expired 10 years later.
The ban covers certain semi-automatic firearms and large capacity ammunition magazines, and ushered in a decrease of deaths from gun violence while it was in place.
"The American people are sick and tired of enduring one mass shooting after another," Schumer said on Wednesday in a speech bringing the motion to the floor.
"Americans have a Constitutional right to own a firearm," he said in a speech on the Senate floor, arguing that the bill was about "trying to label responsible gun owners as criminals."
The most recent high-profile killing happened in Lewiston, Maine, where 18 people were shot by a U.S. Army reservist who committed suicide shortly after the shooting spree.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 45%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Conservatives won’t stop standing in the way of progressive gun control until school shootings become a national attraction.
“Hey look kids! A school shooting! So glad we took this vacation to rural America!”
They won't do it until one of their kids is a victim and suddenly it affects them personally. And even then, only one vote will change.
That's their M.O. They don't care when their policies are actively hurting other people so long as they aren't affected.
So your stance is that only liberal kids get victimized?
Their stance is that conservatives are babies who took the miraculous and precious human ability to empathize with other beings and stunted it with with a bunch of half-assed morality stories about how the world is supposed to work that have nothing to do with reality.
All kids are victimized but most conservatives don't care until it's their kid specifically. Kind of like most political issues that people who have empathy care about.
So conservatives don't care if the children of liberal parents are victims?
No they don't. They immediately jump to "they must have deserved it."
If you honestly believe that you are so full of hate your judgement is off.
Then maybe they should do something.
I didn't say I believe that, it's what conservatives believe.
Let me simplify this for you:
That right there is my point. What are the deaths of a few children so long as there are zero restrictions placed on gun ownership? They won't care until it affects them in a very personal way. The people with the capacity to change things are presently choosing not to. One has to wonder what would finally cause them to do something.
And I'm not even asking for anything crazy like the assault weapons ban that has been floated recently. We can't even get the most reasonable legislation passed.
Our answer to "more gunmen" cannot be "more guns". Or, rather, it can, but take a look around. How's that working out for us?
Wow. Just wow. There was an attempt.
You're seeing what you want to see my man, not what's actually written. Try again.
For $150 a person, you can be taken through a school, wearing a bullet proof vest, during an active shooter drill!
The Republican party is a criminal and terrorist organization. At this point, this is literally political terrorism.
Good, anti 2A laws should be struck down.
Repeal and replace 2a.
No
How many more people have to be killed while going about their daily lives?
An unlimited amount, because nothing will make the US change. Kids being massacred in school, nothing. Concert-goers being plowed down from a hotel window, nothing. Bowlers killed while enjoying a game, nothing.
Apparently no price is too high and Americans will seemingly prioritize their weapons over everything else.
Freedom is paid for in blood, check your history.
The US must be very free then with all the massacred school children to pay for it. Enjoy your freedom, chump.
Why is it that my guns are the problem here? I'm a law abiding citizen and yet people think taking my guns away will stop mass shootings?
I fail to see any logic here. I'm not going to give up MY freedoms when others can't behave properly. You'll never catch me shooting at innocent people, so why is it that all these politicians want to restrict MY guns?
We need more responsible citizens carrying firearms, so if whacko decides to shoot at Innocent people they get readily clapped and the mass shooting is over.
Trained armed police, security, citizens, etc. the thug, thief, ought to fear quick and equal or greater force.
I would even say that I am pro-store owners dropping looters and mass thieves. A few of those instances, where people get dropped, and maybe the idea of such theft won't be so appealing anymore.
100% agree
And harden schools. We piss money away to Ukraine and Israel. Bail large corporations out left and right...
Mexico has had hardened schools since the 80s. Lots of guns, lots of criminals.
If ever you needed any indication that both political parties do not give a flying FUCK about the average citizen and children; it's the fact that hardening schools "costs too much."
Disgraceful.
Because it's never your guns until it is.
I'm sure the owner of every firearm that's been used in a mass killing would have brought that exact question if they had been asked.
