You should all read David Freddoso's brilliant, angry, hilarious piece on the DC gun ban.
I hope that now you can understand where I am coming from when I read District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer’s hysterical court filing in the Heller case, which may strike down the District’s 31-year-old comprehensive ban on gun ownership.“Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees,” wrote the District’s chief law enforcer, “it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.”
What an excellent example of unintended humor — the District’s government is a national leader in standing by while its citizens die. Our homicide rate hit a 20-year low in 2005 — just 29 victims per 100,000 residents. That is slightly better than New York City’s rate (30.7) under Mayor David Dinkins in 1990, when the Big Apple suffered 2,250 homicides.
In 1991, the D.C. murder rate reached an astounding 81 per 100,000 — that was two years after Mayor Marion Barry famously told the Washington Press Club, “Except for the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”
D.C. residents are strictly forbidden from owning handguns, even in the privacy of their homes. Any long guns must be registered and kept “unloaded and disassembled.” It is not even legal, strictly speaking, to assemble and load your gun when you hear an intruder downstairs. A lower court ruled the ban unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will decide later this year whether to take up the case.
In the debate over the gun ban, there is a strong statistical case that an armed citizenry is safer than one disarmed by unconstitutional laws, but this argument is not even necessary. There is absolutely no valid case that the District’s gun ban makes me safer as a District resident. When Singer and Mayor Adrian Fenty (D., of course) penned a September 4 Washington Post op-ed stating that “The handgun ban has saved countless lives,” were they really suggesting that without the ban there might have been 1,000 murder victims in 1991, instead of just 482? The implication is that D.C. is so totally ungovernable that only a total deprivation of constitutional rights can make it barely livable.
if the 13-year olds on my block manage to have handguns (which they do), I can't see how the gun ban is operating in any way except to assure would-be criminals that their victims are unarmed (unless their would-be victims are themselves criminals, I suppose, but it's pretty easy to pick out good victims where I live). am I a little scared by the thought of lots more guns in my city? yes. But I don't think that fear is logical. Until someone makes a compelling statistical case, we should err on the side of constitutionality, no?
"The best antidote to guns in the wrong hands is guns in the right hands. Lott’s data show that states with concealed-handgun laws enjoy a 69 percent lower rate of mass murders in public places than states without such laws, all other things being equal.
Despite the high level of statistical sophistication in More Guns, Less Crime, the book is pleasant to read. Lott lays out the data in an accessible manner, building from simpler statistical models to more complex ones. The book serves not only as a guide to firearms policy, but as a readable introduction to multivariate statistical analysis.
The most interesting part of the book, however, is the chapter in which Lott addresses the criticism of his research. In marked contrast to the anti-gun researchers funded by federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Lott has made his data readily available to any and all researchers.
To the anti-gun movement, the statistics on crime deterrence are irrelevant. But anyone with an interest in rational firearms policy ought to thank John Lott for writing this excellent book. More Guns, Less Crime would be a fine gift for your state representative, local newspaper editor, or public library."
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3813
Gun laws (like drug laws and any other ban) only affect those who have an elastic demand for the product; people who have an inelastic demand for the product will still get the guns.
In the case of guns, people with elastic demand are people who we would usually call law-abiding citizens; people with inelastic demand are people who we would usually call criminals (usually of the drug-dealing type). Criminal demand for guns will continue to be particularly inelastic as long as the War on Drugs is prosecuted heavily, thereby creating a black market in which property rights are unenforceable and making violent crime the primary way of protecting one's "property" (aka street corners, stash houses, etc.).
There are very few circumstances where a local gun ban makes sense. It's just too easy to buy loads of guns anywhere else. For a ban to be effective, it needs to be enacted in a region with a border with customs.
A local ban could be useful if you wanted an excuse to lock people up. If DC had a lot of extra room in its jails, police could arrest people for illegal possession of guns. Then the law would be a deterrent to would-be criminals owning guns illegally. But they don't have room. They don't put people away for owning guns illegally. They only deter people who would prefer not breaking the law.
If it were up to me, I would certainly implement a federal hand gun ban. I'm no fool though. The 2nd amendment isn't going to be repealed, and even if it were, or were reinterpreted, a national gun ban is never going to be law.
It is far more productive to find other ways to reduce gun violence. Ban weapons that are overtly designed for criminal purposes - like the plastic guns the NRA originally insisted should be legal (that's been done, BTW). Ban civilian ownership of weapons with primarily military applications, like autofire weapons or armor piercing shells. Require licensing. Require custodianship - irresponsibility in losing your gun should be at least the equivalent of a serious traffic offense, costing you money and endangering your gun ownership rights. Register transactions of guns like we do with those other weapons we like, cars. Impound the guns of people who do not comply with the laws, like we impound cars. And get people out of jail who have committed minor drug offenses so we can keep gun wielding criminals there longer.
These are reasonable steps that would,if enacted nationally, probably do more to keep guns from criminals than an outright ban does locally.
Yes, if a city wide gun ban is not working we should expand it to a national gun ban. Interestingly, England has done this and they are experiencing skyrocketing gun crime.
No discussion of gun laws is complete without mentioning the two positive effects of widespread gun ownership: making armed rebellion possible should the government get bad enough, and making it possible for the weak to resist the strong by equalizing the force available to each.
Though out of self-interest, as a largish male trained in martial arts, I suppose I should support a gun ban.
David Freddoso implies that he had been better off if had had a gun when his mugger approached him. I think this is arguable: if the mugger had realized that David had a gun, he probably would have instinctively assumed that David is going to shoot him. As a result, the mugger would have most likely have made at least an attempt to shoot David first, even if he had no such intentions to begin with.
But the depressing part about gun debates is what an inadequate job gun contol advocates make of presenting their case. The most important reason why open societies should not allow private hand gun ownership has nothing to do with crime. It has to do with the effect that private gun ownership has on other freedoms and governmental powers.
Since guns are so much more convenient for the perpetration of violent crimes than any other object citizens may have access to, the citizens develop a legitimate fear for their safety. As a result, they grow to accept intrusive increases in governmental powers that attempt to restore public safety. For example, schoolchildren in the United States have been deprived of virtually all protections against unreasonable search and seizure of their property while in custody of school officials. Yet, the punishment they face for even juvenile "threats" are much the same that adults would face for making real threats. This misbalance between rights and punishments is unfit for a democracy.
There is no evidence that private gun ownerhip is a deterrent to tyranny, as those who advocate lax gun regulations often claim. If the United States were to be invaded by a foreign enemy that the citizens of the United States generally recognize as an illegitimate ruler, then firearms in the hands of citizens may be useful.
But private handguns would be not of much help if a tyrannical internal group were attempting to overthrow the democratic government of the U.S. Our democratic institutions have survived because of the widespread support that they enjoy form our citizens. The only way that an internal group would be able to overthrow our democratic institutions is by commanding the support of a significant part of the citizenry, or at least by reducing the involvement of most of our citizens to indifference. In such a case, gun ownership in the hands of those who still care about democracy would not be able to resist despotism.
"There are very few circumstances where a local gun ban makes sense. It's just too easy to buy loads of guns anywhere else. For a ban to be effective, it needs to be enacted in a region with a border with customs."
Oh, I dunno. Last time I checked there were quite a few drugs that are illegal nationwide. Yet, mysteriously , they're not hard to come by.
In the good old USA, if there's a market for something illegal, it's going to be available. Liquor, prostitution, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth, crack, X, acid, shrooms, you name it. You can't make things go away here by making them illegal. Hell, they couldn't make these things go away in the old Soviet Union, and that really was a totalitarian police state.
to Jeff Goldman,
An impressive argument. I'd hire you as a lawyer in a millisecond, especially if I was guilty.
As I just posted, guns are freely available to those willing to break the law. All we're asking for is the right, as law abiding citizens, to own them too. I grew up in a town where everybody owned guns: rifles, shotguns, pistos. We weren't terrified of each other, it was the safest place I've ever lived. If you tried to tell these men (and women - they could shoot straight as well) that owning guns would make them more eager to surrender their constitutional rights, they'd piss themselves laughing.
Your schoolchildren example is ludicrous. The reason kids in school don't have any "protections against unreasonable search and seizure of their property while in custody of school officials" is that they're children, and the school official are in loco parentis. I don't know about you, but I sure didn't have any protection against unreasonable search and seizure of my property when my parents were involved. I complained, but they ignored me. Perhaps I was being oppressed or something...
As for your argument that: "he only way that an internal group would be able to overthrow our democratic institutions is by commanding the support of a significant part of the citizenry", you're nuts. Hell, just look at Iraq (before the whole Bush fiasco): you had a Sunni minority inflicting it's will on the Shiite majority. How did that happen? Oh, yeah, the minority had all the guns. Go figure.
Couple of questions:
Would the Jews in WWII Europe have been better off armed, like the resistors in the Warsaw Ghetto? Or unarmed?
Would the Tutsis in Rwanda have been better off armed, or unarmed?
Would the Muslims in Bosnia been better off armed, or unarmed?
Would the vicitms of the genocide in Darfur be better off armed, or unarmed?
I could keep listing examples, but you can read history books on your own.
"Since guns are so much more convenient for the perpetration of violent crimes than any other object citizens may have access to, the citizens develop a legitimate fear for their safety. As a result, they grow to accept intrusive increases in governmental powers that attempt to restore public safety."- Jeff Goldman (above)
"attempt to restore public safety."(?)
"Once the attackers discovered the other two women, they had their sick, twisted way with all three of them for the next 14 hours (I will not describe any of the details). The women sued the District of Columbia, which argued that “a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.” The District won the case based on what is actually a long-standing legal principle.
Singer, with her silly, dramatic argumentation, has reminded us of this fact — something for which we should all be grateful.
It is our misfortune in Washington to be governed by such simpletons, but it is also a hidden blessing that their legal team shows this level of incompetence. It may be our best chance as District residents to take our safety out of their hands and put it back into our own."
— David Freddoso is an NRO staff reporter.
"Since guns are so much more convenient for the perpetration of violent crimes than any other object citizens may have access to, the citizens develop a legitimate fear for their safety. As a result, they grow to accept intrusive increases in governmental powers that attempt to restore public safety."
Which is presumably why the founding fathers were so willing to accept the government intrusions of King George III.
"David Freddoso implies that he had been better off if had had a gun when his mugger approached him. I think this is arguable: if the mugger had realized that David had a gun, he probably would have instinctively assumed that David is going to shoot him. As a result, the mugger would have most likely have made at least an attempt to shoot David first, even if he had no such intentions to begin with."
Or maybe he wouldn't have tried to mug him to begin with.
"David Freddoso implies that he had been better off if had had a gun when his mugger approached him. I think this is arguable: if the mugger had realized that David had a gun, he probably would have instinctively assumed that David is going to shoot him. As a result, the mugger would have most likely have made at least an attempt to shoot David first, even if he had no such intentions to begin with."
Maybe, maybe not. Had he been armed he would have had the choice to resist or not. Unarmed, he had none.
Bad, violent people will always have access to weapons. You can't enforce a ban on weapons in a free society. It's pretty easy to make guns in a relatively simple machine shop. It would be simple to make a little gun factory in a garage. So banning guns is just not possible.
As far as banning "plastic" guns... if you're talking about a true all-plastic gun, then you're talking about some weird spy gun that is probably a one-shot gun. The partially plastic guns that some gun control advocates were all up in arms about still had a steel barrel and slide and were quite easily detected by a metal detector.
The assault weapon ban was also pretty stupid. It was based purely on cosmetics. The banned weapons were actually less powerful than hunting rifles but most gun control advocates seem to have no clue about guns except that they're skeery.
EI
Say, Megan, didn't you post something after this one? Something about "Ezra?" What happened to it?
Rhinoman, thanks for the compliment about hiring me as your lawyer. Usually online discussions degenerate into name calling over even much less contentious issues than gun control, so that wasn't a pleasant surprise.
My point about the rights of children in school was not so much about decrying a lack of rights that children have. Perhaps schools should be viewed as a second set of parents that temporarily assume much the same powers (though probably not quite as much). What is unfit for a democracy that at the same time children face criminal prosecutions in adult courts for "threats" that they made. It is bad enough that most of these threats were probably not thought through, and in the vast majority of cases did not present real dangers. But due to the widespread availability of handguns, there is this fear in the public that any utterance that indicates a child with emotional problems could end up in a school shooting.
Jeff Goldman:
OK, mea culpa. Name calling is juvenile; I apologize.
I agree that the hysteria over what used to be silly threats by kids is nutty. If children are really being tried as adults over verbal threats, that's just damnfoolishness.
But blaming this on the legality of firearms is a bit of a stretch. They're available whether they're legal or not. When I was in high school, one could obtain pretty much any illegal drugs one wanted, in any quantities. I'm sure we could have gotten our hands on a gun, legal or illegal.
In fact, the curious thing is that school shootings like Columbine never happened when I was in school, and we were a generation reared with easy availablitly to firearms. We were also taught to fight with our fists, and schoolyard bullying was just something you had to deal with. It's the next generation, reared to abhor violence and weapons, that tends to shoot up the classroom. I wonder why that is? (Actually, I'm not making some snide point here. I really do wonder why that is).
How long until some enterprising attorney argues a racial angle on gun ownership, i.e., why do rectangular states with mostly whites have liberal gun ownerships while cities with mostly blacks don't?
YOu have to have a lot of faith in your betters to give up your guns. I mean after you give up your guns you are totally at the mercy of the political process - the process that turned away Jews during WWII and locked up the Japenese, that put African American in separate schools, that decided a homosexual should not be allowed to enter the country for resident status, that a person who takes pot deserves no liberities but a rock singer or movie star gets probation,
Everyone steps more carefully than they would otherwise agains a potentially dangerous opponent. A disarmed opponent is grist for the mill.
"that put African American in separate schools..."
Did you read the cover article in today's WSJ about segregation in MA? Maybe that's what the blacks need: to arm themselves and force their way into white schools like the prep school Matt Yglesias went to and demand their right to an equal education. Imagine the cinematic possibilities! Matt's dad ought to write a screenplay about it, if his union hasn't struck yet.
Because the arguments for gun ownership here are so tedious, it seems I must step in to point out that widespread private gun ownership has not reduced the level of violence in Iraq, Somalia, South Africa, Colombia, or, indeed, the United States. The "explosion in gun violence" cdeegan claims has occurred in Great Britain must have started from quite a low level indeed: last year, 73 people were killed with guns in Great Britain; over 11,000 were killed in the United States. The rate of death by firearm in the US, in other words, is 30 times higher than that in the UK.
If criminals all have guns regardless of the restrictions, and the best way to deter a criminal from shooting you is to have a gun yourself, then why is it that the majority of people the criminals shoot are other criminals? Shouldn't the criminals be deterred by the likelihood that the other criminals have guns too? I mean, why do gang members ever shoot other gang members? Don't they realize the other gangs have guns?
I predict the loosening of gun control laws in DC will not change the gun murder rate much, one way or the other. Given that guns are already widely available, the important variables are economic opportunity and better policing.
I find this debate about school shootings curious. It can't be explained by simply looking to a supply/demand analysis of the drug war or violent crime more generally, but as rhinoman points out, they seem to be a relatively recent phenomenon, in a period when gun control laws became common. On this, I also can't buy the argument of some pro-gunners that the problem arises from the fact that the kids know no one is armed to stop them (which is of course a preposterous argument). Certainly, you can - in small part - blame a glorification of ultra-violence in our culture for some of the problem, but as Progressives will quickly (and correctly) point out, plenty of other nations have an even greater amount of ultra-violence in their culture. One of things that is so frustrating with the debate that always follows a school shooting is that it always involves rounding up the usual suspects: if you're on the political left, you blame weak restrictions on guns; if you're on the political right, you blame Hollywood and video games. But I think both these answers are far too simplistic and might each be totally irrelevant.
Certainly bullying is usually closely related to these events which, while more frequent than they ever were before, are still extraodinarily rare on the whole; but bullying has been around for a long time. Part of it, I think, is our increasing emphasis on pressuring kids to get good grades, and get into the right college (remember, it was just a few years ago that any four-year college was reserved for the privileged; now it is viewed as essential even though it is pretty much irrelevant for most jobs). In fact, I think this is the biggest part of the problem- kids who aren't jocks buffing up their extra-curricular activities or honors students buffing up their grades are truly looked down upon. In the past, these kids might have been appreciated for their skills as an auto mechanic, or respected for going on to learn a trade after high school- or even during high school, if they went to a Vo-Tech. So, I think that plays a big role in the spate of violence.
But I would love to hear other theories, because it is an issue that is only ever used as fodder for political talking heads with pet issues. Unfortunately, I suspect that the real answer isn't one that the talking heads will ever find politically advantageous.
Mark left a comment...
On this, I also can't buy the argument of some pro-gunners that the problem arises from the fact that the kids know no one is armed to stop them (which is of course a preposterous argument).
I am very curious about this since you don't provide any basis for your position. It is a "preposterous arguement", you say, and simply dismiss it. How did you reach your conclusion?
There is evidence that lends credence to the idea that school shootings increased because guns are banned on school grounds. The Gun-Free School Zones Act was passed in 1990, and the number of school shootings started to climb a few years later.
Eugene Volokh once pointed out that school shootings are rare and, statistically speaking, schools are a very safe place for our children. But school massacres seem to be omnipresent through media hype. (I have to go to work and can't look up the relevant post right at the moment.) Sort of like the "Summer of the Shark" in 2001, where fears of extremely unlikely shark attacks were inflated out of all proportion through constant news items.
James
I've been mugged multiple times. My attackers have never claimed to have guns but trust me, they didn't need them. Yes, these incidents have resulted in gun fantasies. I've wished I'd had a gun to whip out.
But really. Folks. You want a gun next time you're mugged? Someone threatens you, the adrenaline starts flowing, you grab your weapon and before you know it you've killed someone. I wonder if you've all thought that through sufficiently.
J-Ron left a comment...
But really. Folks. You want a gun next time you're mugged? Someone threatens you, the adrenaline starts flowing, you grab your weapon and before you know it you've killed someone. I wonder if you've all thought that through sufficiently.
This is a fallacy that keeps getting repeated by the proponents of gun control, that people who legally carry concealed weapons won't be able to control themselves in a stressful situation. But it seems that those who legally carry concealed are certainly more level headed than the general population.
So why do people who support gun control keep insisting that the law abiding civilians who carry firearms for their defense are constantly on the verge of exploding into petty, rage fueled violence?
Heck if I know. But I do have to admit that, considering the lurid first-person fantasies they are always trotting out to support their positions, I'd support any gun control measure that would keep weapons out of their hands!
James
Responding with violence to a mugging or another unexpected, high intensity, threatening situation is not "exploding into petty, rage fueled violence" as James Rummell has it. It's about fear, not rage, and it's certainly not "petty." People who are really afraid often make bad decisions.
Brooksfoe:
You have to distinguish between high gun ownership and weak gun laws- the two are not necessarily co-extensive. Additionally, the countries you cite, with the exception of the US, all have fairly weak protections of private property rights amongst the segment of the population engaged in the violence (meaning offenders are essentially protecting a legally unenforceable property right) or an ongoing "civil war" of sorts, meaning gun control laws wouldn't be very effective in any event. Similarly, gun violence in the US is, as you say, primarily the province of criminals against criminals- as I suggested in my original post, legal protections of private property don't exactly exist when you're talking about a black market like the drug war.
There are additional problems with your examples:
First of all, I cannot find any statistics on actual gun ownership rates in Iraq, Somalia, and Colombia; South Africa's rate of gun ownership is 8.4%, or about one-quarter the US' rate (the highest in Africa, but according to the BBC, also artificially high due to the fact that much of that ownership is wealthy white landowners, a legacy of apartheid; the rest is a result of the fact that the place is so dangerous to begin with that people feel they need to own guns for protection).
Second of all, the guns actually used in crime in South Africa are most frequently guns that are reported "lost" by the police and security forces, or political parties, or are smuggled in from Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
As for Somalia, that country was a complete anarchy for 10 years or so, with no established rule of law other than cultural traditions- no one knows any statistics for anything during that period, although there is actually a lot of evidence that life improved dramatically for most Somalis during that period of time; we do know that now that there are two groups again fighting for power (thanks to foreign countries trying to install governments that no one asked for), the country is insanely dangerous- but civil war has nothing to do with gun control.
