The Thread Where We Discuss Guns and Gun Control

[Commodore]

Hell this police is bad enough now you are giving over justice to "Uncle Zed"? No training. No education in the job (police do not get near enough of this). No ethics requirements. Stupid idea.

When you have ideas like this you really need to think about the lower quartile of people mentally and morally and think if this policy works with that. The abuse would be a nightmare.

Who says there would be no training requirements or oversight? Remember: "well-regulated militia". Those words give the government plenty of wiggle room to regulate citizen militias.

 

[Estebonrober]

Who says there would be no training requirements or oversight? Remember: "well-regulated militia". Those words give the government plenty of wiggle room to regulate citizen militias.

Wait now the government gets to regulate those militias? Good, no high capacity magazines in rifles. . .

 

[Zardnaar]

Wait now the government gets to regulate those militias? Good, no high capacity magazines in rifles. . .

It's my understanding of the US Constitution.

If you want a gun theoretically it seems constitutional to make people join a militia and part of that regulation could involve you can only use black powder muskets.

US Constitution doesn't actually guarantee the right to bear bear arms except as part of a well regulated militia.

 

[AmazonQueen]

It's my understanding of the US Constitution.

If you want a gun theoretically it seems constitutional to make people join a militia and part of that regulation could involve you can only use black powder muskets.

US Constitution doesn't actually guarantee the right to bear bear arms except as part of a well regulated militia.

Which would be the National Guard and in 22 states their own state defence forces.

 

[Estebonrober]

It's my understanding of the US Constitution.

If you want a gun theoretically it seems constitutional to make people join a militia and part of that regulation could involve you can only use black powder muskets.

US Constitution doesn't actually guarantee the right to bear bear arms except as part of a well regulated militia.

Yea I agree with this, the point was the irony that I know @Commodore does not agree with it.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Which would be the National Guard and in 22 states their own state defence forces.

Municipal and state police departments also fulfill part of the role of the militia - law enforcement.

US Constitution doesn't actually guarantee the right to bear bear arms except as part of a well regulated militia.

It's more complicated than that. The right to personal safety and self-defense is an "unenumerated right", like the right to privacy, the right to vote, etc. Justice Scalia wrote that the militia clause was meant to be one reason civilians should own guns, but not the only reason. (I happen to disagree with Scalia's decision, but for other reasons.)

 

[Akka]

Do you really want to compare the gun homicides in France and the US?

• In 2017, there's been 89 gun-related homicides in France (0.89 per 100,000 inhabitants)
• The same year, there's been 14,542 gun-related homicides in the US (4.54 per 100,000 inhabitants)

So tell me again. Are you really that sure your gun laws make you safer in the US than in France?

Let's also consider police killings, which I'm pretty sure are either a consequence of being afraid of facing criminal which are very easily armed, or at least can have this as a convenient excuse.
IIRC, it's something of the order of 10 to 15 death/year in France compared to about 1000 in the US, so a ratio of about 1 to 100.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Looking again at my older post, I've made a mistake:
89 gun-related homicides in France makes a ratio of 0.13 per 100,000 inhabitants (not 0.89). That is actually 34 times lower than in the US which is indeed at 4.54 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Now of course, French people do find other ways to kill each others. There's been 825 homicides in France in 2017. Interestingly as well, despite a surprizing low number of gun-related homicides in France (I didn't expect it to be as low as only 89), there's been 1122 gun-related suicides in France the same year. Those are mostly operated with hunting rifles but a not insignificant part of those are also about police officers who commit suicide with their service duty weapon.

In the US, 24000 people killed themselves with a gun in 2017.

 

[Commodore]

US Constitution doesn't actually guarantee the right to bear bear arms except as part of a well regulated militia.

Yes, it does. The 2nd Amendment guarantees two separate rights, the right to form a militia and the right to keep and bear arms.

We know this because of the use of a comma between those two statements, similar to how they used commas to separate the four separate rights guaranteed in the 1st Amendment.

Not only that, but we have legal precedent going all the way back to 1886 that establishes the right to keep and bear arms as a right of the individual, not a right of the militia.

Wait now the government gets to regulate those militias? Good, no high capacity magazines in rifles. . .

Nope, they get to regulate the militia, not the arms they bear. Remember: "shall not be infringed". And magazine bans were recently determined to be unconstitutional, so those laws will be going away real soon.

Also, note that the federal government has no right to regulate militias or firearms. Why? Because the federal government was not expressly given that power and the 10th Amendment is very clear that any power not expressly granted to the federal government defaults to the states and/or people. So while you could make an argument for state gun laws, it's pretty clear that an honest interpretation of the Constitution demands that all federal gun laws be struck down as unconstitutional.