All of those guns proceeded to become part of the problem, why should we ever just take your word that yours won't?
This isn't about your guns. It's about guns.
This isn't about you. It's about us.
It's such an absurd argument to equate guns with freedom - most free people live without them just fine.
Why is it that not allowing you to own certain types of guns is an infringement on your freedom, yet the ability to drink alcohol before 21, or buy a manpad, or inject heroin into your veins not an equal violation of your freedom?
It won't change until people fill the streets. The supreme court has interpreted a right to be in a state militia as the right to carry a gun anywhere. That kind of power bows to nothing less.
Good
It’s a small price to pay so we can have dorky looking fake machine guns when a tyrannical leader sends waves of drones and infantry.
Can we not make that the only plan to fight tyranny? I mean, that shit rarely pops up out of nowhere.
It's hilarious to me that you think your semi auto AR-15 is going to do shit against the US Army in the first place. Lmao
So the US has never had any issue with guerilla warfare when the adversaries had mostly small arms? Cool it with the American exceptionalism.
Not to mention using an army on the people they swore to protect is so vastly different than something like vietnam. Imagine if during the Vietnam conflict the VC lived in the same country as the president, the generals, and their families. These people have no idea how revolutions actually work to claim it couldn't happen here.
It's not even that, it's shocking to me because most of the people who love guns are on the side of the fascists anyway. Fight the government? They're going to vote for the authoritarians.
Work cited is crackpipe on this. 76% of americans have access to a firearm right now. I dont need to be a rocket scientist to tell you that if this were a party issue we would only ever have rep presidents.
That's the point. Average citizens banding together against the government is bad. Average citizens scared of the government and their fellow heavily armed neighbors = good.
I'm a gun owner and i use them solely to hunt. Nothing more, nothing less.
No one thinks like that or talks like that. No one imagines using arms like that. This sort of thinking is a "gotcha you stupid people" sort of thing.
Anyway, trying to correct this nonsense is exhausting. Posted about it last night if you want a look.
Yeah, there's thousands of Palestinians that would agree with you. Oh wait, they can't because they're dead.
Is this the "Jews would have defeated the Nazis if they had guns" argument?
Yeah, how else can I shoot artillery strikes out of the air when the government comes for me? /s
According to the article it's the same AWB from the Clinton years.
They can fuck right off. It's not what we need. We need to ban external magazines. This cosmetic shit is bullshit and just posturing to make gun owners suffer.
We need to withhold all federal funding from states that do not send information to the NICS system and we need universal background checks.
Banning external magazines works because every rifle can be retrofitted by welding a magazine in place and loading with stripper clips.
Edit - ITT people who think they have a right to carry guns everywhere but are too afraid to write a reply.
Edit 2 - And apparently most of the ones willing to reply fall into the camp of pretending to care as they've laser focused on one word. No I'm not going to change it. Being a nuisance is not the objective. Cathartic release is not the objective. Cutting gun violence is the fucking objective.
Lol "suffer." Man, take your head out of your ass and go fuck yourself. People, CHILDREN, are fucking dying.
"Suffer" in what way? Having to find a new hobby? Having to use a different boom toy instead of the cool boom toy they want to use? Those poor, poor gun owners!
Compared to the actual suffering of the dying kids and their parents, who do you think has it worse?
The old AWB literally bans certain guns by name and certain cosmetic parts. That's it. They can rename the childkiller 2000 into childkiller 3000 while reworking the buttstock to fit around the thumb hole clause. It literally drives more gun sales, not less.
And it grandfathers in all the guns already out there. It's a fucking nuisance law, not a solution. It's not even a step in the right direction because I can buy an AWB legal hunting rifle and run it with old 30 round magazines for the same effect as the scary black gun with a fore grip and flash hider.
How do you read shit like "make external magazines illegal and weld all the guns so they can't take them" and think this guy likes the gun lobby?
Think for half a second. Read beyond the fucking title.
It sounds like you possibly didn't read my question. "Suffer" in what way, exactly? How do you read "'Suffer' in what way?' and go on a tangent about renaming guns? Did you not say "This cosmetic shit is bullshit and just posturing to make gun owners suffer."? Did I misinterpret what you said?