Colombia and Iraq both obviously have active insurgencies or ongoing civil wars (depending on your preferred nomenclature), combined with Colombia's major drug war issue. So we're not exactly talking about situations where gun control would have any effect (if you're already fighting the government in a war, why would you obey that government's gun control laws?).
James:
As you ought to be able to tell, I am quite vehemently pro-gun, and know quite a bit about the subject from a legal standpoint. But I cannot buy into the argument that guns in schools makes for safer schools- as you and others (including me) have pointed out, school shootings, while more frequent than they were 50 years ago, are still exceedingly rare- too rare to use as the basis for making policy. But...your statistic doesn't support anything- that list simply provides no information prior to 1996- it's specifically a "timeline of recent school shootings." Plus, school shootings are so rare that I'm not sure it's even possible to draw a valid statistical correlation.
It may well be that prohibiting guns in schools is irrelevant to safer schools (and thus the Gun Free School Zones Act is worthless), but this is not the same as saying that permitting guns in schools deters school shootings from happening in the first place. The latter is the argument I find preposterous- I am not aware of a single one of these mass shootings where the killers didn't intend (and ultimately commit) suicide; the threat of being shot in the act by an armed teacher just isn't going to deter someone who has a deathwish in the first place. It may reduce the final casualty count, but my concern is with learning what causes these shootings in the first place.
You know, honestly, I don't think the data backs either side up on the gun-law debate. You can make a convincing case either way, which suggests to me that gun laws (or the lack thereof) have at best a tangential relationship to issues of crime and safety.
When times and the environment are bad, like NYC in the 70s, violent crime rises. When times and environment get better (like most of NYC these days), crime goes down. I don't think having a gun made you any safer back then, and I don't think not having a gun makes you any less safe today.
Which is all a long way of saying that I fail to understand how this is an important issue at all. A politician's position on gun laws is about the last thing I would take into consideration when considering how to cast my vote.
Peter: I would tend to agree that you can make a persuasive case either way- the old lies, damn, lies, and statistics thing. But that doesn't make the debate meaningless- if we are focusing on the wrong issue, then we are missing important insight as to WHY the violent crime rate rises and falls so significantly, and thus forgoing an opportunity to actually lower the peaks and valleys of violent crime.
Something worth mentioning along these lines, by the way, is that- not surprisingly- violent crime rates are almost perfectly correlated with rates of illegal drug use.
"Oh, I dunno. Last time I checked there were quite a few drugs that are illegal nationwide. Yet, mysteriously , they're not hard to come by."
Try sticking a glock up your a$$ and smuggling it somewhere.
A single mule can smuggle half a million worth of heroin or coke while walking right through a metal detector. They couldn't even carry a half million worth of guns.
Rhinoman asks if the Jews in World War II would have been better off if they had owned guns. I can't be certain, but I doubt it. Imagine a situation where a Jewish household does have a firearm. When the German police come and pick them up or order them to the town square, the father would have an option to attack the Germans or not. I doubt that anybody would have chosen to attack. Yes, you may kill a German soldier or two, but you know that your entire family will be killed on the spot. On the other hand, if you don't shoot, maybe you will make it through whatever plans the Germans have for you.
This is why guns are not an effective tool against tyranny: tyranny is something that creeps up on you. For example, recently The Economist had an editorial about how the enablers of the prosecutor in the Duke rapist case (by which they mean much of the faculty of Duke University) are just as racist as Southerners were in the 50's. In the 50's blacks were guilty by default, now it is whites. Tyranny against whites is on the march, but most people don't even realize it. No, I am not saying the situation of white people is as bad as was the situation of the Jews in WWII, but there are definitely undemocratic principles being applied against whites. Would any of those students who were falsely accused of rape been better off if they had had a gun?
Now in some of the other cases that Rhinoman mentions guns may have been useful (in Darfur perhaps, but I would have to study the issue more). But guns are only useful if a group of people who form a demos recognize a foreign tyrant. In most cases when tyranny is on the march, it is an internal march and it is unrecognized.
Njorl, if you really believe that the quantity of smuggled drugs that are consumed in this country were smuggled via human orifices in any significant percentage, well, you are being extremely silly.
Mark wrote: ...but this is not the same as saying that permitting guns in schools deters school shootings from happening in the first place. The latter is the argument I find preposterous- I am not aware of a single one of these mass shootings where the killers didn't intend (and ultimately commit) suicide; the threat of being shot in the act by an armed teacher just isn't going to deter someone who has a deathwish in the first place.
Really? If all the person has is a deathwish, suicide is conveniently available at home. If all the person has is a deathwish garnished with publicity, then it's pretty easy to commit suicide in a public place. A good two-hour police standoff with the gun to your head gets way more live attention than a fifteen-minute killing spree.
Which is why I think you're missing the point with that hasty dismissal; the purpose of committing any act of mass violence, even if it ends in suicide, clearly has other motvations -- power, hate, vengenace, etc. The value of that is removed if the shooter knows that the first thing that happens when the gun comes out, is that he gets dropped dead. And furthermore, even if suicide wasn't fully on the table before the event, it sure is afterward, when you're staring at the depressing horror of a pile of bodies and blood, and realizing the only other option is a lifetime in a federal penitentiary.
Wanting to know the root causes is an important facet of preventing future events, but I see no reason to disbelieve the old "an armed citizenry is a polite citizenry" saw, even if it is unfortunate that we've come to the level of seeing it applied in schools.
Rhinoman asks if the Jews in World War II would have been better off if they had owned guns. I can't be certain, but I doubt it. Imagine a situation where a Jewish household does have a firearm. When the German police come and pick them up or order them to the town square, the father would have an option to attack the Germans or not. I doubt that anybody would have chosen to attack. Yes, you may kill a German soldier or two, but you know that your entire family will be killed on the spot. On the other hand, if you don't shoot, maybe you will make it through whatever plans the Germans have for you.
Hmm...ever hear of the term "Organized Resistance"? When there is a clear and present danger to one's safety, what makes you think people would sit around and wait to be picked off one-by-one?
At some point, when gun control or some similar topic came up on Megan's old site, someone shared a family history incident in which the family patriarch of an earlier generation received wind that the Klan was planning to drop by the next evening, and burn the little farm to the ground.
The next night a number of Klansmen showed up right on schedule, but found themselves facing a couple dozen very sober men, bristling with somewhere between fifteen and twenty shotguns. It was politely but firmly suggested that the unwelcome parties leave, and never return. Both requests were honored and no further trouble was encountered.
Njorl:
As plenty of people elsewhere have pointed out, it's not horribly difficult to manufacture a gun if you have the wherewithal. Gun smuggling is really quite easy and common- see, e.g., South Africa, as well as any country where there is a civil war, and you get the point. Hell, the AK47 is essentially designed for smuggling and use by people who aren't particularly well trained. And this says nothing of the fact that the military and police forces will always have access to guns, as will their suppliers- it doesn't take many who are willing to take a few particularly nice bribes for a bunch of guns to reach the hands of criminals (again, South Africa shows this point fairly well). Finally- we're still trying to figure out how to inspect shipping containers for nuclear material; how do you propose we will be able to inspect containers for guns with any kind of success ratio (since guns are pretty much impossible for a dog to sniff out- unlike drugs- and can be easily hidden in a shipping container).
Jeff:
I think you're probably right that in most cases tyranny comes slowly, and not by force; you're probably also right that even when it does come by force, it's unlikely that firearms will allow the victims to mount a successful campaign a la the American War for Independence.
However, firearms ownership at least "raises the bar" for what tyranny must overcome before it can claim power. Think of it as an additional cost for potential tyrannies to consider in their march to power.
This also applies to the "creeping tyranny" scenario, although on a different scale- more the individual angry Constitutionalist fighting the cops against his impending unconstitutional arrest. Knowing the guy is going to put up a fight again raises the bar for what the tyranny must overcome to make the arrest- maybe to the point of deciding to let the guy slide.
Mark left a comment...
It may well be that prohibiting guns in schools is irrelevant to safer schools (and thus the Gun Free School Zones Act is worthless), but this is not the same as saying that permitting guns in schools deters school shootings from happening in the first place. The latter is the argument I find preposterous- I am not aware of a single one of these mass shootings where the killers didn't intend (and ultimately commit) suicide; the threat of being shot in the act by an armed teacher just isn't going to deter someone who has a deathwish in the first place.
Those involved in law enforcement call it "suicide by police". It is where some idiot, twisted with rage and self loathing, decides to rack up a body count before going off to meet his maker. They usually commit suicide in order to make sure that they avoid capture, but sometimes they decide to fire a round or two at the SWAT team and let the taxpayer pay for the lethal round.
But no matter how they elect to go, they want to cause as much pain as possible before they check out. That is why they seek out places where firearms are prohibited, so they can kill as many helpless people before their time runs out and they have to go themselves. (See the Luby's Diner massacre for an example of a killer who carefully chose his killing ground to maximize the number of victims, and then committed suicide before capture.)
I'm sorry if this gives offense, but your statement that allowing concealed carry on school grounds is "preposterous" doesn't line up with the facts. It is very probable that one of these killers would go somewhere else if teachers were allowed to carry concealed, and I would even say that it is likely considering what I know of these spree killers.
And, as you said, having a few armed teachers around could very well limit the body count since they would be able to resist the killer.
James
Njorl wrote: A single mule can smuggle half a million worth of heroin or coke while walking right through a metal detector. They couldn't even carry a half million worth of guns.
Interesting, because I'm pretty sure I could hide a half million worth of illegal guns on a freighter truck without getting even one yip out of the drug-sniffing dogs or, for that matter, the border guards.
Mark: the high ownership of guns among white South Africans is precisely the point. Given crime rates in South Africa, gun ownership by whites is obviously failing to deter crime.
The problem here is with terminology. Calling it a ban makes it seem as if the choice is between a world with no guns and a world with guns. A world with no guns would be great, but that's really not possible at this point. What they should say is that they're passing a law that increases the ratio among hand gun owners of criminals to law-abiding citizens. Because that's what they're doing.
Brooksfoe:
If you had read my arguments, you would have seen that I am not a particularly concerned with the argument that gun ownership inherently prevents crime; my point is far more that legal gun ownership rates are irrelevant to preventing violent crime, and that banning guns only succeeds in removing guns from the hands of law abiding citizens.
Again, the vast majority of guns used in crimes in South Africa are illegally smuggled in or are stolen from security forces of various sources. All banning guns usually achieves is the removal of guns from the people who aren't criminals to begin with.
Moreover, even if you want to use South Africa as an example, the legal gun ownership rate there is only 1/4 the rate in the US yet violent crime is far worse than in the US. Finally, the areas of South Africa that are considered by far the most dangerous by comparison are the overcrowded townships, meaning the lion's share of the crime is black-on-black. So high rates of legal gun ownership amongst whites are totally irrelevant to preventing most of the violence.
"Interesting, because I'm pretty sure I could hide a half million worth of illegal guns on a freighter truck without getting even one yip out of the drug-sniffing dogs or, for that matter, the border guards."-Posted by anony-mouse
Wow, that's amazing. I bet you could smuggle watches into Switzerland too.
There isn't a real serious effort to keep guns out. If there were, it would be much easier than keeping drugs out. Intrinsic to all guns is the presence of a metal tube. You could easily scan any truck, boxcar, cargo container in seconds for any guns with some accoustic resonance scattering technique. There would be ways to defeat it, but they could be detected and countered.
Njorl,
They don't have to be smuggled at all. Everything needed to make them is available at any hardware store.
You also assume that in smuggling, one has to render them invisible to a security check. Sure...if you're goofy enough to actually walk up to the security checkpoint with large amounts of contraband. This country has 10,000 miles of borders - it's not hard to find a place on the border to bring in a large box unnoticed.
On top of that, police and military will ALWAYS have them ... and it's amazing how much those guys manage to "lose".
Final observation: there's 100,000,000 of them in this country already. You're not going to confiscate all of them.
Upshot: no matter how you look at it, they'll be available to anyone who wants one enough - legal or illegal, retail or private sale, purchased or smuggled or stolen, or even homemade. Any notion that involves making them go away totally, completely, forever (or anything close thereto) is preposterously naieve.
Njorl:
Wow. So, you are going to have every single shipping container scanned for metal tubes? And, every container that turns up metal tubing, I assume you're going to give it a top to bottom inspection? You obviously have never seen the inside of a packed shipping container; suffice it to say that even a cursory version of such an inspection would take several people many hours to complete. I suppose this would be fine, except: 1. Metal tubing isn't exactly what you would call an unusual shipping item; and 2. The "tube" (aka the barrel) can be so small as to be indistinguishable via scan; it can also come in about an infinite variety of shapes and sizes; and 3. this says nothing about the fact that many guns have interchangeable parts and can be shipped as separate pieces- so good luck finding the "action" part of the gun.
As for your argument that the problem is that the guns are made here, I guess you're suggesting that we tell the cops that they can no longer purchase pistols from Smith&Wesson, Colt, Sigarms, etc.- nothing but Glocks for them from now on! And the military can forget about the M-16- nothing but AK-47's from now on.
If we have to give up a civil right in order to be safer, maybe we could have a conversation about whether a gun ban or the right of the government to inspect our library records is the greater intrusion.
I don't own a gun, and I do own a library card, but I'd rather give up the right to library privacy than the right to own a gun.
Bans on easily manufactured items are always going to be ineffective at keeping such items out of the hands of criminals. I don't care if you ban them locally, nationally, or globally.
National gun bans will be less effective than many of the drug bans like the prohibitions against marijuana, heroin, or cocaine since those items must be grown outside or indoors with large energy consumption and heat profiles that are difficult to conceal.
If you really want to cut down on the gun violence, you should end the prohibitions against drugs. It is this that is the primary driver.
Mark,
It would not be difficult to perform accoustic spectroscopy on gun barrels so that they are distinguished from other tubes. This would not detect individualized guns, but if you eliminate standardized production from the supply, you've won the battle.
All of the scenarios mentioned - homemade guns, legal guns obtained corruptly, smuggled guns - would still result in a reduction of the presence of guns by multiple orders of magnitude. The price a criminal has to pay to have a gun would go up dramatically. With higher prices, demand would decline. Criminals would no longer consider the cost of a gun to be a small additional marginal cost that provides a large benifit.
Guns, unlike drugs, are a self catalysing market. Criminals want guns primarily because other criminals have guns. Decrease the likelyhood that drug dealers get shot by other drug dealers, and you recuce the profit margin for some illegal gun suppliers to below cost. Drugs are differnet. Cut down on the drug supply, and you increase the profit margin for illegal suppliers.
Yes, I think there would be even more murders if DC didn't have a ban on guns. It is a good thing that the police can approach someone that is slinging, and arest them for having a gun. I would never say that places that don't want gun control should have it. Communities that don't want gun control tend to have positive gun culture. People who are not criminals have guns, and know how to use guns.
DC is a city without a positive gun culture. There are no places to use guns for sport. Most non-criminal residents would prefer the security of fewer guns on the street to the security of carrying a gun they don't have the oppurtunity to use and engaging in armed combat with criminals. Fantasies and realities of armed grannies standing up to armed muggers, being able to arrest someone for carrying a deadly weapon is a powerful law enforcement tool for a dangerous city.
The second admendment is the only place in the constitution where government regulation is specifically called for as being 'necessary'. The people being 'regulated', by need, are gun owners.
If we took the second admendment seriously and insisted on the well regulated part we would have far fewer gun crimes, and probably far fewer guns as well.
Yancey Ward hit the nail on the head.
One would think, given the fact that the War on Drugs is an unmitigated failure and disproportionately waged against poor blacks, that the Democrats would be calling for its abrupt demise.
The fact that the Democratic Party continues to support the WoD leads me to believe that they don't really care about violent crime or the black community as much as they say they do.
Ken, look into the history of the word regulated. What it really meant back then was skilled in the use of guns, specifically skilled in using them as a group. While you are at it, see if you can remember what you were taught in 7th grade about the effect of a subordinate clause on the overall meaning of a sentence.
By the way, the last time United States citizens took up arms to overthrow a government and restore democracy was in 1946.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution were most concerned with the tyranny of government over its citizens with respect to the individual guarantee to have and bear arms. If the right (of the people) was not to be abridged, then it must have necessarily existed before the Constitution was written. What D.C. has done is criminal and is effectively, the disarming of its law-abiding citizens. This illogical nonsense about gun control is just a veiled attempt to totally disarm the citizens of our republic. Ultimately, the "game" is federal, universal registration, a few buybacks like being touted right now in Washington D.C., followed by confiscation and destruction. This leaves guns in the hands of those who would do us harm and creates great gun-free zones in which citizens may have their lives snuffed out. Great Britain, Australia and Canada are already having some second thoughts of their choices, or at least choices imposed on their citizens. My sense is that Americans should wake up and see what is happening in the deliberate, gradual disarming of America as accelerated in the mid 1970s to date and has resulted in people in our Capitol unable to effectively defend themselves in their own homes. Anti-gun individuals and organizations have a very hard time explaining why violent crime is down in right to carry firearm states, and is very high where 2nd amendment rights have been denied. Could it be that the idiots took away guns from the good guys and left the criminals fully armed"? These anti-gun zealots who are systematically disarming America are not misguided or misinformed, they are genuinely stupid and have learned nothing in D.C. over 30 years of high crime rates and their citizenry unable to defend their own life and property in their homes. Could this be what the framers of the Constitution were worried about? The problem may end up being not one of crime or terrorists or much earlier, the Russians coming over here, it could be the attempted disarming of Americans that is our ultimate downfall. The answer is fairly simple, Don't Do It.
The framers who wrote the second admendment knew that having armed bunchs of people without any leadership, regulations, or training was nothing less than having armed mobs. No one wanted that.
So they specifically said that gun owners were to be 'well regulated'. They put it in writing in the second admendment to the constitution.
The problem is not that we have too many guns, the problem is that we have too little regulation on the people with guns.
If we took the second admendment seriously we could cut down on gun crimes and probably reduce the number of guns as well.
Njorl wrote:
"Guns, unlike drugs, are a self catalysing market. Criminals want guns primarily because other criminals have guns. Decrease the likelyhood that drug dealers get shot by other drug dealers, and you recuce the profit margin for some illegal gun suppliers to below cost. Drugs are differnet. Cut down on the drug supply, and you increase the profit margin for illegal suppliers."
This is more than a little debatable. Take a look at Mexico, for instance, which has extremely restrictive gun control legislation (and to my knowledge no domestic gun manufacturers), and yet a firearms homicide rate almost three times that of the US- almost entirely due to smuggling. Or take Northern Ireland circa 1994, which had a tiny legal gun ownership rate, but a much higher homicide rate than the US. In fact, if you look at a graph of gun supply in the US over time compared to a graph of homicide (and especially firearms-related homicide), you will find that there is no correlation one way or another between the two.
The better explanation for why criminals need guns is that they are a necessary part of the criminal enterprise- again, if you are a criminal, you don't have what we would call property rights vis a vis other criminals. So guns become the best possible way of defending your "property" rights or of taking the "property" of rival criminals. Demand for guns may not be perfectly inelastic, but then again, neither is the demand for drugs- but they are pretty close.
The biggest problem I see in the calls for gun bans, other than the obvious constitutional debate, is that usually this is viewed to be the only method required to solve a crime issue which goes well beyond only firearms crimes. What is many times a complex cultural, economic and educational issue, cannot be solved with a knee-jerk law based solely on emotion. It's like trying to cure a compound fracture by putting a bandage over the exposed bone. It doesn't solve anything, but looks like you're doing something.
Rather than simply trying to do an apparently ineffective ban on physical items, cities such as DC, Cincinnati, New Orleans and others with similar issues, they would be much better served by putting all that money and effort into proven crime fighting techniques such as improving the under-supported police forces and court systems.
And as others pointed out, no bad will be effective if there is a large enough demand by criminals. The current trends in the UK is for arms to be smuggled in from Eastern Europe. There has been at least one case in Australia of a widespread firearms manufacturing ring. Shipping containers of Chinese weapons have been seized in LA. Palestinians are manufacturing huge numbers of effective anti-tank weapons such as the Yasin pattern rockets rom common household item.