And your high capacity magazine ban wouldn't affect me anyway. All I own are standard capacity 30 round magazines.

I also want to take this opportunity to address a point I've seen made before: One justification for gun control I've seen has been the argument that other Constitutional rights have limits, so the right to bear arms should have limits too. I disagree. Why? Because no other right in the Bill of Rights has the words "shall not be infringed" in it. The 2nd Amendment does contain those words though, and since we know the Founders were very, very deliberate in their wording, we can reasonably assume they were okay with the government having some wiggle room on every right except the right to bear arms.

 

[El_Machinae]

I also agree. I think the amendment is pretty clear and if I read it more strictly, then the disarmament of the Iraqi people after the second Iraq War was illegal. Same as the Iran sanctions preventing them from getting nukes.

I think the amendment is clear which means I don't think there is much need to debate one of piece of punctuation in a sentence. Weaponry doesn't work when it's guaranteed as a right.

Let's also consider police killings, which I'm pretty sure are either a consequence of being afraid of facing criminal which are very easily armed, or at least can have this as a convenient excuse.
IIRC, it's something of the order of 10 to 15 death/year in France compared to about 1000 in the US, so a ratio of about 1 to 100.

You're probably 100% incorrect. I was told that an armed Society is a polite Society. Cuz the cops don't know if someone is armed, they are much more likely to engage in descalation techniques. You would expect a polite Society to have a much lower homicide rate. The government would be afraid of the people, not more willing to kill

 

[EgonSpengler]

Wow that makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of free people in a slave-holding state, the right of white guys to arm themselves and terrorise people of other races shall not be infringed.

Bit of a cultural throughline from slave patrols to lynch mobs to stuff like armed white supremacist compounds to contemporary border nutjobs and stuff like El Paso too.

I wouldn't be surprised if groups like the KKK, the Crescent City White League, and the Knights of the White Camelia thought of themselves as militias. I think the KKK were considered to be "vigilantes." Today, we would call them "terrorists." But this gets at one bone I have to pick with 2nd-Amendment proponents today, which is that, even when they invoke the militia clause, they conveniently overlook the 'well-regulated' part. What's their command & control structure? Who do they answer to? Who decides when they deploy? What are their rules of engagement? When they're acting in a domestic, law enforcement capacity, are they serving a warrant? Have they been deputized? A quick Google search doesn't turn up a court ruling on the KKK being officially labeled vigilantes, but the 1871 "Third Enforcement Act" - intended to enforce the 14th Amendment, and its the due process clause - was known as "the Ku Klux Klan Act."

Let's also consider police killings, which I'm pretty sure are either a consequence of being afraid of facing criminal which are very easily armed, or at least can have this as a convenient excuse.
IIRC, it's something of the order of 10 to 15 death/year in France compared to about 1000 in the US, so a ratio of about 1 to 100.

I don't have it handy right now, but I think I recently read about a study that compared US states and found a correlation between more-relaxed gun laws and shootings both of police and by police.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yes, it does. The 2nd Amendment guarantees two separate rights, the right to form a militia and the right to keep and bear arms.

We know this because of the use of a comma between those two statements, similar to how they used commas to separate the four separate rights guaranteed in the 1st Amendment.

Not only that, but we have legal precedent going all the way back to 1886 that establishes the right to keep and bear arms as a right of the individual, not a right of the militia.



Nope, they get to regulate the militia, not the arms they bear. Remember: "shall not be infringed". And magazine bans were recently determined to be unconstitutional, so those laws will be going away real soon.

Also, note that the federal government has no right to regulate militias or firearms. Why? Because the federal government was not expressly given that power and the 10th Amendment is very clear that any power not expressly granted to the federal government defaults to the states and/or people. So while you could make an argument for state gun laws, it's pretty clear that an honest interpretation of the Constitution demands that all federal gun laws be struck down as unconstitutional.

And your high capacity magazine ban wouldn't affect me anyway. All I own are standard capacity 30 round magazines.

I also want to take this opportunity to address a point I've seen made before: One justification for gun control I've seen has been the argument that other Constitutional rights have limits, so the right to bear arms should have limits too. I disagree. Why? Because no other right in the Bill of Rights has the words "shall not be infringed" in it. The 2nd Amendment does contain those words though, and since we know the Founders were very, very deliberate in their wording, we can reasonably assume they were okay with the government having some wiggle room on every right except the right to bear arms.