You lost the entire context of it and just went with the catharsis of gun nuts having to spend more money on less than perfect guns. The point was the catharsis doesn't help victims of gun violence.
I asked for clarification on something you said. The context of my question is what you said, which is why I conveniently quoted it for you. My question does not relate to the general point you're making but to this one sentence which I believe I made more than clear through my following-up questions. You seem to prefer to pretend not to understand that in order to worm out of the question, possibly because you're aware that what you said is a slight exaggeration.
Also, what do you believe "catharsis" means?
No what you're missing is I don't care about the single sentence. If that was all there was to the post then that's all I would have posted.
Yes, it was already obvious you have a problem addressing a stupid thing you said. I'm sure you're not really all that black and white, you're just having a hard time being wrong and admitting it.
No one- and I mean no one- has it harder than someone who has 12 rifles that look like they were designed for military use but can't buy a 13th because of some stupid law that is designed to cause them literal physical pain.
Those dead kids wish they had it so bad.
Oh my God dude, you too? You usually actually read posts. How about instead of concentrating on being a nuisance to gun owners and the industry we pass some laws that work. Like maybe these things from that comment you responded to-
Stop sending any federal funds to states that don't give prohibited possesor information to the National Instant Background Check System
Ban and make illegal all external magazines. Existing weapons to be retrofitted by welding a block and installing an internal magazine.
Institute Universal Background Checks.
No, instead we're over here discussing if the Remington 21a hunting rifle can be sold with thumb hole, fore grip, and pistol grip. Or if Remington has to design weird shapes and bumps to provide the same functionality without actually being those things. Meanwhile, the kids you care so much about and the gun suicides that make up more than half of gun deaths are still happening.
This is what pisses me off about the 2A debate. One side wants to sacrifice people for their ego and the other side wants to do no more than pretend they're doing something about it.
As long as gun owners don't suffer. That's the main thing. We have to end their suffering! Poor gun owners!
Right. Clearly you don't want to actually do anything. Just complain. Great.
I just want to end the suffering! Of gun owners! Because they're the real victims.
Christ winces bearing the weight of humanity's original sin on the cross when contemplating the thought of having to go to the range to shoot non moving targets at a faster rate.
Again you have no idea what you're talking about. My heart aches for people like you full of opinions on a topic, yet completely lacking in basics of said topic.
No expertise at all. Just a decade in the military doing grunt jobs. Nothing happens until we materially affect the speed with which semi auto weapons can fire, and their spread in the country. Revolvers and bolt action weapons are perfectly fine, even as militia weapons.
"here durr, I served my opinion matters more" you supported the corporate machine while likely pushing 3 MOA chump.
Lmao. Sure buddy. Whatever you want to believe.
What I KNOW is serving doesn't make you an expert marksman. Most barely pass basic quals, so don't spout that like some sort of badge of honor.
Oh so now you have to score expert on the shooting range to understand how semi auto weapons function? The gatekeeping just keeps getting deeper and deeper. I guess years of Infantry training and combat experience are just nothing compared to that guy who got 36/40 on the range.
We could just ban all guns, unless you're part of a well organized militia. No need to worry about cosmetics or any real particulars that way.
No, you couldn't. Familiarize yourself with 10 U.S. Code § 246 which actually defines exactly what the militia (both organized militia and unorganized militia) are:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246
I don't have demographic data to reference, but I imagine the United States has a LOT of male citizens between the ages of 17 and 45.
Fun fact, that's because of a SCOTUS ruling in the 1940's. They just arbitrarily decided that the militia was everyone.
If we want to get originalist about this the well regulated militias refers to men of a town who were in good standing and drilled regularly under official supervision. They were also subject to call up by the town, county, state, and federal governments.
The only things we have with that structure are the Reserves and National Guard.
Well perfect. Looks like we've got a definition for "organized militia" (literally another word for "well-regulated militia". Don't waste your time I'm not going to get into a semantics argument about this). "Unorganized militia" became obsolete when we created a standing army.