I dont totally agree with the tyranny arguement only on the basis that it will probably never happen. i like to defend gun ownership using logic. Gun control has mixed results throughout the world. In the UK, murders and gun crime have gone up since inacting gun control, but in austria, gun crime is down, but other violent crime is up. Then in the US there seems to be no correlation between gun control laws and murder rate/crime rate (just wikipedia homicide rates by country). I dont buy the suicide arguement when it comes to gun control either. You can't seriously believe that an adult will be stopped from harming themselves if they dont have access to a gun. What about a car, just turn on the heat and go to sleep forever. Look at japan, whose suicide rate is highest in the world with very limited firearm ownership. Dont use the arguement also that other suicide methods are less deadly- people who truly want to kill themselves will use lethal means, the only people who use such things as overdosing are just looking for attention, if you are using a gun, you truly want to kill yourself- dont have the gun, then you might suffocate yourself with your car or jump infront of a train. My next problem is with the accident reasoning for gun control-especially with children. in all honesty, a child is more likely to die from drowning then an accident with a firearm so i dont believe that is a valid reason to start controlling arms more strictly. and what about murders you say...crimes of passion between spouses. well first murders can be done with any other weapon. and the spousal arguement is misguided because in many instances where there is no gun, a kitchen knife is used and using the arguement that a kitchen knife is less deadly then a gun to ban guns is like saying to a person who got hit by truck going 50 miles an hour and died "atleast it wasnt a passenger train." Our society errs on the side of freedom, just look at our justice system- innocent till proven guilty- do you know how many times NY mobsters went free because we couldnt prove they were guilty, even though we knew in our hearts they were. Gun control advocates need to prove that gun control makes us safer and until then we will err on the side of freedom and limit governmental control on guns. I also find that gun control advocates going after guns as a crime fighting method is like a drivers ed teacher going after shaving while you drive as a method to prevent accidents. Yes shaving while you drive increases your chance of being in an accident- it isnt the major cause only a minor one- speed is a major cause. What i am saying is to solve the root problem of gun crime- socioeconomic, takes a lot more work to accomplish- so our politicians go for the easier route.
Ken- do you know that lowering the number of guns in private hands will have almost no effect on gun crime. you would have to lower it by atleast 4/5 and that is an impossible feat. Just think about this, during the 1990's we saw the largest drop in violent crime in our history, plus an increase in our private arsenal of 50-75 million new firearms.
"If we took the second admendment seriously and insisted on the well regulated part"
...then we would follow the lead of the Founding Fathers, who after enacting the 2nd Amendment promptly wrote the Militia Act of 1792, which declared that _all_ able-bodied males 17-45 would arm & equip themselves (at their own cost) to a minimum standard, and the local gov't would provide periodic training.
At the time it was written, "well regulated" addressed being equipped, skilled, capable and organized - very different from today's meaning amounting to "suppressed".
triticale,
A more recent example is Waco & Ruby Ridge. They happened within 6 months of each other, and heralded in a new era of dynamic raids by highly skilled & armed gov't teams acting on tax violations.
The citizens fought back. Hard. Armed.
Yes, the citizens in question lost the conflict.
But, it was a Pyhrric victory for the winners.
Such raids haven't been repeated for 15 years.
re: Mark E Hoffer's posted quote from a review of "More Guns, Less Crime"
If it weren't for the fact that Lott's results disappeared when coding errors in his data were corrected, or that he tried to bring the results back by dropping the control for clustering; or that his subsequent analysis of the data requires hilarious leaps of reasoning totally unsupported by the existing literature; or that Lott himself has been known to promote himself online, even going so far as to create a persona known as "Mary Rosh" to talk about what a wonderful man he is; or that basically, his work is of extraordinarily poor academic standards... that review would be accurate. Alas, it's not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a supporter of the Second Amendment. It's just that Lott's work is among worst, from a statistical standpoint, I have ever read, and I consider him to be a liability to the cause he champions. There are plenty of entirely valid arguments against gun bans, so it's not necessary to use his.
If we are going to have a 'well regulated' armed populace we need to organize, train and give them leadership. The second admendment says as clear as day that regulating people with guns is a necessity.
If we would only take the second admendment seriously we could reduce the amount of gun crime and probably the number of guns as well.
When people are members of an organized group that is well led and well trained they will be less likely to pull a gun out and shoot someone. They can be educated as well about gun rules and laws and the consequences of breaking the laws and rules. Crime will go down. So will gun ownership. Everyone wins.
By the way, the Second Admendment is the only place in the constitution that demands a group of people be 'well regulated'. Unfortunately we have not lived up to our founders expectations in this regard. But we can and should turn this around and start providing the regulation gun owners need right away. A decent respect for the constitution demands nothing less.
Njorl:
I doubt the part about the watches. I do think, however, that you are pretty naive about the many ways guns can be transported; we can't even keep people from crossing the southern border in droves, so you can no doubt come up with some clever transport schemes to use humans as disposable, untraceable mules to carry firearms in exchange for promise of a cash payment. Or you can smuggle guns inside large industrial equipment. Or cars. Or just about any other large, complex metal object where a little extra metalic content will go completely unnoticed unless someone has a specific reason to search. Or you could ship them inside large barrels of innert industrial chemicals, mineral oil being the most friendly.
In many of these cases, if you set up your scheme right, the front organizations can be dealing in enough legitimate business to avoid suspicion, and the mules could be innocent third party shipping contractors who have no clue what is inside their nominally-legitimate cargo (and are thus unlikely to act in ways that would tip off the border guards). Or you can go for the sporadic approach, and simply make ad-hoc shipments at random intervals so as to minimize risk of detection. Whichever suits.
This is before we get into the problem of enormous shipping containers arriving daily by the tens of thousands on both coasts. Yeah, you can come up with complex imaging techniques that are technically capable of reading and graphically reconstructing the contents of a shipping container, and even highlighting known item shapes (modern airport carry-on scanners already do some of this). But you're going to have a terrible time distinguishing the parts of a disassembled gun from legitimate stocks of other goods, and you haven't even addressed the problem of actually scanning every shipping container. As someone already noted, we haven't even found a good way to monitor shipping containers for purposes of mitigating the threat of nuclear terrorism. And you think you've got a good idea for trapping smuggled arms?
Your reasoning is evidently parallel to claiming that forest fires shouldn't be an issue because we know water puts out fire and we have pumps that can propel water. It shows a legitimate grasp of the technical basics, but no clue of the scope of the problem or real-world implementation difficulties.
Ken wrote: The second admendment says as clear as day that regulating people with guns is a necessity.
No, it speaks of a "well-regulated militia". As has already been noted in the thread, this says nothing about individuals on their own time, and the founding fathers' own behavior clearly indicates that the collection of people together into the militia was the part that was to be well-regulated, not the individual ownership (the uninfringed right to bear arms) which was pre-requisite to forming a militia.
You shouldn't speak sanctimoniously of "a decent respect for the Constitution" if you're not going to provide a demonstration in your own use of it.
A kilo of heroin has been metabolized soon after crossing the border, and its buyers want more of it more than they want anything else. A gun, whether smuggled or made domestically, has a very long shelf life: my oldest was made in 1917. If I had the money, today I could buy a Revolutionary War-era rifle and shoot it before it gets dark.
Yes, England has a low murder rate even after the recent increases. They had an unbelievably low murder rate a century ago, when anyone but the police could carry guns. Despite this fact, England has decided that gun control is the reason for their safety. If you attribute a good harvest to the human sacrifices made that year, not only are you unlikely to advance much in agronomy, but you'll probably respond to the next crop failure with increased funding for the sacrifice program.
Matthew,
Thank you for pointing that out. I chose Lott's work, primarily, for it's simple premise: "More Guns, Less Crime", one I happen to agree with, btw.
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=Lott+statistical+errors
No doubt we should be careful to do our own homework. "Experts" may not be reliable.
When ever I hear the gun control people speakingof unarmed schools as "safe" schools and armed schools as potential killing zones I can't help but recall my own childhood. Growing up in rural Idaho I can well remember the parking lot of the high school filled with cars, and many of them with gun racks and people's hunting rifles and shotgun's stored in those gun racks. Alot of us wore buck knives, or multi tools or carried pen knives in our pocket's yet we never had anyone pull a gun or knife on anyone else. If we had a difference it was usually settled with unarmed posturing and heated words, occasionally with fists. Now some may think I am talking of the distant past, yet I graduated in 1994. Furthuremore the gun control folks decry loosening gun control as turning back the clock to the "Wild-west". Yet this arguement seems childish when you look at the fact that gun-ownership in the period of 1870-1900 (the historical Wild-west) was greater than 90%, yet the crime rate was extremely low. It also was extremely rare, contrary to Hollywood's portrayal, for criminals to "tree" a town. A great portion of the adult males had come to age fighting on the fields of the Civil War and were quite adapt at handling firearms for personal defense. As for the definition of a militia, we must look at the 18th century concept of militia to determine the founding fathers intention. A militia was conceieved as a group of private citizens (armed at their own expense) who upon the sounding of the alarm would gather to take part in what ever emergency was presented and would just as likely fight of a Native attack or foreign invasion, as take on a group of armed criminals. They did drill, but it was an ad hoc event, with no mandatory participation. Granted many states did have an organized cadre that was labeled as a militia, but the purpose was to act as the framework in which local militias could be assimilated into once they were needed for a national or state emergency. The National Guard was not founded until the 1890's and the Army Reserve until the early 1900's, though both branches try and claim decent from earlier militias. Both forces are considered to be a branch of the US Army and are paid for from National coffers, are armed by the National governemnet and have obligatory drills, in which a person can legally (though rarely) be prosecuted for not attending. The founding fathers were not fans of a strong federal army and envisioned a small federal Army being supplemented by a large, local militia force made up of private citizens armed at there own expense. If we were to follow this model, we would elminate most of the Department of Defense and require all citizens arm themselves in preparation for possible military/civil duty. Also, the 18th century saw little actual organzied police forces (the NYPD was not organized until the early part of the 19th century) and the federal police forces were limited to a few postal inspecetors and Marshals. The government expected local citizens and militias to protect themselves. The Supreme Court has ruled mutliple times that Police forces have no obligation to protect the individual citizen from crime. So therefore we are either expected to protect ourselves or to become willing victims.
It isn't that DC is ungovernable. It's that it's incapable of self-government. It's past time to repeal home rule and place a presidential appointee in direct control.
Right, so when do we start regulating the people who own guns like the constitution says we must do out of necessity?
We will have met the constitutional standard of having an armed populace that is 'well regulated' when guns are no used for crime but are used only for legitimate purposes, and in the proper manner. We will need to increase regulation until that happens.
Are you a bot, Ken, or do you have a reading comprehension problem?
Ken - I think you may have missed the sarcastic use of "regulated" in the earlier posts. If we stick to the meaning of the word as recognized when the second amendment was penned, then "regulating the people that own guns" would lead to having the government supply guns to the general male populace so as to have a well-regulated militia.
I can't tell if you are also making a joke, so maybe I'm missing your point.
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. I prefer to be armed against a criminal instead of disarmed because as a victim of crime I am the real first responder. Self-defense is the first law of nature.
Ken, please try and keep up...
Consider the words of Alexander Hamilton:
"The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, nor a week nor even a month, that will suffice for the attainment of it. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry and of the other classes of the citizens to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people and a serious public inconvenience and loss.
--- The Federalist Papers, No. 29."
More here if you're serious about educating yourself: http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndmea.html
Ken,
The well-regulated militia was back then consisted of WE, THE PEOPLE. A reading of the amendments will show that the 2nd is clearly the rights of the people shall not be infringed. Not even the National Guard comes close to the definition of a militia, is was the common citizenry. Second, a LOT of people do not understand the 2nd amendment (and STILL do not), nor do they know the history of the natural right to have and bear arms for defense. Don't mention hunting, shooting sports and the like, just defense of one's own life, and even restrict it to our own home and car. The notion that if you take away virtually all the firearms from law-abiding people, criminals will somehow be disarmed is ridiculous. Last Wednesday, in TWO MINUTES, the front door of a large local hardware store was broken, a brick was thrown through the display case inside and 11 handguns were stolen of 21 in the case at the time. Luckily, this was caught on tape at the new bank next door, outside camera. The irony is that this summer late, a convicted felon had a handgun violation and was given probation here in Superior Court, not what I understand should have been a five year sentence by federal standard. There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books around the country. A few thousand more will help little to none and could result in MORE loss of life. I'll give you a hint, they are taking away firearms from the wrong people, those who are not criminals and many of whom have undergone local, state and FBI background checks. I promise you, most criminals do not undergo these checks, nor could they pass them, they steal guns, purchase them through straw sales and can buy them on almost any street corner in the U.S. Most folks are confusing firearms with criminals who use firearms. The emotional, knee-jerk response is to ban firearms, pass more gun "control" laws and subject a larger portion of our citizenry to criminal behavior. I favor strong background checks, disqualification of convicted felons and mental cases. I believe parents are responsible for keeping firearms out of the hands of small children. I am NOT in favor of some politician or official telling me I cannot defend my family in my own home. I believe in reasonable regulation of firearms, like no firing in the city limits, limited automatic weapon permits for legitimate collectors and high jail time for anyone convicted of a violent crime with a handgun or other firearm. There is a reasoned middle ground to take without disarming people who have done nothing wrong and every reason to take firearms away from criminals and having teeth in the consequences of doing crimes with firearms. There are physicians for responsible gun ownership, there are millions who hunt and enjoy sport shooting, and D.C. is way out of bounds in my view by denying its citizens the basic right to self defense. Now THAT is illogical and a true violation of the 2nd amendment and the basic, natural right to self-defense.
When the second admendment was written it was carefully worded to include the necessity of regulating the people who will be armed. This is the only place in the constitution where the government is specifically directed to regulate certain people, ie people with guns.
It was clear then, and it is clear today.
Throughout our history this obigation for regulation has been haphazard at best. The result is that we live in a world where gun violence is so common it is taken for granted. This itself violates the 'general welfare' clause of the constitution which was the entire purpose for establishing the government in the first place.
We really do need to take the constitution seriously and start regulating people with guns until we bring the situation under control.
Yuri,
In spite of what Hamilton wrote the framers still included words to the effect that those with arms need to be 'well regulated'.
You can't get around the plain meaning of the constitution.
Hopefully the Supreme Court, should they decide, to hear the D.C. case will concur with the 2/3 vote of the Federal Appeals Court. Maybe the Court will refuse to hear the case and the Federal Appeals Court decision will stand. I am disappointed the Appeals Court issued a split decision and, in my opinion, the descenting Judge (a relative) decided that D.C. does not deserve the benefits under the 2nd Amendment because D.C. is not a State.
I certainly hope the Court affirms the right of the People to own and bear arms.
Yes Ken,
Please take it seriously. Come to my house and attempt to regulate me and my family.
More regulation on firearms? What other consumer product is as heavily regulated as firearms? There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books already! Here in my neck of the woods, I continually see gun charges plea bargained away time and time again. Why on earth do we need more gun laws if we're not going to enforce existing law?
I continually see the case for more gun control laws promoted as a matter of "public safety." Given the fact that year in and year out there are over twice as many alcohol related deaths in the US as there are firearms related deaths, why are the "public safety" campaigners AWOL on this one? Perhaps the driving force isn't public safety but rather, a dislike and/or fear of firearms.
From the DC circuit court's recent ruling on DC's handgun ban (pg 46):
"To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia."
Ken,
"The second admendment says as clear as day that regulating people with guns is a necessity."
No, the 2ndA clear as day says that the best way to get a "well-regulated militia" (i.e.: equipped, familiar & trained) is that the people in general have an unrestricted right to arms.
Put another way: if the nation needs defending, the most efficient way to do so is have a generally armed population - that way anyone called into service is already armed and is already familiar with his weapon. (Contrast with allegations that our military is maxed out in Iraq, and that a draft of presumably unarmed and unfamiliar men may be needed; wouldn't it be better that they all _already_ have M16s and know how to use them?).
Allowing people to have guns does nothing to regulated them, well or otherwise, as is required by necessity, according to the second admendment.
The second admendment is clear in this regard. The people with arms need to be 'well regulated'.
It is too bad that conservatives cannot look at the constitution objectively and take it as it was written. Perhaps it would help if you first read the Preamble and could grasp the fact that the constitution established a government to ensure tranquility and to provide for the general welfare of the American people.
With that in mind it may be easier for you to understand the full meaning of the second admendment. The founders knew that having untrained armed mobs is not conducive to domestic tranquility. So the requirement that anyone who is armed must be, as a group, well regulated.
This is where we have failed. We need to take the constitution seriously. It is never too late to do the right thing and begin the regulation gun owners need, as per the constitution.
"CAN WE TALK"?
If the buffoonish DC government wants to continue to compromise constitutionally defined civil rights and liberties of US citizens in the name of violent crime abatemant, why not compromise the ones that actually will reduce the numbers of predatory thugs roaming streets and invading homes. Such as:
---Racial and demographic profiling of likely criminals and the elimination of a requirement for probable cause before making an apprehension.
---mandated abortions of illegitimate male fetuses from demographic or racial groups having a high probability of producing violent criminals.
---charging drug dealers with murder for any death directly or indirectly resulting from their merchandise, and apply the death penalty.
But of course none of this will ever fly in DC, or anywhere else in the US nor should it. But should "Pontius" Fenty, Bloomberg, Daley, et.al, continue to be permitted to wash their hands of the blood of innocent, and LEGALLY but UNCONSTITUTIONALLY disarmed and made vulnerable, law abiding citizens?
Perhapps we should study some of the methods Dr. MLK used to address the injustices of his time. In any case folks, it's time to get serious about this!
After reading all the comments and hearing all the same old arguments from the gun control crowd about how guns are bad and need to be done away with because doing so will solve all violent crime problems. What hogwash. You are treating the symptom not the problem.
The problem is the use of violence/use of force to control or eleminate someone else. It doesn't matter if you have a gun, a ball bat, a hammer, a vehicle or anything else you can name or get your hands on, if you use it in an offensive manner to threaten/intimidate or physically assault another individual, it is not being used for its original intent. It has now become a weapon and the individual using it as such should be dealt with accordingly.
As much as you would like to legislate morality, it will never happen. Any given society can be broken down into three groups of people, preditor, prey and warrior.
The preditors are the criminals who live outside the norms of society, taking whatever they feel they deserve or desire, usually by force.
The prey are the individuals who go through life unconcerned about the world around them, expecting others around them to provide them with protection and help supply all their other needs. They are either unwilling or unable to defend or provide for themselves if found outside the group.
The warriors are those individuals who will go between preditor and prey to defend those who are unable to defend themselves or to defend their own life and home when threatened.
This being said, The question we shoud be asking is how to stop the preditors before they are able to commit an act or how to deal with them after the fact. We need to deal with the main desease not the symptom.
You think that enacting more laws and posting signs will deter the preditors/criminals. How many people disobey speed limit signs? Criminals by nature do not follow or obey rules/laws that we create to keep society functioning smoothly. We need to stop trying to come up with all the excuses for why criminals do what they do and start dealing with them for what they do. They make the concious decision to rape, rob, murder or assault someone, so why should we let them plead down to lesser charges because they had a bad childhood. As the old saying goes - excuses are like a**holes, everybody has one.
Self defense is an inherent right and no one should be admonished for exercising that right. Whatever you have to use or do to protect your life and property should not brought against you. This does not mean that if a criminal is in the process of doing something illegal that he also has the right of self defense.
As for concealed carry. Law abiding citizens who desire to carry a concealed firearm have a constitutional right to do. If you are carrying a concealed firearm for self protection, the odds are that no one will even know you have it until the need arises. Criminals are the ones who come in brandishing the "weapon" from the get go and disregard any sign or law restricting this action.
Firearms are tools just like any other tool when used for its intended purpose. Weapons are any tool used for other than its intended purpose.
Ken wrote: When the second admendment was written it was carefully worded to include the necessity of regulating the people who will be armed. This is the only place in the constitution where the government is specifically directed to regulate certain people, ie people with guns. It was clear then, and it is clear today.
It was clear then, and the founding fathers supplied plenty of peripheral evidence to prove it; but it evidently is not at all clear today, or you wouldn't be making the arguments of a semi-illiterate 12-year-old's Junior High arguing essay.
To repeat: "a well regulated militia" plainly refers to the entity of the militia. Your attempt to make it comprise any and all regulation applied to the individuals comprising the milita is not in the "plain meaning" of the constitution at all; it is interpolation. Specifically, yours.
Second, you might spend some time contemplating the difference between having a law, the capability to enforce a law, and the actual act of enforcing a law. They're not the same thing.
I find these comments to be very informative and entertaining! Something must have "gone right," that such an ad hoc collection of well written and generally well thought opinions appear as if vacuum fluctuations.
That said, our Bill of Rights grants or establishes absolutely nothing. Rather, it acknowledges and protects the inherent rights of myself, my sons and my daughters.