Seems thin but ok. In the situation you get 75% of the states amend the 2nd would you comply with it if they banned all guns. Arguing over a comma seems silly.

They already regulate fully automatics, seems clear it's not a universal right it never defines what an arms is.

The other thing you could do is say arms are blackpowder muskets, right now the law already has destructive devices.

Wouldn't be hard to define assault rifles as destructive device along with 30 round magazines.

What would you hunt that requires 30 rounds, if you can't hit something in 2 or 3 shots you're a crap hunter.

30 round nagazine really only has one use which is killing lots of humans although I will admit firing guns is fun.

I'm not American but the intent of the 2nd seems clear. High capacity assault rifles outside of a well regulated militia are probably not what they meant. No nukes for citizens either.

What's the difference between an AR 15 and M16? A switch for 3 round burst fire?
And what legimate excuse can you dream up for bump stocks.

Full auto weapons were invented for warfare.

 

[Lexicus]

Wow that makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of free people in a slave-holding state, the right of white guys to arm themselves and terrorise people of other races shall not be infringed.

Bit of a cultural throughline from slave patrols to lynch mobs to stuff like armed white supremacist compounds to contemporary border nutjobs and stuff like El Paso too.

This has been known for a long time. IMO the more troubling throughline is from slave patrols to modern police departments, and in fact many police precincts in the US today actually do derive ultimately from the slave patrols.

 

[Marla_Singer]

This has been known for a long time. IMO the more troubling throughline is from slave patrols to modern police departments, and in fact many police precincts in the US today actually do derive ultimately from the slave patrols.

Thanks for the link. That's very informative.

 

[Lexicus]

Thanks for the link. That's very informative.

Some rather more disturbing information on US gun stockpilers:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-are-white-men-stockpiling-guns/

Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearmsmanufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.

So, who is buying all these guns—and why?

The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

The racial fears aspect is what I want to focus on here. The article doesn't mention The Turner Diaries, but it's my informal theory that these gun stockpiling lunatics are basically operating in their own mental Turner Diaries universe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries

The Turner Diaries was a massive influence on the far right in this country and helped to inspire the "militia movement" of the 1990s which culminated in such tragedies as the Ruby Ridge standoff and Timothy McVeigh's terrorism.

Anyway the dovetailing here is highly disturbing. Basically gun marketing, the political influence of the gun lobby, and far-right paranoia have combined into quite a toxic brew.

Just one last quote from the Scientific American article on the toll exacted by this stuff:

Unfortunately, the people most likely to be killed by the guns of white men aren’t the “bad guys,” presumably criminals or terrorists. It’s themselves—and their families.

White men aren’t just the Americans most likely to own guns; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they’re also the people most likely to put them in their own mouths and pull the trigger, especially when they’re in some kind of economic distress. A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight. Most murders and shoot-outs don’t happen between strangers. They unfold within social networks, among people of the same race.

A gun in the home is far more likely to kill or wound the people who live there than is a burglar or serial killer. Most of the time, according to every single study that’s ever been done about interpersonal gun violence, the dead and wounded know the people who shot them. A gun in the home makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed by her husband. Every week in America, 136 children and teenagers are shot—and more often than not, it’s a sibling, friend, parent, or relative who holds the gun. For every homicide deemed justified by the police, guns are used in 78 suicides.

 

[rah]

I always laughed/cried that whenever Obama would even mention gun control, gun purchases would spike.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Jeez we really did all just kinda memory hole the Las Vegas massacre didn't we

With the recent slaughters (which were not in schools), all of the emphasis by the media has been on invoking school shootings as evidence for why we need gun control. I don't recall a single mention of the Vegas massacre in any of the recent news segments on gun control. I noticed this but only because I recently pointed out on some other thread how weird it was that the Vegas massacre did not have nearly the cultural cache as Columbine or Parkland or Newtown despite a higher body count.

 

[AmazonQueen]

With the recent slaughters (which were not in schools), all of the emphasis by the media has been on invoking school shootings as evidence for why we need gun control. I don't recall a single mention of the Vegas massacre in any of the recent news segments on gun control. I noticed this but only because I recently pointed out on some other thread how weird it was that the Vegas massacre did not have nearly the cultural cache as Columbine or Parkland or Newtown despite a higher body count.

Children's deaths are particularly emotive, especially for parents.

 

[Commodore]

They already regulate fully automatics, seems clear it's not a universal right it never defines what an arms is.

Just because the government does it, doesn't mean it's Constitutional. And while the document doesn't define "arms" the Supreme Court has through rulings on various cases. One of those cases being the striking down of a nunchuk ban in New York City. The court ruled that the 2nd Amendment didn't just apply to firearms, but all categories of weapons.