Here is the definition you linked to since it appears as though you stopped reading about 2/3 through:
So it looks like we do have a well-regulated militia, and it's called the National Guard. Thanks for the additional evidence that the Heller decision was bullshit!
You won't debate the semantics because you would lose said debate and because you know it is germane.
I imagine you know full well that the meaning of "well-regulated" as used in the BOR and "organized" as used in the USC are not the same, and your suggestion that they are is nonsense. The former refers to training and armament. The latter is used to describe the part of the militia that is also part of the National Guard and that which is not.
As you seem to think I have not read it, here is the entirety of it:
(a)The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b)The classes of the militia are—
(1)the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2)the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
I suggest it is you who either did not read it, or doing so, did not understand it. If you are
A) a citizen of the Unites States B) Male and C) in the age range of 17-45 (with some variance for NG) then you are a member of the unorganized militia.
If only we had 2 centuries of precedence to back any of this up. Oh wait, we do...
Heller completely changed how we interpret the second amendment, in a way we never had previously. You can pretend that this is what was intended, but the actual reality is that the interpretation of 2a to refer to individual ownership of firearms started with Heller in 2003.
Is that so? I'll be wanting a citation for that assertion. In the interim, you might read the following. It presents an actual informed, expert opinion on the subject at hand:
https://constitution.org/1-Constitution/2ll/schol/2amd_grammar.htm
Just one I found real quick:
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/14/1113705501/second-amendment-supreme-court-dick-heller-gun-rights
[...]
(Emphasis mine)
Thanks! I'll look it over after I get home.
“for most of U.S. history, there was little actual legal framework to support any such interpretation of the Second Amendment. It wasn't until a relatively recent Supreme Court decision that this all changed.”
The article you linked to bases its premise on that statement, which is demonstrably incorrect. Any review of the debates on the BoR of the day, in particular of the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers will have little difficulty in discerning the intent of the founders. Concerning court interpretations, as I am not as erudite as most, I'll refer you to this. It is taken from a constitutional commentary from the University of Minnesota Law School (https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1275&context=concomm):
"From the enactment of the Bill of Rights through most of the twentieth century, the second amendment seems to have been understood to guarantee to every law-abiding responsible adult the right to possess most ordinary firearms. Until the mid-twentieth century courts and commentaries (the two earliest having been before Congress when it voted on the second amendment) deemed that the amendment "confirmed [the people] in their right to keep and bear their private arms," or "their own arms."
In a 1939 case which is its only full treatment, the Supreme Court accepted that private persons may invoke the second amendment, but held that it confines their freedom of choice to militia-type weapons, i.e., high quality handguns and rifles, but not "gangster weapons" such as sawed-off shotguns, switchblade knives and (arguably) "Saturday Night Specials. " In the 1960s this individual right view was challenged by scholars who argued that the second amendment guarantee extends only to the states' right to arm formal military units. This states' right view attained predominance, and was endorsed by the ABA, the ACLU and such texts as Lawrence Tribe's American Constitutional Law. During the 1980s, however, a large literature on the amendment appeared, much of it rejecting the states' right view as inconsistent with the text and with new research findings on the legislative history, the attitudes of the authors, the meaning of the right to bear arms in antecedent American and English legal thought, and the role that an armed citizenry played in classical liberal political philosophy from Aristotle through Machiavelli and Harrington to Sidney, Locke, Rousseau and their various disciples. Indicative of the current Supreme Court's probable view is a 1990 decision which, though focusing on the fourth amendment, cites the first and second as well in concluding that the phrase "right of the people" is a term of art used throughout the Bill of Rights to designate rights pertaining to individual citizens (rather than to the states)."
There is an easily traced history regarding the Second, clearly showing the intent to protect a naturally-existing right of the individual against incursion by government.
I don't actually care. Guns are dumb. I'm just being obtuse for the sake of shitting in gun ownership.
State militia. Those were the well regulated militias being referenced. Johnny's anti government friends club does not count.