Eleanor Holmes has a low IQ; and that's one reason why handguns are banned in DC. She's also a liar (all socialists are liars). Gun banners don't respond to logic or sound reasoning or facts; they simply want guns banned.
There exists now a growing trend by local government to ignore laws that protect gun ownership - lets see how gun owners handle that. This trend will keep (us) gun owners in litigation forever. Eventually we will need a President who will be willing to send in troops to enforce the Constitution.
'Home Rule' is nazi rule, so never support it. Home rule is the cause of most local gun restrictions.
Americans (including gun owners) don't respect their Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the concept of limited government. If they did then home rule would not exist and neither would restrictive gun laws.
Restrictive gun laws exist, in part, because of gun owners who don't respect the Constitution.
Njorl,
News item:
"South African Police are sheepishly acknowledging that 3,856 firearms are currently missing from their own inventory. This is just what they've been forced to admit to. The actual figure is, in all probability, much higher."
Need I say more?
Some STILL do not get it. "Restrictive gun laws exist, in part, because of gun owners who don't respect the Constitution.
Posted by Tory"
Legitimate gun owners as a group are respectful of the Constitution. CRIMINALS who have and use firearms are NOT generally respectful of law in general and certainly not the Constitution. Carry permits are issued after an FBI background check, and usually a state and local background check. Crimes committed with handguns by this group is minuscule, compared to the criminal. More restrictions on firearms have not generally made us safer. Look at the misrepresented crime figures submitted by D.C. in D.C. v. Heller and the original Parker v. D.C. case. Crime is way up in D.C., despite an effective ban on the use of firearms in the home for self-defense. Ken's idea of regulating gun owners is misguided in that the criminals are the ones NOT following the law in the first place. IF I were a criminal, I would love to know my victims were not armed. Find me a few more vertebrate judges and give these rapists, murderers and robbers real jail time for firearms violations and THEN talk to me about more firearm laws, most of which do not work. Even in California, the microstamping of bullet cases by the firearm will simply have the criminals use pre-microstamping firearms. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I'll give you a hint, criminals steal guns, they get them by straw sales, represented by someone with a cleaner background history, they crash their pickum up trucks into a gun store and load up, they buy them from other criminals and non-criminals on the street, they WILL have firearms. Charge $1,000 each and they will STILL have firearms. My suggestion, stop the knee-jerk response to ban all firearms and remove them from NON-criminals and ban and remove the CRIMINALS using the firearms for ill and harm. IF you choose the former and not the latter, when a criminal comes to you, or a terrorist, or someone in a disaster situation (Katrina?), do not come to me and say, gee, I wish I had not handed in my firearms. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. Our forefathers were not stupid men. I am not too sure about more recent additions to the republic.
Conservatives do not understand the constitution.
It says that gun owners are to be well regulated - not guns, gun owners.
Right now gun owners are out of control. They form gangs to intimidate neighborhoods, they deal drugs, they rob banks, they mug people, they shoot at drivers they don't like, they kill classmates, they murder family members, they kill themselves.
Gun owners are so out of control that even the highway patrol dare not approach a vehicle without wearing a bullet proof vest. They never know if a crazed gun owner is behind the wheel or not.
This has come about because we have been too lax in following the constitutional mandated imperitive to regulate gun owners. We will know that we have reached the correct amount of regulation when domestic tranquility is restored and we no longer have police fearful for their lives each time they come into contact with the public they serve.
ken, how can you rationalize your interpolation of "well regulated" with the unambiguous "shall not be infringed"; the way I see it, your "regulation" would infringe upon our 2nd Amendment right.
Ken,
Step up and tell us what you think the regulations were meant to be?
Ken, your logic is inverted or lacking. Conservatives and federalists and most libertarians understand the Constitution reasonably well. Self-defense and the right to keep and bear arms were the people, the militia was a reference to indicate one reason this was important. The right to self-defense is a natural, individual right and not the collective right the revisionists would have us believe. It is not reasonable by any standard to prevent people from protecting themselves in their own home. I guess in Washington, D.C. residents can use their trigger-locked or DISassembled firearm as a club against an armed attacker. Residents of D.C. 0, criminals 1. The right of the people shall not be infringed. What part of that do you not understand? Also, your use of the word well-regulated, disciplined reads more like register firearms, try a buyback, confiscate and destroy. THEN, I would suggest you get a Louisville Slugger baseball bat to defend yourself and your family against a well-armed "regulated" criminal, because that is about as well armed as you will be. Of course, you can always bring a knife to a gunfight when 3 dudes break in your front door at 3:00 AM in the morning. Good luck!
A conservative Republican and supporter of the 2nd amendment and all the rest of the amendments, including the 14th.
I just have to add this: For all the people that think that private gun ownership would never stand a chance against a nation's army, consider this:
America's standing army is how big? 480,000? 500,000? At it's largest the US Army had 780,000.
Now compare that to 90 MILLION GUN OWNERS in America, owning some 200 MILLION firearms.
I don't care what kind of imagination one might possess, there is no earthly way that the army could smoke out 300 million US citizens. Heck, they can't even smoke out 30,000 Iraqis.
So to the people who say that the Jews wouldn't have wanted guns 'round 1937 or so, you need to take a serious bite of reality. If the 6 million Jews (and additional 6 million "other" victims of the Nazis) were armed, you think a few hundred thousand SS troops could have dealt with that?
More and more I an convinced that the liberal's position is to set up a world where no one has to THINK any more. No would have to think because all the choices are made for you by legislators. The only choice you'd have to make is between the latte or the mocha at Starbucks.
For all those conservatives who try to ignore the constitution or downplay the plain words of the second admendment you need to leave your idealogical cocoons and look at the document from the perspective of objective reality.
The second admendment is the only place in the constitution where regulation is specifically called for. Who is to be regulated? Well the people who take up arms are to be regulated. How are they to be regulated? They are to be well-regulated.
And how will we know when the people with guns are well regulated? We will know when we have domestic tranquility restored and gun owners are not forming criminal gangs and are not taking pot shots at drivers and are not so intimidating that even the police are afraid to approach them without a bullet proof vest.
The second admendment is not like the first admendment right to free speech.
An individual can never lose the right to free speech in its entirity. That is because it is a basic human right. So for example a person may lose the right to promulagate stock buying opportunies because of some criminal action they have taken in the past. But they still maintain the right to talk about politics or anything else.
A person can however lose the right to own a gun in entirity. Even a law citizen citizen who shows homicidial tendencies can have his guns taken away, before he commits any crime whatsoever. And any kind of felony, even one were a gun is not used, will forever preclude that person from owning a gun. They can not even own a gun for sport shooting or for hunting.
This is because gun ownership is not and has never been an individual right but is a right that by needs comes with regulation as per the constitution.
kfd,
It is the second admendment that calls for gun owners to be regulated. This may be to you an unsolvable dilemna but it is not a problem in reality.
Without regulation we get what we have today: armed gangs that threaten our peace and tranquility, homicidal maniacs that slaughter fellow students or postal workers, drivers who take pot shots at each other for no reason at all, and civil servants who are so frightened by the armed citizenry that they have to wear bulletproof vests just to do their jobs.
This is not what the framers of the constitution had in mind. They knew what an unregulated armed mob of people can become and how civil society can be destroyed by them. So they wrote into the second admendment the necessity of regulation on those who take up arms.
We need to take the constitution seriously and begin to regulate people with guns.
Ken, are you truly so obtuse or just trying to stir the pot? The historical meaning of the 2nd Amendment has been correctly explained in detail several times and you return to the exact argument ad nauseum. The court of appeals ruling on the DC case pointed out the error in that argument.
Stooxie, I think, nearly got it right. If we are too take the example of ken as an 'average' liberal, it would not point to not wanting to think, but to not being able to think.
In one respect, I will agree with ken. Criminals using guns need to be regulated in the way he wants to use the word. We should jail them all for a long time. I resent his implication that just owning a gun makes one a criminal. Since ours is a country of 'innocent until proven guilty', isn't the DC law in violation of that tenet?
steve, it is the constitution itself that says that gun owners need to be regulated, and regulated well. It is not me. If the writers had chosen to leave that part out of the constitution you would be on stronger grounds with your argument. But they purposefully added the point that regulation is a necessity for all gun owners.
They could have added the same need for regulation on anyone with a printing press, but didn't.
This tells us that gun ownership is not a right in the same category as is the right of free speach.
The second admendment does not recognize an individual right like the first admendment does. Instead it recognizes that while individuals may chose to be armed it is needful that they be well regulated.
We are not failing in having armed populations. We are failing the constitution in not regulating the people with arms. Hence we live in terror of gangs, kooks, and criminals. This is not how it was supposed to be. The government was formed in order to ensure domestic tranquility. We will never have it until we take back our civil society from the gun nuts and provide the serious oversight and regulations that gun owners need.
No, it says that to get a well-regulated MILITIA (which is desirable for the security of a free state), the right of the PEOPLE (of which the militia is a _subset_) "shall not be infringed".
It is the MILITIA which is regulated, NOT the _people_ who enjoy an uninfringed right to keep and bear arms.
Carl, your re-writing of the second admendment doesn't count.
Let's use it the way it was actually written, shall we?
And the way it was written it says that a 'well regulated militia is necessary' and we know that the militia referred to the armed citizens in general.
The framers knew that uncontrolled armed mobs would lead to exactly what we have today and that is why the second admendment is worded the way it is and not like the first admendment.
Note that it is the only place in the entire document that specifically calls for regulations on a certain class of people. That is not by accident. They could have left it out, but didn't.
The problem is not that we have an armed citizenry, the problem is that this armed citizenry is out of control and need regulating, as per the constitution.
ken, if we're going to use the 2nd amendment the way it was actually written, let's use ALL of it: "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".
The framers also knew that without checks on its power, a central government would become overbearing and tyrannical. Without ALL of the basic freedoms that the Bill of Rights recognizes, the people would have no final power over the government. The 2nd amendment allows the people to defend the other freedoms.
Furthermore, the founding fathers felt that these freedoms were so basic that it was not necessary to enumerate them. It was only at the urging of certain individuals that the Bill of Rights was included in the Constitution.
Just imagine had Mr. Jeff Goldman been in attendance at the US constitutional convention some two centuries ago. His assignment: compose an ammendment that will go between numbers one and three. Heres what he might have come up with:
----The right of the states to form well regulated, armed militias shall not be infringed. Or, the right of the people to keep arms for the purpose of participating in well regulated militias shall not be infringed. Or, some other variant of this line of thought concerning the association of individual citizens and (military type) arms.
But, most fortunately, profound wisdom prevailed, and the people who knew and understood tyrany gave us that 2nd ammendment which as it is worded, gives those armed forces (militias of the 1790s) much incentive to remain within the bounds of civilian regulation. Oceans of blood and innumerable mass graves around the world give testimony to potential consequences of alternative views of armed citizens (or unarmed subjects).
Mr. Goldman, you may be a good and well intioned guy, but I'm glad you wern't there.
It is quite obvious that the Founding Fathers had an overwhelming distrust of government and that view is quite evident in the quotes I've provided.
Again, Ken we're not enforcing current gun laws adequately. Why then, do you continue to campaign for more? And what's so special about gun control laws that those intent on murder and mayhem will suddenly respect the law?
Your insistence that "gunowners are out of control" is an insult to all law abiding citizens. But then, that's your motivation, isn't it?
The Founding Fathers on Arms
"Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence … from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable … the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that's good."
George Washington
First President of the United States
"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside … Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them."
Thomas Paine
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
Richard Henry Lee
American Statesman, 1788
"The great object is that every man be armed." and "Everyone who is able may have a gun."
Patrick Henry
American Patriot
"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"
Patrick Henry
American Patriot
"Those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not."
Thomas Jefferson
Third President of the United States
"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that … it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; … "
Thomas Jefferson
letter to Justice John Cartwright, June 5, 1824. ME 16:45.
"The best we can help for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
Alexander Hamilton
The Federalist Papers at 184-8
kfd,
congradulations you are making some progress. It is unusual for a conservative to acknowledge the actual wording of the entire second admendment. Good for you. Reading it in it's entirety you will see that it specifically calls for the regulation of people bearing arms, ie the militia, as necessary. Glad we cleared that one up.
Tim,
The problem we face is not that there are too few gun owners, the problem is that they remain unregulated instead of 'well regulated' as is required for security. This is all plainly stated in the text of the second admendment.
Hence we have gun owners forming gangs, we have gun owners dealing drugs, we have gun owners robbing stores, we have gun owners shooting drivers of cars, we have gun owners killing fellow students or fellow workers, we have gun owners murdering family members etc.
This is not what the framers had in mind. They would be aghast at the breakdown in civil society caused by gun owners and shocked that we allowed the needed gun owner regulation to proceed in such a haphazard fashion that today even our police are so fearful of the citizens that they dare not appoach us without wearing a bulletproof vests.
This lawlessless does not comport with the purpose of the government they set up which was to establish domestic tranquility. If you take the constitution seriously then there is no alternative but to work to achieve the 'well regulated' goal set by the second admendment.
Ken, your deliberate misuse of the term "gunowner" suggests the only reason you're posting here is to insult and otherwise malign law abiding gunowners, both right and left leaning. I see no reason to engage you in further conversation on this subject.
Once again, the summary of the DC Circuit Court's recent decision on DC's gun ban (pg 46):
"To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia."
Normally I wouldn't say this to another commentator but fact that ken keeps recycling the same garbage in the face of well thought replies, without addressing those replies shows that ken is a fool.
Let's use Ken's logic and just talk over and over about one side of the amendment. Everytime he and his ilk suggest we regulate, as though that were the only important thing, just reply, "the right of the people to keep and bare arms shall not be infringed".
There is no ambiguity in that last statement. The right of the people. SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
There is certain question to what regulation means, how much, when, where, who, etc.
sam,
isn't that exactly what gun nuts have been doing for the last several decades? And isn't that exactly why we live amid so many gun owners who are out of control? Those tactics have led us to a civil society that would be unrecognized by our founding fathers. They did not want gun owners to be so poorly regulated that we live in terror of armed gangs and cannot even drive down the street safely or send our kids to school without worry. They expressed this plainly in the second admendment.
The problem today is that the gun nuts have twisted the full meaning of the second admendment until it no longer serves the purpose set by the constitution itself, which was to provide for domestic tranquility. By refusing to respect the second admendment the gun nuts have caused untold harm to us as a nation. Our police forces are so concerned about this they will not appoach a citizen without wearing a bullet proof vest. This is not the kind of society our founding fathers wanted.
Just look around you Sam, but shed the idealogical glasses and look at the world as it actually is. The problem is not that we have too many gun owners, the population is very well armed, the problem is the armed population is not at all being 'well regulated', as per the second admendment.
Ken:
Will "domestic tranquility" be well served when coroner's reports begin to cite slit throats, beheadings, and crushed sculls as causes of death more frequently than gunfire? Dealing decisively with crackhead street thugs and their gangs will accomplish much more in this regard without attacking the pursuits of law abiding citizens.
Jeff Goldman wrote:
"Would any of those (Duke) students who were falsely accused of rape been better off if they had had a gun?"
They might have been had a mob tried to castrate them.
Woodpiggie,
The constitution says nothing about regulating the people who own knives, it does talk about regulating people who own guns. Please just read the second admendment.
The framers of the constitution recognized the danger of unregulated mobs of gun owners terrorizing large swaths of territory and of crazed gun owners slaughtering innocents in a maniacal fury of hate. Hence, in their wisdom they recognized the need to regulate gun owners. And this makes sense as we see that in our failure to implement fully the second admendment we have gun owners causing the greatest harm to domestic tranquility - knife wielders not so much.
If you want to discuss the need for regulation outside of the what the constitution says should be regulated I suggest we wait for a different thread. This one is about the constitutionally recognized requirement that gun owners be well regulated.
A few points:
1. Ken applauds kfd for acknowledging the entire 2nd Amendment, yet himself refuses to focus on anything more than 1 word of it ("regulated", which did not mean the same thing in 1790 as it does today, since the regulatory state had not even been conceived).
2. Ken's argument that the 2nd Amendment was to "provide for domestic tranquility" is just false, and would effectively read the amendment out of existence. The 2nd Amendment, as with the rest of the Bill of Rights, must be read as an anti-Federalist requirement. If you read the Federalist Papers, you will find that the Federalists were completely opposed to any Bill of Rights; however, to placate the anti-Federalists (who were what we might call today minarchists), the anti-Federalists were given a Bill of Rights- every single element of the Bill of Rights thus can, should, and must be read primarily as a safeguard AGAINST the goverment, allowing for armed resistance if the government abuses its power. Ken's idea that somehow the 2nd Amendment existed to protect the government from being overthrown is completely anathema to the purpose of the Bill of Rights and the 2nd Amendment. We can never forget that the drafters of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution owed the existence of those documents to the fact that they had just fought a successful insurrection AGAINST the government; that the 2nd Amendment exists to prevent the very thing they had just accomplished makes no sense whatsoever.
3. Ken's argument that somehow the problem with crime is a result of a LACK of regulation is also silly. The fact is that 50 years ago, there was relatively little regulation of firearms; what we have seen over the past 50 years is that increased gun laws have little or no correlation to gun crime. What we also see is that there is a direct correlation, though, between the severity of the War on Drugs and gun crime.
4. Just to re-emphasize- Ken is using a modern definition of the word "regulated" in order to justify just about any type of interference with the gun ownership rights. However, the only definition of the word that is relevant is the 1790 definition, which other posts have discussed at length. If you could use the modern definition of anything in the Constitution, you could simply deprive the Constitution of any meaning whatsoever by legislatively redefining any term in the Constitution.
I'm not particularly happy with guns, or the people who want unrestricted access to them, and yeah, it's pretty much a no-brainer that unfettered access to firearms will lead to more deaths. There is also the fact that the second amendment has some confusing language that can be easily interpreted as imposing some restrictions on gun ownership.
Fine. Granted. For the sake of argument, let's assume that's all true.
Imho, there should still be few, very few restrictions on gun ownership. There's no particularly fancy reasoning involved, just this: What is being argued for, in the end, is a certain narrow interpretation of the second amendment. Suppose that interpretation is accepted.
What's to prevent similar narrow interpretations of the other nine particulars of the Bill of Rights? Would the harm resulting from those narrow interpretations outweigh any supposed benefits from a streamlined right to bear arms?
One could argue, for example, that the right to not have to bear an unreasonable search and seizure, or the right not to have troops quartered in your home is similarly open to such interpretations. Or how about that 'right to privacy' that formed the basis of Roe vs Wade?
No, _all_ the amendments should be interpreted as broadly as possible. And it is very hard to argue some sort of exceptionalism for any one particular one. Which means, like it or not, that access to firearms should not be made restrictive.
Mark, that is absolute hoot.
So to you, and your fellow conservatives, the word 'regulated' does not mean regulated, but something more like 'unregulated'. That is just really funny. Thank you.
Your reading skills are not very good. I said the purpose of the constitution, as set out in the Preamble is, among other things, to establish, and presumably maintain, domestic tranquility. Since the second admendment is part and parcel of the constitution, by admendment, it must needs therefore share in that purpose, as must every other line in the constitution. If conservatives would only take the constitution seriously this stuff would not have to be explained so often. You can read it and see the purpose of the constution yourself.
And Mark while there may be many causes of crime the one focused on in this thread has to do with the failure of the second admendment to be taken seriously and implemented as intended by the framers. The only regulation specifically called for in the constitution is regulation on gun owners, but there it is, in black and white, for everyone to see as plain as day.
You may not like what the constitution says, but it says what it says.
ScentofViolet,
But where else in the constitution, except in the text of the second admendment is there a specific acknoledgment of the need to regulate a particular class of people? There isn't. So none of the other rights have any constitutional restrictions written in, only the right to bear arms has that restiction.
That may seem like a conundrum to you but it really isn't.
You're not reading what I said, Ken. Let's look at the actual amendment:
Do you disagree that there are several interpretations to the clause "A well regulated Militia'? If so, you really shouldn't be here. If not, why is your particular interpretation so obviously the right one?
So really, when you say "But where else in the constitution, except in the text of the second admendment is there a specific acknoledgment of the need to regulate a particular class of people?" you are assuming the conclusion that your interpretation is the correct one. Was that intentional? I don't know. But cut it out, either way it's bad arguing or arguing in bad faith.