Wouldn't be hard to define assault rifles as destructive device along with 30 round magazines.

Yes, it would be hard. Again, there are Supreme Court rulings already on these matters and even though they aren't supposed to, Supreme Court rulings pretty much carry the weight of law in the US.

What would you hunt that requires 30 rounds, if you can't hit something in 2 or 3 shots you're a crap hunter.

I've already addressed why ARs are useful to hunters as well in the thread about holding manufacturers liable for the use of their products.

30 round nagazine really only has one use which is killing lots of humans

Yeah, and that's useful in a self-defense situation where you are facing multiple assailants in close quarters and aren't going to have time to reload. You know, like that story I mentioned of the old guy in Florida that fought off four armed intruders with his AR.

What's the difference between an AR 15 and M16? A switch for 3 round burst fire?

Or full auto depending on the variant. But the main difference between them is durability and reliability over periods of extended use. AR-15s available to civilians may perform equal to or even better than military M16s or M4s fresh out of the box, but after extended periods of heavy use and enduring the rigors of battlefield conditions, the M16 and M4 will still be going strong while the civilian AR-15 will suffer increased malfunctions, misfires, or even just stop working altogether. That's why it seems so ridiculous when people call the AR-15 a "weapon of war". Any soldier who would take an AR-15 from his local gun shop into battle over his government issued M4 is an idiot and deserves the quick death that would surely find him.

Not that that is relevant to the definition of an assault rifle, which is what I think you were getting at, but I never miss an opportunity to educate people on firearms.

And what legimate excuse can you dream up for bump stocks.

It's a firearm accessory, and should be treated as such. All it does is help the shooter fire faster. There are plenty of other firearm accessories, such as two stage triggers, that do the same thing and nobody seems to be calling for special regulations of them.

Full auto weapons were invented for warfare.

Yeah, I agree. But the 2nd Amendment was put in place with warfare in mind so...

 

[Zardnaar]

Just because the government does it, doesn't mean it's Constitutional. And while the document doesn't define "arms" the Supreme Court has through rulings on various cases. One of those cases being the striking down of a nunchuk ban in New York City. The court ruled that the 2nd Amendment didn't just apply to firearms, but all categories of weapons.



Yes, it would be hard. Again, there are Supreme Court rulings already on these matters and even though they aren't supposed to, Supreme Court rulings pretty much carry the weight of law in the US.



I've already addressed why ARs are useful to hunters as well in the thread about holding manufacturers liable for the use of their products.



Yeah, and that's useful in a self-defense situation where you are facing multiple assailants in close quarters and aren't going to have time to reload. You know, like that story I mentioned of the old guy in Florida that fought off four armed intruders with his AR.



Or full auto depending on the variant. But the main difference between them is durability and reliability over periods of extended use. AR-15s available to civilians may perform equal to or even better than military M16s or M4s fresh out of the box, but after extended periods of heavy use and enduring the rigors of battlefield conditions, the M16 and M4 will still be going strong while the civilian AR-15 will suffer increased malfunctions, misfires, or even just stop working altogether. That's why it seems so ridiculous when people call the AR-15 a "weapon of war". Any soldier who would take an AR-15 from his local gun shop into battle over his government issued M4 is an idiot and deserves the quick death that would surely find him.

Not that that is relevant to the definition of an assault rifle, which is what I think you were getting at, but I never miss an opportunity to educate people on firearms.



It's a firearm accessory, and should be treated as such. All it does is help the shooter fire faster. There are plenty of other firearm accessories, such as two stage triggers, that do the same thing and nobody seems to be calling for special regulations of them.



Yeah, I agree. But the 2nd Amendment was put in place with warfare in mind so...

2nd amendment doesn't cover destructive devices though. Supreme courts change and the constitution can be amended yes even I know that.

If Trump's so repulsive he loses the presendency, house and Senate and America becoming more liberal the GoP might cede permanent control to the Dems for the next few decades.

The GoP went nuclear and played hardball over Obama's supreme Court pick the Dems if they control all 3 executives can increase the courts size. It has been more than 9 justices before.

Have you hardliners ever considered that. You might lose everything in the next decade. Blowback etc. GoP crossed lines, if the Dems do it they can screw you over hard. And you suspect Trump is going to crash and burn next year, the quest ion is will he take the GoP control of the Senate with him.

No fillibuster, Senate, presidency, house you have two years to do whatever you like and US isn't getting any more conservative.