To resume, if there are multiple interpretations of the meaning of the text, it makes sense to ask what the are repercussions of reading the text in a certain way beyond the narrow, obvious ones. I maintain that this is the camel's nose in the tent, the foot in the door, what have you, to resritctive interpretations on other amendments.
Don't try to pretend that isn't possible, or hasn't happened already, albeit implicitly. But I am not sure exactly what your position is, so if I may, would narrower, more restrictive on other amendments be worth the cost of reading your interpretation into the second amendment? Are you saying you think the risk that this would happen is minimal to nonexistant?
I wonder why we don't hear anything about criminals invading police stations or military bases. Hmmm.
Ken:
Is the word "regulated" associated with "The People" who are keeping and bearing, or the word "militia"?
Ken, can you say SOPHISTRY?
Ken:
Is the Bill of Rights part of the original text of the Constitution? No- in fact the Federalists fought quite hard against the inclusion of the Bill of Rights, as Hamilton argued in Federalist 84. Why, then, does the Bill of Rights exist? As a response to anti-Federalist concerns that the Constitution would create a too-powerful central government. So in what way can the preamble of the Constitution be used to limit the intent of a set of amendments that are intended to limit the Constitution itself? It can't.
Also, as Woodpiggie again points out, the word "regulated" is clearly associated only with the word "militia" and not "the people."
Also important (and something that hasn't been addressed here) is that the 2nd Amendment begins: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of A FREE STATE"(my emphasis). The phrase "a free state" cannot and does not refer to the federal government- every other reference to "a state" or "the state" in the early Constitution either refers to a foreign government or, more often, to one member of the United States (we tend to forget that the USA was not considered a single entity until many, many years later). So, to the extent regulation is permitted, the 2nd Amendment is only permitting that regulation by the individual states- a right the States clearly had at the time, especially under the 10th Amendment (which pretty much permitted state legislation on just about anything). So, if you want to argue that individual states may regulate firearms, perhaps you have something, since the incorporation debate over the 14th Amendment has been a complete mess for decades (though I would argue a properly interpreted privileges and immunities clause would undermine much state regulation of firearms). But as far as I can tell, you are arguing for federal regulation of firearms, rather than state regulation.
Mind you, I don't think all gun control is unconstitutional, as I do think many, maybe even most, rational forms of gun control would survive strict scrutiny analysis by SCOTUS even if the 2nd Amendment is interpreted as an individual right.
Here are a couple of questions who believe in private ownership of firearms:
1. Where on the list of hierarchy of weapons should the line be drawn between that that can be owned privately and that that cannot be, and why? We could put weapons in order from least lethal to most lethal, and I presume everyone will draw the line somewhere. Something like a front-loader ancient firearm would be the least lethal, and a hydrogen bomb would be the most lethal. In between would be revolvers, machine guns, tanks with the necessary ammunition, and so forth. So which one is the final weapon that private citizens should be allowed to own legally and why?
2. If firearms in the hands of ordinary citizens is such an effective tool against tyranny, why didn't all those millions of Soviet soldiers who had access to firearms during WWII overthrow Stalin's regime after defeating the Germans?
The problem with D.C., like many other urban areas, is not a gun problem. It is, to put it delicately, a demographic problem. We have inner city areas where poverty, ignorance, drugs and gangs are rampant. The individuals illegally using guns are not your upright citizens, they are criminals. And criminals, by definition, disregard laws. The law-abiding, in this toxic climate, are forced by law to be defenseless victims. Unfortunately, as long as overreaching gun control is a major tenet of the party in power, the victims will continue to be victimized, and the criminals will reign supreme.
I hope that some visitors to this site understand that it is good to take away firearms from criminals and prosecute them. It is not a good idea to disarm men and women who have committed no crime and have the natural right to protect themselves and their families in their home and car. I maintain that firearms are being taken from the wrong people and the ones who should not have them and are committing crimes. It is an emotional issue and their are reasonable common grounds to permit self-defense, hunting and the shooting sport competitions and target shooting without disarming all America. We did cut out (Ken would like REGULATE) automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns and the like, and certain armor piercing bullets, etc. For Washington D.C. to require people to keep a shotgun or rifle in their home not loaded, with either a trigger lock or the weapon disassembled borders on criminal. Instant background checks are great, the federal form for purchase now includes mental health consideration. Judges do not always tack on the additional time for firearms violations and I have seen a convicted felon be placed on probation for a firearm at a public gathering. Now that is dumb! A retired Baltimore policeman told me that he and his wife came out of the theatre in Towson, MD and three thugs came up and demanded money from him. He pulled out a .45 1911 and pointed it at them and they QUICKLY dispersed and no shot was fired and the policeman and his wife lived that night. Unfortunately, by the broadcast media, we just hear mostly about the shootings and not the thousands and thousands of cases where firearms save lives. My sense is that it is very dangerous and foolish to disarm law-abiding Americans, period, not in storms, floods, hurricanes, other natural disasters, never. I would ask you to consider what you would have done in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina if armed thugs tried to come in your home, forcefully, AFTER Mayor Nagin had the sheriffs and others take away firearms from people who had done nothing wrong? I guess we can use baseball bats and clubs and perhaps even take a large kitchen knife to a gunfight. Remember, the criminals are going to be armed. Are you?
1) Almost anything can be a weapon when placed in the wrong hands, whether it's a golf club or a Cadillac. In the endless series of compromises law abiding citizens have made, it appears that 50 caliber weapons are the dividing line.
Guns, regardless of caliber, are neither gun nor bad. They can only serve to amnplify the good or the bad in the man. As anyone who has put any thought at all to this question will tell you, the real weapon lies between the ears.
2) Who says they didn't try? Uncle Joe slaughtered by the millions in an effort to consolidate and protect his power. Stalin redefined the word "ruthless". Very unusual for someone on left side of the political spectrum (ahem).
Anyone who's studied American history can explain that the American revolution wouldn't have been possible without an armed private citizenry.
And on the other side of the coin, virtually every household in Switzerland has a full auto "assault rifle" in the closet as the male head of every household is mandated to be part of their militia. And I'm sure it will probably surprise the heck outta most every anti-gunner but Switzerland has one of the lowest murder rates in the world.
I'm puzzled by those who appear to be so freaked out by the prospect of the private citizen possessing firearms. Why no panic over these same private citizens and the incredibly easy access to alcohol?
If they can't be trusted with firearms, then they sure as hell can't be trusted with booze.
I'll make you anti-gunner types an offer. Enact strict alcohol control. Use any and all schemes you've offered for firearms. Let's see how it works. Then we'll talk.
Mark,
The Bill of Rights was enacted along with the body of the constitution as a package deal. I don't know what your point is but if you think it was added some years later you are mistaken. It was this packaged together deal that originally formed govenment. I will assume you are just ignorant of the facts and not really trying to mislead people about this.
Mark, ScentofViolets, Woodpiggie,
If you think the word 'militia' means something like the word 'moon' then you guys might have a point. And granted the word has been given a bad name by the current generation of gun nuts who are given to organinzing themselves into unlawful and unregulated militias. But that is not what the word means and you guys should know better.
Follow me on this: The founding fathers could have written the constitution differently, we could have, for example have been a monarchy as many were clamoring for George Washington to be the first American King. But they chose the kind of government they really wanted and thought best for themselves and for their posterity.
That government was established by the Constitution and its attendent Bill of Rights.
One of the stated purposes of the new federal government was to establish domestic tranquility, as the preamble tells us, and in the second admendment, which was enacted at the same time, this idea was repeated by insisting that a well reglated militia was necessary for the security of a state.
So what did they mean by militia? Simple, it meant white males within a certain age that owned guns. And it was this certain class of people that the constitution insists should be well regulated and gives us the reason why - security.
Now do the people living is DC enjoy either domestic tranquility or security as was promised to them by the founding fathers? Or do they live in terror of gun toting unregulated mobs and well armed maniacal individuals?
George Washington who I think understood the constitution and the rights of citizens as well as anyone called up the militia to put down the unruly mobs in western Pennsylvania - this is known as the Whiskey Rebellion. He could do this because the government that he along with the other founding fathers formed insisted that people who owned arms be organized into well regulated militias.
That is the kind of government they gave to themselves. If it was good enough for them to have well regulated gun owners then it should be good enough for us as well.
For too long now our civil society has paid the price of gun nuts insisting on an unfettered right without any acknowledment of the comcomitant duty that accompanies that right. It is time we start taking the constitution seriously and give to gun owners the kind of regulation that our forefathers insisted upon in the constitution.
Tim, so you believe that 50 caliber should be the dividing line. But you have to admit that there is nothing special about that number. Your wording, "in the endless series of compromies," clearly indicates ambiguity and consternation. If you admit that there should be a dividing line, then surely reasonable people could disagree what that line should be. And the only logical conclusion one can reach is that even pro-gun advocates believe that some weapons should be banned. Why are you banning shoulder-fired missiles, for example? If we make shoulder-fired missiles illegal, wouldn't only the criminals have these missiles, who are unconcerned with the legality of their actions anyway? What about tanks with the appropriate ammunition? Hydrogen bombs?
Ken, I asked you an honest question, and you're ducking:
Since you didn't answer the question, I'm going to assume that you know well that there are in fact differing interpretations, and that you really can't point to any definitve argument that says your interpretation is the right one.
Nor did you answer this:
Let me be more specific: do you think giving up the right to privacy in certain circumstances is a good exchange for a narrow interpretation - your specific narrow interpretation - of the second amendment, which would allow more restrictions on the ownership of firearms? This isn't a hard question, nor are these tricky semantic traps. I honestly want to know.
Personally, I don't agree on a "dividing line" as possession of any certain material item has little to nothing to do with intent. I could have a bazooka strapped across my back and I would still present much less a threat to society than a Charles Manson would be if he were strolling down the street armed with a slingshot.
But we'e got a bunch of handwringers within our society who can't or won't admit that reality. So we gunowners have compromised in hopes of getting the gungrabbers off our collective backs.
Now how about that alcohol control offer? I don't for once believe that gun control is an effective means of crime control.
Wouldn't alcohol control be a surefire way to prove me wrong?
Njorl ... gun ownership is a right, not given by government. Driving is a privilege given by the state.Adding more to the 20,000+ gun laws only affect the law abiding and does nothing. That is why bad guys are called criminals. Laws do not affect them. "Plastic guns" like my Glock and Kahr 9mm actually have more steel in them than some other traditional handguns. "Plastic guns" are a moot point, they pose no threat because of their frame composition.
Jeff Goldman ...
Guns in the hands of law abiding does have a tremendous affect against tyranny. I suggest you look at some of the actions taken by armed citizens in protecting their families and neighborhoods in the aftermath of Katrina(the weapons not confiscated by corrupt government of Ray Nagin, violating both Federal and state constitutions). But not just Katrina, the L.A. riots also come to mind. Make no mistake, even small groups of armed citizens can make a huge difference. History proves this to be true.
Oh, by the way, those Soviet soldiers were disarmed on returning home by their loving government.
Guns are not Hydrogen bombs. All explosives and cannon are called ordinance and therefore can not be owned by private citizens. Automatic weapons can be owned by private citizens, but carry a heavy Federal tax and are prohibitively expensive.
Do not confuse semi auto guns with auto ... way way different things.
Lorenzo ...
Even your fists of fury would be no match for an armed predator with nothing to lose. If that were the case I would suggest that my local SWAT team would not need their MP5's and shotguns and just wade in with their CQB skills. Or put this way, as long as a law officer needs to carry a weapon, I think I will keep mine.
J-Jon ...
If I or anyone else so decides to defend with a carried handgun, I would think that they are law abiding folks with concealed carry permits. Having to pass safety and marksmanship protocols to achieve this permit over several hours in the classroom and range, I would also think that they have thought it through. If you decide not to defend yourself, God bless you. Many choose to.
ken ...
I am very well regulated, about 100 rounds a month to be exact. All downrange into the X.
Also, the militia in times of need would be made up of private citizens, armed with privately owned firearms, as it was when the Constitution was written. The same thought applies today. I believe it may be you who has not thought this out correctly. The monks and young people of Burma, I think, show what the non-ownership of firearms means.
All, it seems that we, the people posting here, come from different political backgrounds. Some are gun owners, some are not it seems. The fact of the matter is the Bill of Rights guarantees that the government will not usurp any of those rights therein. Rights not given to us by our loving officials in Washington, but handed down from a much higher source. Lets get on with it.
Those so avid against the ownership of firearms and so ready to excise it from the Constitution should know that its loss would certainly accelerate the loss of the 1st A and the ability to discuss topics in forums such as this.
So, Tim, you don't believe in any dividing line? If one had the money, in your view it is acceptable for a private citizen to own a tank with the ammunition to go with it? Or a hydrogen bomb?
I am not entirely sure about your point about alcohol probibition. I am guessing your point is that alcohol prohibiton didn't work, so a gun ban won't either. But this is incorrect for three reasons.
One is that it is much harder to manufacture a gun than it is to manufacture alcohol. While I am sure that there are machine shop experts out there who could do it, the level of expertise and organization required is on an entirely different level. Two, the consumption curve for illegal guns is different from illegal alcohol. In countries where guns are illegal, most criminals do not find a way to purchase illegal guns. For example, in Slovakia, low-level gypsy criminals have to make do with knives or other less-lethal weapons. It is not true that criminals will find firearms whether they are legal or not. Three, alcohol prohibition was not an entire failure, in the sense that it did drastically reduce the amount of alcohol cosnumed in the United States.
Newton, the LA riots and the Katrina situation are examples where a group of people (mostly white homeowners) clearly recognized an illegitimate foreign invader (black criminals). In such a situation, firearms are useful. But neither one of these situations is an example where firearms were utilized to thwart off tyranny.
I would gladly replace those 20,000 gun laws with just one that bans private ownership of firearms.
I understand that under current law in the United States private citizens are not allowed to own explosives and hydrogen bombs. But would you be in favor or allowing the private ownership of these items. If not, where do you draw the line and why? Couldn't an explosive come in quite handy if a citizen has to defend his freedom against a would-be tyrant?
I know Soviet soldiers were disarmed, but why didn't they overthrow Stalin while they still had their weapons?
For the sake of this argument, the dividing line is a 50 cal weapon. That's as much as I'll concede. The point is, and always has been, government prohibitions don't work. The law of supply and demand reign supreme. Always have and always will.
Fully functional automatic weapons have been constructed in prison workshops. I've seen the pictures. And let's not forget the black market. All kinds of weapons are manufactured worldwide. What's to stop the Bloods and Crips from tossing a few cases of AK's onboard with every shipment of drugs across our porous borders?
Now back to alcohol. Since year in and year out, there are twice as many alcohol related deaths as firearms related deaths in the US, why is there no hue and cry for "alcohol control?" Surely if the schemes offered by anti-gunners were as sound as we are told they are, why shouldn't they be implemented for alcohol sales and possession? Why should anyone object?
I'm not advocating another Prohibition. That was an absolute flop and simply served to make crime families like the Kennedy's rich. But why not licensing, purchase limits, background checks, or any other of the myriad gun control proposals that we're told are certain to control those who don't obey the law?
People killed by the use and misuse of alcohol are just as dead, aren't they?
I have to ask, is the point of gun control really about public safety or is it simply a manifestation of the dislike of guns and the distrust of gunowners that drives the proponents of gun control?
Jeff ... Tim
Ordinance is not a firearm.
Gun ownership is a guaranteed Right. Like dissent. It shall not be infringed. Think Freedom of the press.
If it were true that bad guys can not get guns, then I wonder were all of those bad guys are getting theirs in D.C.? Do not they know they are banned?
Murder is illegal. So is rape. So is speeding. Shoplifting. Driving without a license. ETC. That is why I do not do those things. As a law abiding citizen my Right shall not be infringed upon.
Its a criminal problem. Its a drug problem. Its an education problem. Its a no Daddy at home problem.
Not a gun problem.
Scent of Voilets,
If the first admendment said something like the people who own printing presses need to be well regulated then you would have a point.
The only place in the entire constitution where anyone is specifically called on as in need of regulation is in the second admendment.
This does not carry over to the other rights which allow for as broad an interpretation as you like. The second admendment, in addition to the right, calls for those exercizing the right to be well regulated.
If you will look at the second admendment in its entirety and in relation to the rest of the constitution you will see that it is unique in this regard.
So your question on a quid pro quo tradeoff doesn't apply or even make any sense.
Ben Newton, but the second admendment itself says that gun owners are to be regulated.
There is nothing like that at all, anywhere in the constitution, about people who own printing presses.
The two rights are alike in some ways but the right to own a gun is clearly not unrestricted.
Tim, so now you do believe in a dividing line. Then everything I said in my previous post still holds. Which is:
"If you admit that there should be a dividing line, then surely reasonable people could disagree what that line should be. And the only logical conclusion one can reach is that even pro-gun advocates believe that some weapons should be banned. Why are you banning shoulder-fired missiles, for example? If we make shoulder-fired missiles illegal, wouldn't only the criminals have these missiles, who are unconcerned with the legality of their actions anyway? What about tanks with the appropriate ammunition? Hydrogen bombs?"
There are two reasons why we shouldn't be as concerned about alcohol as we should be about guns. One is that alchohol kills the user, whereas guns kill anybody.
Much more importantly, private gun ownership has nefarious effects on our democracy that alchohol abuse does not. Due to the threat that firearms represent to our citizens, politicians are under immense pressure to counteract that threat with whatever means possible. The appropriate response would be ban on firearms, but since that is not politically feasible, all that pressure ends up being channeled elsewhere.
There are many examples of this phenomenon. Our right to privacy is being eroded by surveillance cameras in an effort to make schools "safe." Children have been stripped of all constitutional protections while in custody of the school, yet prosecutors are under pressure to try them as an adult to make sure that they don't go on a school shooting.
Rather than banning these highly lethal weapons, our society attempts to identify those who hold the type of political views that lead to violence. Predictably, since almost all political views have violent and peaceful manifestations, those who hold unpopular, as opposed to violence-prone, political views are the ones being targeted for special police scrutiny. The list could go on and on. The response to private firearm owenership is an enormous drag on American democracy and the Second Amendment was major mistake by the founding fathers.
Ben,
You're absolutely right concerning the "ordinance vs firearms" point (and everything else you've posted here.) Cannons, anti-aircraft guns and nucweps are not practical for self defense, therefore I don't miss them nor do I want them frankly. But I am not naive enough to believe that the government's magic legislative wand will make these things go away. Same goes for ordinary firearms. It's wishful thinking.
The bad guys will always have weapons. Why should they have the advantage over ordinary law abiding citizens?
Ken wrote:
"The Bill of Rights was enacted along with the body of the constitution as a package deal. I don't know what your point is but if you think it was added some years later you are mistaken. It was this packaged together deal that originally formed govenment. I will assume you are just ignorant of the facts and not really trying to mislead people about this. "
Before you accuse someone of having their facts wrong, I suggest you have your facts straight:
1. 5/25/1787- Constitutional Convention
2. 9/17/1787- Final Draft of Constitution
3. 6/21/1788-NH becomes 9th state to ratify Constitution
4. 3/4/1789- Constitution becomes effective
5. 9/25/1789- Bill of Rights passed by Congress
6. 12/15/1791- Bill of Rights (minus eventual 27th Amendment) ratified by 2/3 states
Quote from beginning of Federalist 84 (Hamilton):
"The most considerable of these remaining objections is, that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights." The remainder of Federalist 84 attempts to answer concerns about the lack of a Bill of Rights.
If the above doesn't satisfy you, then here is an excerpt from wikipedia:
"Initially drafted by James Madison in 1789, the Bill of Rights was written at a time when ideological conflict between Federalists and anti-Federalists, dating from the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, threatened the Constitution's ratification. The Bill was influenced by George Mason's 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, the 1689 English Bill of Rights, works of the Age of Enlightenment pertaining to natural rights, and earlier English political documents such as the Magna Carta (1215). The Bill was largely a response to the Constitution's influential opponents, including prominent Founding Fathers, who argued that it failed to protect the basic principles of human liberty."
You will note that the Bill of Rights was not drafted until more than 2 years after the final draft of the Constitution, was not passed until 6 months after the Constitution had become effective, and was not ratified for another 2 years after that. I should think this would put the lie to your claim that the Bill of Rights was somehow intended to be part of the original Constitution and was a "package deal."
As for your argument that the "militia" exists solely for the defense of (rather than the defense against) the federal government, this discussion from Justice Story's 1833 Commentaries on the US Constitution pretty well refutes it:
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
From Justice Story's 1840 edition:
"One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offence to keep arms, and by substituting a regular army in the stead of a resort to the militia. The friends of a free government cannot be too watchful, to overcome the dangerous tendency of the public mind to sacrifice, for the sake of mere private convenience, this powerful check upon the designs of ambitious men."
Newton, DC is one small island in a sea of guns, so obviously that is not going to work well to stop criminals from getting guns. Having said that, undoubtedly there are violent criminal actions that would have happened if DC did not have the gun ban.
Obviously, the bigger the area with the gun ban, the better it will work. Very few criminals in Europe have a gun, the low-level losers usually attempt to operate with knives. I have seen it myself.
Jeff,
Bzzzzztttt!!! Alcohol use and misuse has a profound and horrible negative effect on our society. It figures prominently in crime. It's simply not true at all that alcohol only kills the user. That's utter nonsense.
I maintain medical imaging equipment and have been doing so for over 20 years. I can tell you first hand that number of alcohol use vs gunfire victims is overwhelmingly in favor of alcohol.
Again, it's your chance to demonstrate to us nonbelievers with none of those squishy Constitutional questions.
If you can demonstrate that any alcohol control scheme can keep alcohol out of the hands of those who misuse it, then I'll be a convert.
Until I see that I will remain highly skeptical of any gun control scheme offered as a crime control measure.
Tim, maybe a tank is not very useful against an ordinary criminal, but if the President of the U.S. decided to overthrow our democracy by ordering the army to install himself as tyrant, wouldn't you want and need a tank to fight back?
Jeff:
You ask a fair question about the dividing line. I said in a previous post that I think that many arms regulations would pass muster under the SCOTUS' strict scrutiny standard. This is an important standard because it prevents arbitrary line drawing, which is something I would generally oppose. However, under a strict scrutiny standard (ie, narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest), some things can clearly be ruled in as being a proper realm for government restriction of arms.
Prohibition against private ownership of nuclear weapons presents the clearest example of this, since the potential damage is so tremendously large and it is impossible to conceive of a use of privately owned nuclear weapons that would not pose an inherent and massive threat to the citizenry as a whole. Additionally, I believe you can make a very good argument that much of the current machine gun regime would pass strict scrutiny since it is not an absolute prohibition (with some important modifications like eliminating the arbitrary line between pre-and-post 1986 guns). Arbitrary prohibitions on "assault weapons", however, would definitely be unconstitutional under strict scrutiny.
Also, if you would like a defined line, Justice Thomas Cooley gave a fairly succint statement of this in his 1880 General Principles of Constitutional Law:
"The arms intended by the Constitution are such as are suitable for the general defence of the community against invasion or oppression, and the secret carrying of those suited merely to deadly individual encounters may be prohibited."
Of course, this statement is extremely vague and fails to define what might be "suited merely to deadly individual encounters," but at least it gives a decent starting point for debate. Certainly, offensive weapons like nuclear warheads or conventional missiles would not be suitable to defensive purposes.
Jeff,
Say somehow Hillary is coronated President and for some reason decides to declare herself ruler for life, formalizes the Left's war on the NRA and orders the Army to disarm the citizenry. Just suppose that unlikely event comes about.
I suspect a significant portion of our Armed Forces would choose to disobey our newly ordained Fearless Leader and their weaponry would subsequently be on the side of the Good Guys. (Recent polls conducted of members of the Armed Forces indicates that's exactly what would happen.)
Mark, the Bill of Rights was indeed part of a packaged deal to get the original constitution enacted. I may have confused you by saying that it was not several years later, when in fact, as you point out it was two years later. I suppose 'two' does not qualify as 'several'. Sorry about that. I meant merely to point out the historical fact that they were part and parcel of a negotiated package deal and the timelines were essentially concurrent.
And as to the purpose of the militia: George Washington used to to put down unregulated mobs who were attacking Federal authorities. He was one of the founding fathers and had a reliable understanding of the purpose of the second admendment. So much for your theory.
Jeff ...
I do not know the races of those involved, but one thing I think is true, tyranny can come in many forms, and I believe would be relative to those being
attacked, gang raped, having their heating oil and food stolen, and being murdered.
Oh wait! This did not happen in the instance we are speaking of! I wonder why? Oh yeah, they could fend for themselves when the WHOLE system broke down. Tyranny my friend? Relative.
I guess its good we have the Constitution to keep from passing inane law like a gun ban. Only the innocent would suffer. When local police can be weapon free, I will feel better. It takes on the average 6 to 7 minutes for a 9-1-1 call to be acted upon. Better to be prepared I think.
I am glad you said that firearms would be useful in some situations:
"Newton, the LA riots and the Katrina situation are examples where a group of people (mostly white homeowners) clearly recognized an illegitimate foreign invader (black criminals). In such a situation, firearms are useful." - I whole hearted agree with you! But I say that even if one never has to use his firearms in such a situation, better to have and not need than need and not have.
Remember, the Soviets had, by their historical perspective just single handedly won the war, a very ruthless and destructive war on what we now call the Eastern front. The support in the patriotic fervor for Stalin must have been on the same level as the fervor the Germans had for Hitler. If the Germans supported nationalism up until the early Fifties, a decade after the death of Hitler, we can see why the 99% illiterate and uneducated Russian/Soviet population would drink the Kool-Aid of Stalin as a God on Earth, even allowing his regime to exterminate millions of dissendents. No Bill of Rights their. Dissent? Bullet in the noggin or the work camps. That is why the National hero Stalin was not over thrown. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, remember?
YOU STATE:"I understand that under current law in the United States private citizens are not allowed to own explosives and hydrogen bombs. But would you be in favor or allowing the private ownership of these items. If not, where do you draw the line and why? Couldn't an explosive come in quite handy if a citizen has to defend his freedom against a would-be tyrant?"
The Right to Bear Arms/Second Amendment is what we are discussing here. The spirit of the 2ND is this, that an armed citizen can look ANY tyrant in the face, shout NO, and mean it. Whether that tyrant be a member of a gang of looters in the Katrina aftermath or the Regular Army personnel of Mexico that cross into US territory from time to time in supplying armed escort to coyotes and drug runners for cash or maybe just the odd home invasion meth head that may kick in your door. Please remember, it was the American rifleman that saved Europe from villainous clutches twice in the last century. Riflemen. As in damn deadly prolific with a rifle. To think that this talent will never be have to be drawn on again is dangerously short sighted. The explosive area effect weapons you speak of I have already touched on in a previous post tonight. I believe that a million rifle toting American citizens, united in one purpose, would not need ordinance to make quite an impression on any tyrant.
YOU ALSO STATE:"Newton, DC is one small island in a sea of guns, so obviously that is not going to work well to stop criminals from getting guns. Having said that, undoubtedly there are violent criminal actions that would have happened if DC did not have the gun ban.
Obviously, the bigger the area with the gun ban, the better it will work. Very few criminals in Europe have a gun, the low-level losers usually attempt to operate with knives. I have seen it myself." - You state it yourself again, undoubtedly violent crime would happen in DC no matter the gun ownership laws ... no kidding. So, what DC has done,by way of feel good legislation, is allow the citizenry of their wonderful town to be at the mercy of gun toting thugs. Now, it is true, that certain rifles and shotguns can be kept by the private folks. But they must be kept unloaded and or locked up. Some one breaks in, you unlock or assemble your mode of defense, and then retrieve your ammunition and then load it. I hope that gang banger and his buddies suffer from crippling arthritis. And I do not care whether they are armed with knives or guns or baseball bats. If a taxpaying, law abiding citizen has to take a back seat to street scum in the matter of self defense, I wonder what the agenda or mind set is of a government that will not let its private citizens at least be on par with bad guys?
Yes, the Bill of Rights was enacted as a carrot for the anti-Federalists- that's kind of my point; in other words, it is an anti-Federalist document. However, it was not even drafted until after the Constitution itself had been ratified and become the law of the land. Obviously you chose to ignore the very words of Alexander Hamilton that I posted that demonstrated quite clearly that the idea of a Bill of Rights was rejected by the Constitutional Convention itself. I would like to see some form of evidence for your claim that somehow the Bill of Rights is limited by the rest of the Constitution, rather than the Bill of Rights limiting the rest of the Constitution. In any event, if they were, as you claim, a "package deal", you would expect that they would have been drafted simultaneously.
As for your example of the Whisky Rebellion:
Washington could not and did not directly call up the militias- he was required to issue his request for militias from the state governors, who then had to decide whether to obey the order or disregard it and risk a severe break with the federal government. The governors chose to answer the call, in part, it seems, because the rebels were not particularly popular with much of the populace (they received more volunteers than they asked for).
In addition, it is worth pointing out that every single SCOTUS opinion that was issued on the 2nd Amendment prior to the FDR court packing scheme made a clear statement that the federal government could not regulate firearms ownership, although the states could. Please note- all of these decisions were prior to the debacle that is the incorporation debate; whether individual states may still regulate firearms ownership is a much different issue.
Ken has consistently proven his inability to determine the referent of an adjective in an English clause. The clause in this case is "Well-regulated militia." It is the militia that is to be regulated, not "the People."
The term "well-regulated" had a somewhat different meaning at the time the Constitution was written: it did not mean "subjected to regulations" as it has come to be used, but "in good working order." A well-regulated clock kept good time.
You can't apply modern usage if your goal is an honest understanding of the meaning of the amendment. If your goal is to support your own otherwise unsupportable position, that's a different matter.
This is going nowhere. Someone please find an example of a violent society that became significantly less violent after gun control was instituted.
This is going nowhere. Someone please find an example of a violent society that became significantly less violent after gun control was instituted. - Bambi
Good point. In fact just the inverse is seen in our world. Any time, any where, when the citizens lose the ability to have firearms, they become subjects ... the gov becomes more corrupt and any hope for real freedom dies. Burma, Nazi Germany, Washington DC, Chicago, etc. You know the deal.
On the other hand, I think we did go somewhere. Gun control is wrong and dangerous. The ones who record their thoughts here, at least the obviously anti gun folks, look past historical fact to support knee jerk and hand wringing points of view while offering nothing of substance. They take the point of view that gun owners are barbarians and are not like the civilized Europeans. I can support those who for religious or moral or other reasons do not want firearms in their home. But I can not stand idly by and allow stupid(by reason of ignoring historical fact)points of view to be rammed down my throat.
Jonathan, you simply do not know what you are talking about.
The term militia meant the armed population, more specifically the white male population, with some exceptions for ministers, mariners, and others. The exact terminology differed slightly from colony to colony and then from state to state after the revolution.
But various laws required the armed citizenry to enroll, report, and submit to government authority appointed to train and lead the armed citizenry while under arms in the militia.
In addition to regulating the armed population the colonies were rife with regulations on guns and gun use. Many cities banned the shooting of guns within the cities, some places forbade shooting across roads, etc.
The founding fathers expected the those with guns to continue to be regulated. They said so plainly in the text of the second admendment.
Mark,
Washington called up the militia with his declaration of marshall law. The various state governors had no choice but to obey as the federal has superior sovergnty over the state governments.
Washingon even led the militia himself.
You know all this stuff may have happened a long time ago but the history is all well documented. There is no excuse for persistent ignorance.
Ben,
Whatever your opinion of what happens elwewhere in the world you cannot escape the fact that in this part of the world the second admendment insists on the necessity of regulation for people with guns.
Ken,
*closes eyes and chants*
The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat! The Earth is flat!
*opens eyes and looks around*
Damn! Still round!
Just saying something over and over doesn't make it true.
ken..
I know no such thing and neither do you.
My opinion means nothing. It is virtually worthless. But what I have stated here in this forum is historically factual. You just seem to repeat your opinion on your "interpretation" on the 2nd A with no factual data. Repeating something non-factual does not make it so, and is only an opinion, virtually worthless.
The DC court has ruled in favor of the Constitution. A truly great victory. I think that the Supreme Court, if it sees fit to hear the case, will further the reach of this good ruling. If the SC does rule, I believe they may take it even further in the Constitutional direction and deepen the meaning of our Second Amendment.
I'm bowing out of this particular series of exchanges, which seem to have come full circle several times. But I will do so with a note to Mr. Goldman: I do appreciate your forthrightness in stating what you would want in the way of gun policy for the U.S. If I understood you correctly it is a total ban on gun ownership for private citizans. The radical fringe left who are effectively pulling Hillary's strings seem to share this same inclination, but are deceptive in their intentions and in selective use of statistics and application of sinister sounding terminology to various kinds of guns and ammo. My experience with guns is personal and spans some 55 years. It includes good felowship and family time,collecting, and target shooting and savoring delicious fall days walking fields and forests. Only once did I have a need to pull a pistol to avert a probable mugging. No shot was fired and nobody was injured. I have never had a bad incident with a gun nor have I ever even seen one. I presume that your experience with firearms has been purely vicarious, with information derived fron Hollywood and the mainline media, urban centered and negatively biased. You really should try to broaden your base on this issue before assuming such a radical position. Should your dream legal disarmament of the U.S. actually come to fruition I can envision several possible scenarios, all of which are written in blood.
Good luck
Ken,
I am still waiting for your description of the regulations you desire. I have read this entire thread, and you have answered absolutely no questions other than to return to your initial assertion that gun owners are to be regulated by order of the 2nd amendment, while continuously ignoring the dominant clause of the amendment which states that the people's rights to keep and bear arms is not to be infringed. So question number two is what do you think the meaning is of the dominant clause I quoted above? Or does it have absolutely no meaning, and is to be ignored?
Mark, I have to say your response to my question about where the dividing line should be drawn was fairly well-researched and intelligent, which is more than can be said of most posts on here. Which is not the same thing as saying that I necessarily agree with your conclusions.
I think if we agree that a dividing line between legal and illegal weapons must be drawn somewhere, then we have exposed a big flaw in the argument that criminals will always have access to weapons. I argued that a gun ban can work, partly because it is so much more difficult to manufacture a gun than it is to produce alcohol. Others claimed that illegal guns have been manufactured before. Somehow the Palestinians in the occupied territories manage to cobble together crude missiles as well, and yet even pro-gun lobby is on-board with a ban on private ownership of missiles in the U.S. While governmental bans are rarely perfect, the ban can have massive influence on public behavior depending on the complexity required to overcome that ban and the demand curve for the banned product.
Ben Newton, that was my point exactly about Stalinist Russia: the soldiers did not overthrow democracy because Stalin commanded a significant amount of popular support from the populace. The fact that guns were or were not available had no effect on that tyranny's political calculus.
A better way to view the post Katrina situation would be that, since the U.S. provided absolutely zero police services, society reverted back to a "state of nature" as described by Hobbes. Under such circumstances, having the best weapons is clearly an advantage as predicted by Hobbes, but guns played no role in averting tyranny.
Ben Newton, it doesn't matter whether DC bans handguns or not, you--and all other middle class and richer folks--are not going to live in an area where they don't feel safe anyway. We feel safe, and are safe, when the political dynamics have established peace, and having guns is not going to restore your safety.
But the biggest reason I oppose private gun ownership has nothing to do with crime: it has to do with its effect on governmental powers. Firearms are not an effective tool to keep governmental powers in check; on the contrary, firearms, especially the more lethal kinds, lead to a dangerous build-up in governmental powers. If we knew that every household in the U.S. had an unlocked assault rifle avaiable, we would be clamoring for those police powers that we thought could neutralize this threat emanating from every residence.
The Economist pointed this out too when they had an article about the shooting at Virginia Tech. They decried that fact that the debate in the U.S. is about campus security and not about gun control. And what is more campus security if not an increase in police powers? Campus security will undoubtedly entail more search and surveillance powers for the police, more stringent background checks, more pressure on prosecutors to prosecute petty incidents before they turn violent, and potentially even a crack-down on speech that those in power deem to be threatening or hateful.
You mean like your persistent refusal to acknowledge that the Bill of Rights was an anti-Federalist document and that your claim that the two were "a package deal" is utterly unsupported by any facts whatsoever? Or your persistent ignorance of the fact that any pro-gun argument begins with the same argument that you accuse pro-gunners of ignoring (to wit: the broad meaning of militia)? Or your persistent ignorance of the phrase "the right of the People (not the militia) to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"?
Now, the Constitution explictly gives the federal government some important powers over the militia that directly permitted the calling up of the militia in the Whisky Rebellion:
"To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress"
However, the 2nd Amendment (which was again drafted after the final draft of the Constitution had been ratified and passed into law) cannot be read as being duplicative of this authority- otherwise it wouldn't exist at all. Instead, the "well-regulated militia" phrase can only be read as granting to the individual states the authority to keep a militia independent of the federal government's rules- again, the 2nd Amendment refers to "a ... State" not the "United States" or any other formulation that could possibly refer to the federal government. I other words, if a State felt that the US militia was inadequate to protect the individual state from any enemies, foreign or domestic, that state had the right to have its own set of militia rules and regulations. Moreover, and absolutely critically, the key phrase in the 2nd Amendment is "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." This is an independent clause- it stands on its own; if the "militia" language was intended to limit the RTKBA language, it would have done so explicitly.
Most importantly, however, is the word "people." This word, in every other context in the Bill of Rights, refers to individuals; it does not refer to states, or militias, or anything other than the mass of individuals residing in the USA. So, why, in this one instance (as compared to 4 other instances) would the meaning be different?
Woodpiggie, as a matter of good governmental policy, yes I am in favor of a total ban on private handgun ownership. But I wanted to point out that there are two parallel discussions going on in this board. One is a debate in the abstract as to what should be the policy of a republic with respect to firearms. The other is a debate about what our founding fathers meant when they wrote the Second Amendment. On this second issue I would probably defer to scholars who have studied this issue in more depth than I have, but at this point I would probably side with those who claim that the founders believed that private citizens should have a right to own firearms. Unfortunately, I doubt that they thought about the technical innovations that will make firearms so much more lethal than in their age, and that could be a constitutional way to at least have effective restrictions on gun ownership, but that doesn't change the fundamental point. As such, I do worry about the precedent this may set: if we say the Constitution does guarantee the right to own firearms and yet we allow gun control laws, then which other protections found in the Constitution may be eroded next?
Mark,
Really this is all in the history books. You need to leave the idealogical clamshell you live in and look at history as it actually happened. Your gunnuttery causes you to misinterpret everything I say and puts you automatically in an antagonistic posture regarding reality.
You are making a presumption that I am saying that the second admendment was negotiated along with the constituion by the constitutional convention. That is not what I mean by it all being a package deal and if you looked at American history objectively this would be apparent to you. I really do not have the time to educate you, it is an obligation you need to take upon yourself.
Further, you like the other gun nuts, have misrepesented what I have been saying about the second admendment. Your point about the clause you worship is well known and does not need to be explained to me or anyone else. I have not denied a single letter or phrase of the second admendment.
I am saying that we all need to respect the second admendment in its entirity. This includes people like you. If you and other gun nuts took the constitution seriously we could agree on what kind of regulation gun owners need in order to be well regulated as per the second admendment.
Your continued denial of this is not rational.
Yancy asked me what kind of regulation I thought we needed today. Good question. But I would answer by saying that I would first want the people with some skin in the game, ie gun owners, to first answer the question, and answer it honestly in light of the problems we have today.
The people who wrote the constitution and gave us our government ackowledged the duty of each armed citizen to submit to government authority and serve the common good in a cohesive well trained and disiplined militia. That was the world they lived in and the government they created for themselves specificied the need for this regulation to continue.
Would gun owners agree to that? Or can they
propose something else that will work as well? The founders lived in an era where gun laws and regulatins on gun owners were ubiquitous. I am not suggesting we duplicate there laws and regulations but to make them relevant for today.
Oh, and Ken--in case you haven't read the actual text recently, the word "gun" doesn't appear anywhere in the 2nd Amendment. Instead, it refers to "arms". Consider it comes from a time before self-loading firearms (or even revolvers.) It was not at all uncommon to fire a volley then fix bayonets and charge. Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that knives, at least ones large enough to serve as effective bayonets, are addressed by the 2nd every bit as much as firearms are.
Jeff:
Again, thank you for your well-reasoned response.
I understand your arguments, and you certainly make fair points that I agree with to a certain extent. Perhaps most importantly, you brought this thread back to its original topic (which ken had almost made me forget).
Certainly, your point that the existence of a line that even pro-gunners are willing to draw is problematic to an economics-based argument against gun control makes sense.
However, I think there is an important caveat- some weapons are more prone to effective (or reasonably effective) control than others since different weapons have different demand curves amongst different groups of people. The weapons I view as particularly regulable are those which will have the most elastic demand curves and which are typically an unacceptable danger to society from even an otherwise law-abiding citizen. I believe these weapons/types of regulations line up very closely with my strict scrutiny standard- but this is not some happy coincidince.
Instead, for a regulation to meet strict scrutiny it must be narrowly tailored to meet the compelling government interest; if the law/regulation is unlikely to have much of an effect on crime or the danger to society as a whole, then it will be difficult to make an argument that the regulation is narrowly tailored In other words, the people who you are disarming are almost exclusively people who are not a threat, so the compelling interest is barely existent; the regulation is also not narrowly tailored because it is affecting a large number of people, the disarming of whom does nothing to advance the government interest.
Some examples:
As things currently exist, demand for machine guns is relatively elastic (they're not very useful to criminals since they don't work well offensively); machine guns also (arguably) present a significant hazard to public safety in the hands of a law-abiding (but irresponsible) gun owner (who, as law-abiding citizen, by definition has an elastic demand curve). Therefore, restriction of machine guns to FFLs and SOTs is narrowly tailored in that it effectively limits possession of machine guns to persons who are responsible gun owners (some modifications of existing law may be necessary to meet strict scrutiny, but for the most part, machine gun law is ok).
Similarly, law-abiding use of explosives and other ordinance has a very elastic demand curve since they're not particularly useful for most crime. Additionally, the nature of explosive presents a significant public safety risk even amongst law-abiding and relatively responsible individuals. So, restriction of ordnance ownership to a highly regulated class of people is narrowly tailored and likely to have a significant effect.
Handguns, on the other hand, have a very inelastic demand curve amongst criminals- they are useful for offensive purposes, they are easily concealed, and easily carried. As long as a black market exists where property rights cannot be legally enforced, members of that black market will continue to have an inelastic demand curve for such weapons. Additionally, handguns (I would argue- you may disagree) represent a relatively minimal public safety threat in the hands of otherwise law-abiding citizens. So, prohibition on handguns, I would argue, is not narrowly tailored. However, if the War on Drugs were ended, and crime/accidents with handguns remained a large enough problem as to amount to a "compelling government interest," then you would have a pretty strong argument for intense regulation of handgun ownership- even under a strict scrutiny standard.
Rights were for individuals or states. Clearly the 2nd refers to the rights of individuals and is not a collective right, as people would have us believe. Moreover, the right to keep and bear arms is a guarantee that preceded the Constitution. The wording is shall not be abridged, therefore, had to exist prior as a natural right. All this about a line is confusing. Does that mean that you should not use a .50 cal black power rifle to hunt deer, or my heavens, a .54 caliber? We already agreed to cut out automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns and body piercing bullets. Certainly grenades, tanks, machine guns, F-16 and the like are included for individuals. Firearms like the F92 stainless, 686 S&W stainless, their small 5-shot .38s (stainless) are good for generations of use. Microstamping as was just signed in California just means that criminals will have to use pre-microstamping firearms. All these laws are feel-good, but really band aids in controling crime. You have the overwhelming right of the people to keep and bear arms and criminals ignoring the laws flagrantly. So the solution is take guns away from all the law-abiding people and leave the criminals armed? This is exactly what Washington D.C. has done to its citizenry. For the most part, liberals are working hard to disarm all of America except for the police and military. The Brady group and a few other "conservative" groups are complicit as well. They refer to gun control, but for the most part, they really mean federal registration, confiscation and destruction. Make no mistake on their ultimate goal. They are not really misguided, most of them are stupid and do not see the consequences of trying to disarm people who have not committed any crime. Nor do they recognize the statistics that carry states generally have much lower crime than states and cities where 2nd amendment rights have been denied. They ignore the social science statistics, distort statistics and use selective date ranges to prove weak points and deny the effectiveness of an educated and armed citizenry to deter crime and criminals. Do not try to use logic and reason with these people, like Diane Feinstein, they would take up all the guns if they just had the votes. The Constitution and its framers had other ideas, and I suspect they were pretty smart men and understood the possibility of tyranny of government over its citizens and the nature of human beings and the need for protection of life. I am not too sure about the brainpower of these anti-firearm activists. The choice of not having a firearm in your home is clearly your choice. Not being allowed to have a firearm for protection in your own home is having no choice in the face of criminals. I suggest you follow D.C. v. Heller in the U.S. Supreme Court very carefully. 07-290 is the case number.
Ken,
Then fine. The second amendment means that the people's right to keep and bear arms is not to be infringed- or do you have some other private meaning of the word. Since people don't have to be in the militia, then they need not be regulated by the explicit text of the amendment.
Ken:
This will be my last address of you, as you are obviously unwilling to even consider the other side.
1. I am not a "gun nut"- in fact, I have never owned a gun. However, I have a fair amount of real-world experience in dealing with the 2nd Amendment (both in law school and my career), so I think I have a pretty good grasp of it. I also think my exchange with Jeff pretty clearly demonstrates that I am not an absolutist when it comes to gun legislation.
2. I have provided you with ample evidence that the Bill of Rights was an anti-Federalist document- a position backed by the DC Circuit's recent opinion; you have provided exactly zero. If, as I say, I (and the DC Circuit) am "just ignorant", then you should be willing to show me exactly how I am ignorant.
3. We have not argued once that the term "well-regulated" should be ignored. Instead, we have provided you with ample evidence that the term does not have anything close to the meaning you suggest, and have provided ample evidence as to its clear and intended meaning. You have provided zero evidence in response.
4. If you wish your constantly repeated arguments to be taken seriously, then you must address the counterarguments directly. Simply calling the counterarguments "ignorant" and making an unsubstantiated claim fails to do this.
Mark,
On the contrary, I have provided the history of the country and the plain wording of the second admendment as understood by the founders as evidence.
Nothing you have presented supercedes the actual wording and meaning of the second admendment itself.
Perhaps this will help give you some perspective:
In 1786 the City of Boston passed a law making it unlawful hve a loaded weapon in their homes or in any other building.
The people who passed this law, just like the people that wrote, and adapted the constitution and the bill of rights presumably owned guns themeselves yet they all agreed that gun regulations were needed to meet the needs of the society in which they lived.
Our founders lived with regulations on gun owners, ie. themselves, both before the country was formed as well as after it was formed. Legislatures and city councils passed the regulations they felt needed in order to maintain domestic tranquility and provide for the peoples security. This is not controversial that they did this.
But just like today there were people who disagreed. But those who disagree lost the argument and the regulations were writtin into law. Those who created this country, and should know their intentions better than anyone today, lived with regulations on gun owners.
Without these regulations George Washington would have been unable to call out the militia to put down a challenge to the federal governments authority.
If living with regulations on gun owners was good enough for them it certainly is good enough for us as well.
Kirk, laws preceeding the second admendment defined arms as guns. The people who founded our country knew what it meant. So did everyone else who lived in those days.
yancy, gun owners did indeed have to be in the militia when the second admendment was adapted.
If you read the second admendment you will see that the right to bear arms was to serve the purpose of having a well regulated militia.
And the militia was generally the armed population.
And regulations were passed that required this armed population to do certain things in service of the common good.
(Ignoring my own vow to ignore)
Ken:
You obviously miss the point- the 2nd Amendment as originally written was not a restriction on state governments, but on the federal government. Of course, local and state governments were allowed to regulate firearms at the time under the US Constitution- no one has argued otherwise, since the pre-14th Amendment Constitution by and large did not pertain to individual rights against the individual states. To the extent state regulation of firearms is prohibited, it would be under the 14th Amendment, which is something that you have not once even acknowledged. The 14th Amendment incorporation debate is one that is the subject of much legal wrangling and disagreement, and I have consciously and explicitly avoided it as a result- the entire argument has been about federal powers.
In support of my argument that the 2nd Amendment protects individual firearms rights and state militia rights, I have cited:
1. Hamilton's words
2. Justice Story's words
3. The timeline of the Bill of Rights and its drafting (which you say is irrelevant but refuse to explain why)
4. The history of the debate over the Constitution
5. The use of the word "State" as opposed to "United States"
6. The use of the word "People" in the latter clause of the amendment vs. the word "militia" in the former clause
7. The fact that the use of the word "militia" and the meaning (with which you seem to agree) is considered the linchpin behind the argument for the individual rights theory of the 2nd Amendment.
I have scrolled through the entire thread, to look at every single one of your posts. In only one post did you cite to a substantiated fact, to wit, the whopping proposition that Washington was able to call upon the militia to put down the Whisky Rebellion. Other than that, every single one of your posts has relied on either your own, unsubstantiated, reading (and definition) of the word "regulated" as if it existed in a vacuum and were the entire 2nd Amendment, or the language in the Constitution's preamble, which was passed and drafted well before the draft of the Bill of Rights and is thus irrelevant to interpreting the Bill of Rights (which was a carrot to the anti-Federalists).
You have been provided with ample, specific, evidence that the preamble cannot be used to interpret the Bill of Rights; yet you have repeatedly and explicitly declined to provide any specific contradictory evidence other than your blanket assertions that I'm just ignorant.
I don't believe gun control is an effective means of crime control. Gun control is sold as "crime control" by anti-gunners but I don't see any practical, real world evidence that this is true.
Severe gun control laws have been enacted in England and Australia in recent years, yet the rate of violent crime has skyrocketed in both countries and currently is at a level that surpasses the US rate. It's things like this that lead me to believe the anti-gun lobby's position is fraudulent. Their argument is based more on emotion than fact.
I don't care how it's justified, gun control is not an effective means of crime control.
My alcohol control analogy is an effective means to recast this ongoing debate into terms that more private citizens can relate to. The overwhelming majority of Americans use alcohol safely and responsibly. They would ask, and rightfully so, why further alcohol control would be necessary given the fact that those most likely to abuse alcohol would be the last to obey any new attempts at alcohol control.
The same is true for firearms. It's as simple as that.
Mark, I see your mistake. You are making an agrument with me about something I have not addressed thinking I am taking up the opposite side of that issue.
I have limited myself to the factual claim that the regulation of gun owners is called for by the second admendment.
I do not care if the right to own a gun is an indivudual right or a collective right. It is in either case a civic right and not like any other right we posses. No where else is there a specific mention of the need to regulate people who own printing presses, or anything else. Just gun owners are singled out in the second admendment for regulation.
Whatever Madison or Story has to say does not supercede the clear wording of the second admendment nor does the debate about it or its history change the fact that it was written the way it was written.
And the purpose of the government could have been different as well. Those who created the new government set it up the way they wanted it. One of the purposes was to establish domestic tranquility. This idea was repeated in the language of the second admendment with its reference to security.
The second admendment could have been worded differently. I will point out to you that those who saw it differently could have won the argument about the wording but they didn't. It is what it is.
As I've pointed out above the people who gave us our government and wrote the bill of rights lived with regulations on gun owners all their lives. They did not want this to change. They specificied that in the wording of the second admendment.
As to the kind of right it is? It doesn't matter as long as you don't take an eraser to over half of it.
ken, since you continue to refuse to recognize the latter half of the amendment under question, here are some ways we already regulate the people that "own" firearms:
be convicted of a felony, lose your 2nd amendment rights
must be 18/21 to purchase/own firearms
to carry a firearm, be a member of law enforcement, OR, have a carry license (except for 2 specific states that require no permit)
if you have the privilege to live in our illustrious capital, you forfeit that right (currently being challenged)
these are merely the highlights, there are probably more. ken, if these aren't sufficient regulations in your opinion, what would you suggest, ideally WITHOUT infringing on our right to keep and bear arms anymore than is already done?
also, what regulations on gun owners did the founding fathers "live with all of their lives"?
JEFF WROTE -
1.Ben Newton, that was my point exactly about Stalinist Russia: the soldiers did not overthrow democracy because Stalin commanded a significant amount of popular support from the populace. The fact that guns were or were not available had no effect on that tyranny's political calculus.
2.A better way to view the post Katrina situation would be that, since the U.S. provided absolutely zero police services, society reverted back to a "state of nature" as described by Hobbes. Under such circumstances, having the best weapons is clearly an advantage as predicted by Hobbes, but guns played no role in averting tyranny.
3.Ben Newton, it doesn't matter whether DC bans handguns or not, you--and all other middle class and richer folks--are not going to live in an area where they don't feel safe anyway. We feel safe, and are safe, when the political dynamics have established peace, and having guns is not going to restore your safety.
4.But the biggest reason I oppose private gun ownership has nothing to do with crime: it has to do with its effect on governmental powers. Firearms are not an effective tool to keep governmental powers in check; on the contrary, firearms, especially the more lethal kinds, lead to a dangerous build-up in governmental powers. If we knew that every household in the U.S. had an unlocked assault rifle avaiable, we would be clamoring for those police powers that we thought could neutralize this threat emanating from every residence.
POINT 4...
I do not know what you mean by "unlocked", or assault rifle. Do you mean not locked up in a safe fashion(safe, what ever your definition)and by assault rifle rifle I think you may mean a high capacity self loading rifle(high capacity meaning, by Clinton's definition, more than 10 rounds), since an actual assault rifle has a selector for fully automatic fire. I have something to tell you that might come as a shock to you, but I know many many folks that have at least one of these "threats", including myself. You make it sound in your comment like people, law abiding gun owning people, do not enjoy owning high capacity rifles like the AK variant and the AR 15. Sorry friend, the nearest neighbor I have that owns one of these is a police officer. Its in his vast collection of "threats". I don't mean to make any leftists quiver or pee their pants here, but many people own these nice rifles.And by the way, these "threats" fire rounds that are much less powerful than the calibers used in this nation for deer, hog, elk, ram and moose hunting. But lets not let actual facts get in the way here.
POINT 3.
Jeff, I am not in the middle class, I grew up in the "hood" through the 70's and I know a little bit about street crime. I still live in a inner city neighborhood. Just the other day(about 5 months ago)SWAT busted in next door and arrested 18 on drug charges. Crack to be exact. Now I was on my way home on the bus, about 10 minutes out,when my wife called me to tell me of these events. I was frightened for her, but since she has been taught by moi(a little French from an American barbarian for the imagined elite out there)how to accurately and safely use a weapon, I felt she was relatively safe. Now it wasn't just the many firearms in our house that she could choose from to protect home and hearth, we have a Dobey trained for protection and solid doors and locks. But a powerful quick firing rifle in her hands sure would be a "threat" to a home invader(s).
POINT 2.
Hobbes .. state of nature .. blah blah blah. The fact of the matter is those gang bangers were punks, driven by animalistic instinct, preying on what they saw as weak. Having no real core values, like the animals in Knoxville and Newark, these human scum were just looking for easy meat. When threatened by the thought of high velocity holes being punched through their worthless bodies, they turned tail. Plain and simple. To think that the neighborhood defenders had more or better guns than this criminal element, that is unknown. It does not matter. This was not about society falling into a state of barbarity. Quite the contrary, it was about civilization insuring it would go on, at least in a semi normal state,in this microcosm, in the face of barbarity. Enforced by Winchester, Colt, S@W,etc. A true testament to the Human spirit, American spirit, and the true nature of what the founding Fathers meant in stating that this spirit would not be infringed. Those who would surrender freedom for security deserves neither.
P.S.-I believe if those law enfarcement officers under Ray Nagin would have raided said fortified neighborhood to UNLAWFULLY confiscate the very objects that guaranteed the private citizens survival, you may have seen an example of tyranny being averted.
POINT 1.
Since no one tried to any great extent in overthrowing Stalin, we do not know to what extent the gun would have played. But, since the Stalinistic regime controlled all of the firearms, it would be safe to assume that any coup would have been greatly one sided.
kfd,
I am not ignoring a single solitary word of the second admendment. I am suggesting that as a society we need to respect all of it and that means providing gun owners with the regulation they need, as per the admendment itself.
What kind of regulations on gun owners did the founding generation of Americans life under all their lives? Well there were numerous local ordinances like the one in Boston that forbade leaving a loaded gun in your own home, or your barn, or your shop, etc. There were also lots of regulations on when and where a gun could be fired. Certain cities forbade firing guns within city limits altogether and some places had limitations on when it was lawful to fire a gun. Many places also had restrictions on ammunition, ie powder, limiting where and how it could be stored. In general the more urban the setting the more regulations on gun owners.
But for what we might consider today the most onerous regulations it didn't matter where you lived, urban or rural folk were all treated the same: On muster day you had to show up, with your musket or rifle, and submit to government authority until you were dismissed.
There is more but this is just a flavor of the kind of regulations on gun owners the framers lived with.
As far as what is sufficient for today in terms of regulations. I would say that right now things are out of control. We have gun owners dealing drugs, we have gun owners running gangs, we have gun owners robbing and mugging and murdering and generally terrorizing large swaths of territory thereby precluding the domestic tranquility promised in the preamble and the security mentioned in the second admendment to large numbers of our fellow citizens.
This is not what the framers had in mind.
But we have gotten so far away from having a society of well regulated gun owners that bringing them all into compliance is going to take a generation or two and require the cooperation of gun owners willing to respect the entire meaning of the second admendment.
The first step is to educate the public. When we have a public that is just as informed about need for the regulation of gun owners as the founders were then we can begin to make some progress. But as long as the gun nut crazies with their powerful lobby refuse to respect the entire second admendment we will remain at an impasse and our civil society will continue to suffer.
If having regulations on gun owners was good enough for our founding fathers then it should be good enough for us as well.
well, ken, as an American and a member of that powerful lobby, I support educating the public: in gun safety, how to use a firearm, and that gun owners (the legal ones, not the drug dealers, gang runners, and other criminals)do not pose the danger that you, the politicians, and the bulk of the media paint us to be. As "gun nut crazies", we respect not only the entire second amendment(you still have not addressed the latter half of it), but the entire constitution as well.
As far as what is sufficient for today in terms of regulations. I would say that right now things are out of control. We have left wingers dealing drugs, we have left wingers running gangs, we have left wingers robbing and mugging and murdering and generally terrorizing large swaths of territory thereby precluding the domestic tranquility promised in the preamble and the security mentioned in the first admendment to large numbers of our fellow citizens.
This is not what the framers had in mind.
The topic of gun control is an old dead horse. Its a bad idea. Obviously by our texts here in this forum, 90% agree. I think it is a case of case closed.
Gun control is an old and outmoded form of leftist politics. I believe we have put it to bed.
To all my fellow gun owners who have had their words recorded here, I say thank you. It shows the great strength we have when we come together. And the depth of knowledge and emotion it takes to keep those who would assault our freedoms at bay.
Through the smoke of burning piles of horse dung that the lefties use to try and confuse the issue we see the real desires of the Socialist left and call them on it. Sweet.
To all of the people this discussion has touched, those who may have been fence sitters on the subject, I hope you have seen the difference in the mind set of both sides. Freedom to lawfully be able to run our lives and households the way we see fit and those who believe that a Government nanny knows best. If one child's life can be saved by a firearm, such as one of the thousands of times each year that a firearm is used by a family member to protect another, it is worth it.
To the Anti's who posted here. Come on over to the light. You will find the open mindedness that you so obviously desire. Here is where the healing begins.
As far as what is sufficient for today in terms of regulations. I would say that right now things are out of control. We have car owners dealing drugs, we have car owners running gangs, we have car owners robbing and mugging and murdering and generally terrorizing large swaths of territory thereby precluding the domestic tranquility promised in the preamble and the security mentioned in the Constitution to large numbers of our fellow citizens.
This is not what the framers had in mind.
Great point myopic ....
We have regulated and have rained all Hella law down upon society to no avail.
The time of the "Hug a Thug" judge and sanctuary city non-sense has come to an end.
A gun problem? Nope. Seems more like a problem with leftist law.
kfd,
The founders had a better understanding of what they meant about the constitution and bill of rights they adapted than your gun crazed lobbiest do today. You should defer to them instead of to people today who have a finanicial interest in keeping you ignorant.
And if you are going to support educating the public it starts with facing up to the actual words of second admendment - without first taking an eraser to any of them.
When you can do that you will be part of the solution and no longer part of the problem.
Ben,
You wouldn't last a day in a world that does not protect you from people who act out what you promulgate.
Ken:
You've made a number of mistakes of reading and of logic. First, the "well regulated" phrase in the 2nd Amendment applies to the militia and its workings, not to gun ownership or use outside militia service. The retrictions you suggest have nothing to do with militia service and therefore have no basis in the 2nd Amendment. Simply because the amendment mentions a "well regulated militia" as an important justification for prohibiting infringement on the people's (already existing) right to keep and bear arms does not in any way imply that the right itself can or should be regulated. Just as traffic laws only apply when a vehicle is driven on a roadway, and place no restrictions on how a vehicle is owned, kept, or used when not on a public road, neither does allowing the regulation of a militia aloow in any way the regulation of weapons while they are not being used in militia service.
Second, you're quite wrong about several things the 2nd Amendment says. One example is your statement about it not mentioning knives but mentioning guns. Actually, it mentions neither. It simply says "arms", which could include any weapon - knives, swords, spears, bows and arrows, and guns, to name a few. The Founding Fathers intended the citizens of this country to be armed; they didn't specify any restrictions on how.
Third, all your idiotic statements about "gun owners" are quite ignorant. All these things - murder, running gangs, selling drugs, etc. - are not being done by LEGAL gun owners, but by criminals who are in ILLEGAL possession of weapons. Your call for "regulation" of gun owners in order to reduce all these criminal activities misses the point that should be obvious to even someone operating at 5 year-old's mental capacity - regulation already prohibits them from owning these weapons and YET THEY STILL DO! Get a clue - more regulation isn't going to do jack$#!t to deter people who are already breaking existing gun laws and plan to use guns to commit more serious crimes than violating your proposed "regulations". They're already commiting other crimes for which they face the harshest penalties our criminal justice system imposes - what are you going to threaten them with - a time-out?
Oh, and before you start slinging around more "you conservatives" BS, I'm a registered Democrat, and always have been. I support abortion rights, universal health care, workers' rights, and affirmative action; I believe in evolution (and not any make-believe friend in the sky, or wherever), in taxing the rich more than the middle-class and the poor, and protecting the environment. I'm just not ignorant or irresponsible enough to shirk my responsibilities for the protection of the lives of my loved ones or myself and just expect others (including the government) to cover for my unwillingness to take on the responsibilities of a good citizen. If you want the freedoms listed in the 1st Amendment, then you have to exercise your rights (and responsibilities) under the second, and not simply leave the guarding your life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the hands of the very government that the Fouding Fathers understood was the greatest threat to them.
(Unsuccessfully fighting urge to maintain pledge to ignore robot)
Ken:
So, clearly the only thing that matters is your particular, personal definition of the phrase "well-regulated", without considering that phrase in the context of the overall amendmement, or any other, modifying phrases in the amendment (for instance, "being necessary to the security of a [as in one, not many] free State").
I was clearly wrong to consider the the phrase as being modified by the other words of the amendment. I was also clearly wrong to consider the historical context of the amendment, contemporary (or near-contemporary) interpretations of the Amendment, the words of Alexander Hamilton (an opponent of the Bill of Rights more generally), and anything concerning James Madison (who actually wrote the amendment). Obviously, these interpretations of the Bill of Rights and Constitution pale in comparison to your own interpretation of one phrase in one amendment, taken out of context.
You have made fairly clear that you are not an attorney or anyone who has actually studied the Constitution in depth. Otherwise, you would realize that your definition of "civic right" is identical to the commonly accepted definition of "collective right." So, yes, I was making an argument that was directly counter to your argument.
I still await proof that I am ignorant of history in claiming that the Bill of Rights was not intended to be read as part of the original Constitution (in other words, proof that the Bill of Rights actually was not a set of Amendments intended to safeguard against tyranny of the federal government).
From Wikipedia:
"The majority falls prey to the delusion — popular in some circles — that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people... A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble. All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. ... If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars." — Kozinski, Circuit Judge, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc in Silveira v. Lockyer [11]
Mark, again you are making an argument against something I have not said. I think the problem is that you are stuck behind the NRA talking points and have never taken an independent look at the constitution nor the bill of rights without that bias. Fine, but that is your problem. You need to get over it. It makes communication difficult.
Let me repeat myself once again. I don't address the question whether the right is collective or individual. That is your hang up. If civic right to you is code for collective right then fine, I can live with that. What I mean by it is clear. The right is the ONLY one anywhere in the constitution where the people who exercise that right are specifically called upon to be regulated. That is absolutely clear by the wording of the second admendment itself. You cannot erase over half the admendment just because it doesn't fit your preconceptions based upon NRA propaganda.
I still await proof of your claim that George Washington did not have the authority to call out the militia. Or that he did not understand what the second admendment or the constitution actually meant.
Rob,
1) I've urged no restrictions. I've urged respect for the second admendment.
2) The term arms meant guns. There were plenty of laws on the books way prior to the second admendment that made this clear.
3) George Washington, who would clearly qualify as a founding father, called out the militia and wiped the butts of people who, like you, make claims about the danger of the federal government to their life liberty and pursuit of happiness (actually they were so pissed they went beyond words and actually took up arms against the federal goverment)
I don't know how many times and how much evidence we need to explain to you that the word "regulated" has a different meaning than you ascribe to it; the "regulation" referred to in the second amendment is regulation by the individual states- not the federal government.
I already acknowledged that Washington had the authority to call the militia up to put down the Whisky Rebellion- but that authority is clear under the main text of the Constitution, which I had the decency to cite; it has very little to do with the 2nd Amendment.
And, regardless, the word "regulated" (I don't know how many times this must be repeated) refers to regulation of the state militias by the states- NOT to individual ownership of firearms.
We give you various arguments and evidence- you give us the same thing, just slightly rephrased every time, with no additional supporting evidence. It is, to put it bluntly, annoying, and not how debate is conducted in the real world.
Usually when people give you a counterargument, you explain how their counterargument is flawed- you don't just incessantly repeat yourself over and over again. What, pray tell, are your qualifications that make you such an expert on the 2nd Amendment, able to singlehandedly contradict centuries of jurisprudence, the plain text of the ENTIRE 2nd Amendment, not to mention the explanations of the people who actually drafted the 2nd Amendment, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights?
As for my being poisoned by NRA propaganda, well, you obviously do not know me or my background. Suffice it to say that if you did, you would find your allegation ridiculous. I think my various arguments that some, even most, restrictions on firearms ownership are nonetheless constitutional on other grounds are hardly the positions of the NRA.
promulgate -
1. to make known by open declaration; publish; proclaim formally or put into operation (a law, decree of a court, etc.).
KEN SAYS: Ben,
You wouldn't last a day in a world that does not protect you from people who act out what you promulgate.
Obviously you are wrong, since I am here. I have stated nothing but the truth about myself and personal surroundings. You make the most dangerous mistake of thinking that people need protecting, and or that any government entity can really do that. Its up to the individual to be the first line of defense, not just for themselves, but also their neighborhood, and when needed, beyond. A 9-1-1 call to local law enforcement ends up being for cleanup most of the time, not prevention. We can not hand over our ability to be secure in our personal places, like homes and neighborhoods, to any outside of these envelope entities.
I believe you sir are way out of touch with reality. It is years of leftist law that has produced the problems that we as citizens face, not the freedoms we are guaranteed. And now, lefties standing in the smoking crater of the social morass they have created look up at the public and demand more of our freedom. To HELL with that.
Mark,
You are really trapped by the NRA bamboozlement concerning meanings of words.
Go back in time to the generation that founded our country, you know the people that lived all their lives, as gun owners, under regulations of one sort or another on the city or colononial level, concerning what gun owners can and can not do and what they must do.
The people who lived then I think understood what they would mean by their words better than some anal lawyer paid by people with a financial interest in guns.
They lived with regulations themselves and desired regulations to continue and said so in the text of the second admendment. It is plainly there for all to see.
The second admendment endorsed the scheme of regulation, without limiting it, on gun owners that they knew, utilized, and expected to continue, and adapt to changes as needed, in one form or another going forward.
Is this really so hard to understand? You know the founders did not write these documents so that it would an army of lawyers to understand them. They wrote them in plain english that everyone of the day understood. It is your problem if you have to rely on people who have anti-constitutional interests to interpret this stuff for you.
It is interesting that you can find other reasons to regulate gun owners other than the wording of the second admendment, but you really need not go beyond it.
ben,
It is widely known that people who proclaim their self reliance the loudest are the ones most in need of support from others.
Ken:
Do you even bother reading other people's comments?
If you had, you would have realized that everyone acknowledges the individual states were constitutionally permitted to regulate guns at any time prior to the 14th Amendment. The point is that the 2nd Amendment explicitly keeps firearms regulation out of the realm of the federal government.
Whether the individual states are prohibited from regulating and banning guns is primarily a matter of determining whether, and to what extent, the 14th Amendment applies the Right to Keep and Bear Arms against the states- which is not an issue that has been discussed here.
As for "going back in time", that is precisely what you refuse to do, as you repeatedly dismiss contemporary interpretations of the Second Amendment and Bill of Rights as irrelevant.
Ken what are you smoking?
There's been a lot of time and energy expended here arguing the meaning of the 2A. For the sake of this argument, let's say the government (at any level) has the power to disarm private citizens through whatever scheme they deem appropriate. As usual, this power grab would be sold as "crime control" or "it's for the children." Whatever.
My question is, why would we allow such an obvious exercise in futility? I need go no further than the "War on Drugs" for an example of how market forces always triumph government edict, no matter how well intentioned.
Wouldn't it be better to hold wrongdoers accountable for their actions and see that justice is meted out in a swift and certain manner?
Enforce the law and demand accountability. Why is this such a difficult concept for some to grasp?
Tim, good question,
Guns are ubiquitious in America and, as we all know have, been since colonial times.
The solution our forefathers had was to make sure that gun owners were well regulated. They did this by requiring (with some exceptions) that the armed population submit to govenment authority, training, and disipline.
They endorsed this scheme of regulation, without limitation, in the second admendment.
We have abandoned this scheme of regulation and against the bitter opposition of gun nuts have tried to substitute less onerous regulations. But this going easy on gun owners approach hasn't worked out to well. We have large portions of our populations denied the domestic tranquility promised by the constitution and without the security referred to in the second admendment.
If our history had been different, more like England or Australia, we would not have an armed population that is causing such huge problems.
But our history is our history and we cannot deny it.
I think if we could only have gun owners who lobbied for the second admendment instead of against it, like the NRA does, we might be able to actually solve this problem.
But until then we muddle on and our society fails to live up to the promise of its potential.
There is one huge logical flaw right in the middle of your post: in the second paragraph you say "market forces will always triumpth government edict," yet at the end of your post you tell presumably the same government to "enforce the law." How can the government enforce the law when market forces will always triumph anyway? Logically, those laws that are in full agreement with unfettered market forces will be superfluous and need no enforcing anyway.
Ken,
Let me get this straight. You want me, as a law abiding gunowner, to lobby the Federal Government, with all their awesome power, to take steps to further restrict my right to possess firearms? I already follow the letter of the law whenever I purchase and use firearms.
What about those who willingly misuse firearms, i.e., criminals? Should they lobby the Feds too? What's so special about gun control laws that will make the criminal element, i.e., the REAL problem, obey the law?
Why should my rights be dictated by the inappropriate actions of an irresponsible criminal minority within our society?
I don't know about you, but I left the Kindergarten mentality long ago. Just because little Johnny in the back of the class acts up that doesn't mean I have to put my head down on the desk too.
Sooner or later, the practical aspect of gun control has to be taken into account too.
The act of buying and/or possessing a firearm should never be a crime. The government, despite all their power, cannot hope to keep firearms out of the wrong hands, despite the assurances otherwise.
What they can, and should, do is punish those who misuse firearms. However, our judicial system is broken. Time and time again, I see gun charges thrown out, reduced and/or plea bargained away.
If we're not going to enforce the law, why bother enacting them?
The emphasis should be on enforcing laws against what are widely regarded as criminal behavior. Murder, rape, robbery, assault, that sort of thing.
The idea that the mere possession of firearms by law abiding citizens should be some sort of crime should not be tolerated by any right thinking person.
The Constitution has two instances of the word "regulate" which might be relevant to the modern-vs.-archaic usage question:
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution_transcript.html
Article I, Section 8 says Congress has the power…
“To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;”
“To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;”
Tim,
No, I invited you to lobby for the second admendment instead of against it.
You call for a practical look at the issue, problems and solutions. I agree.
Well the practical solution our founding fathers lived with and endorsed in the second admendment was to make sure gun owners were well regulated. As a result they did not have large swaths of territory ruled over by out of control gun owners. And when gun owners did get out of control, like in the Shays Rebellion, they ordered the well regulated gun owners to put them down and restore government authority.
If living with a well regulated population of gun owners was good enough for them why isn't it good enough for you?
Okay, so the government has the right to regulate the Militia. Thus it can determine training requirements, mustering times, required arms and supplies for members, etc...
However, as it plainly says, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Thus the government may not restrict gun ownership by individuals, whether or not they are in the militia.
Seems pretty clear to me.
I don't see anything in there about regulating gun ownership or regulating the people, just the militia.
Looking at it, "shall not be infringed" seems like it would be even stronger than "Congress shall make no law..." The latter specifically restricts Congress from abriding speech by making laws, for example, while the former doesn't limit who or what shall not do the infringing...
EI
Tim, Mark and others,
Thanks for the discussion.
I know we disagree and I have pointed out historical truths that don't comport with your understanding but for what it is worth we are not going to take away your guns, if that is what you are afraid of.
I was hoping however that, in the spirit of the second admendment itself, we could discus ways to solve the huge problem we have in America today.
Best wishes to all
Ken,
I'm afraid that what you call "lobbying for" the 2A will eventually restrict access to firearms by honest, law abiding citizens. What is accomplished by this? Since I think, I THINK, we can all agree it is those who do not obey the law who are the REAL problem, what is solved by further restrictions? I do not see a society of potential criminals when I look at American society. I feel sorry for those who do.
I have no problem with gun laws as they exist now. I feel access to firearms is "regulated" just fine. Again, it's time to start enforcing those laws, swiftly and certainly.
I am standing for the 2A by demanding that existing gun laws be enforced on those who disobey them. Rest assured I will fight tooth and nail against any new gun laws that will affect only the law abiding.
We're just going to have to agree to disagree I'm afraid. Your interpretation of the 2A is totally wrong IMHO.
Jeff G:
Many of the itemized rights in the Bill of Rights have some limitations that concern abuse of the defined right. The culpret here is the abuser of the right, not the right.The vast majority of gun violence comes from habitual, chronic felons with backgrounds that often involve illegal use, possession,and/or sale of addictive drugs. It seems that you are prepared to add further restrictions to a particular constitutional right that you do not identify with, presumably for reasons having to do with your cultural background, even in the face of much evidence of the futility of this approach. With a little objectivity applied to your approach you might consider instead the rights of criminals in the criminal justice system, that turn so many of them loose to commit more murder and mayhem.
Jeff G:
I was hoping to get a response from you to my post from yesterday at 3:35. (Not trying to be snarky, I really am curious about your counterarguments, or if you agree in principle, just not in application).
Mark,
Well, if I get an invitation to respond, then I must respond.
As is usual with public policy discussions, there are a lot of different aspects to this whole gun debate.
Strictly from an economics standpoint, society certainly needs to weigh the costs and benefits of whatever regulations or bans are enacted. Thus, your analysis of the supposed demand curves for various weapons would be useful for policymakers and I agree that that is the appropriate way to begin with a cost/benefit analysis.
The strict scrutiny standard is drawn from the legal world. I don’t believe that the right to own arms should be included in the set of human rights that liberal democracies recognize, and as such there should be no such constitutional protections. However, as things currently stand, the Second Amendment is in the United States Constitution, and the Supreme Court is about to make a potentially watershed ruling on this issue. If the Supreme Court rules that the Second Amendment does provide the citizens with at least some degree of an individual right to own firearms, then the immediate next question will pertain to the degree of scrutiny that courts the will utilize to review any regulations on this right that governmental organizations may enact. In this, Mark, you may be way ahead of the curve, and I think exactly these type of legal arguments may become crucial in the future. I was glad to read that according to your legal reasoning, even if we apply the highest standard to gun regulations, what the Supreme Court termed the strict scrutiny standard, some gun regulations will still pass constitutional scrutiny.
But if the Supreme Court does rule that individuals do have a right to own firearms, then I would think it would be very strange if a strict scrutiny standard would still allow laws banning handguns to be upheld. That would mean that on the one hand the courts are saying that this a constitutional right and laws abridging this right must be viewed with a very critical eye; on the other hand, the courts would be saying that even though you have this right, handguns are so dangerous that laws abridging your right can stand even the highest level of skepticism.
Mark, I have to give it to you, I have never heard anybody else argue before that the strict scrutiny standard provides the type of economic efficiencies that you describe in your post. I am skeptical that the demand curve between handguns and machine guns is as different as you imply and I think there is plenty of evidence that a gun ban would keep guns out of the hands of most of those who are low- to mid-level criminals, temporarily infuriated, or not mentally stable. I agree with the pro-gun crowd that international comparisons are devilishly difficult to make due to the fact that a myriad of factors differ between nations, so we have the classic problem of not having a controlled experiment. But The Economist described recently a rash of incidents in China where alienated individuals have attempted to do harm to seemingly randomly selected schoolchildren. In one incident, for example, a man succeeded in throwing a couple of children out the window; in other incident children were attacked using a knife. These are exactly the type of incidents where in the United States a gun would have been involved and the body count may have been much higher. Further, the violent crime rate in Australia, for example, is much lower than in the United States, despite the recent drop in the U.S. (a murder rate of 1.5 versus 4.8 per 100,000 citizens). The good thing about murder statistics is that they are accurate for virtually all nations; a lot of other crime statistics are not comparable, for a variety of reasons, across countries.
Now on to the political philosophy aspect, and this is the most important. The Economist said that if the right to bear arms is unrestricted, then other freedoms must be restricted. Just today, the school in Ohio that suffered a recent school shooting reopened after metal detectors were installed and armed security guards were posted. This is a clear example where the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure was abridged because that ended up being the less-well defended right compared to the right to bear arms.
Even more worryingly, freedom of speech may be the next one to go on the altar of the right to bear arms. Again, just this week there was a case in Pennsylvania where a 14-year old boy and her mother were arrested for allegedly planning a school shooting. The evidence that the boy was soliciting another boy to help him execute a school shooting is flimsy and based on pure hearsay. There goes our the constitutional protections that we are innocent till proven guilty. Yet, everyone is willing to believe that the police saved us from imminent catastrophe because they found an assault rifle and some neo-nazi literature in the boy’s home (I wouldn’t be too surprised if the cops just made up the part about neo-nazi literature). If guns wouldn’t have been involved, we would be facing a situation where a child allegedly fantasized to another child about carrying out a violent act. But because of the ready availability of guns, the child’s political beliefs are portrayed as leading to unavoidable violence, the prosecutors bring charges wholly out of proportion to the incident, the media creates a hero out of the snitch who informed the police, and the rights of the criminally accused are trampled upon.
Tyranny was not impeded as a result of guns; tyranny is creeping up on the United States as a result of guns.
Mark,
I guess a more direct answer to your question is that I disagree about the desirability of the model you outlined in principle and not just in the way you applied it. I mean I think you are correct, that if we do give the right to bear arms a strict scrutiny level of constitutional protection, then machine guns and explosives may be banned, but handguns must be kept in the hands of ordinary citizens. Thus, you applied the model correctly to handguns, I can't disagree with the application for the reasons that I discussed in greater detail in my post above.
Ramdom thoughts relevant to the two preceding arguments:
Longarms plus hacksaws plus criminals=handguns(not to mention clandestine machine shops when the demand gets high enough)
Go to gun free England and your on camera big time. (?ptivacy)
Didn't that 14 year old also have at least one functional home made hand grenade?
Would school security not have been instituted sans guns, in the face of home made explosive devises, knives and threats?
Ramdom thoughts relevant to the two preceding arguments:
Longarms plus hacksaws plus criminals=handguns(not to mention clandestine machine shops when the demand gets high enough)
Go to gun free England and your on camera big time. (?privacy)
Didn't that 14 year old also have at least one functional home made hand grenade?
Would school security not have been instituted sans guns, in the face of home made explosive devises, knives and threats?
Joseph Stalin's Minister of Agriculture for several decades was a man by the name of Lysenko. To make a long story short, Lysenko controled crops, planting times, and planting locations (remember farmers and everyone else worked for the state in Stalin's USSR) based upon falacious biological theories. But these theories, which held that environmental conditions had a direct effect on the genetics (innate nature) of an organism even though preposterous and easily disprovable, fit communist dogma and so pleased Stalin. And so very unsound agricultural practices caused decades of low yealds and crop failures , causing hunger and starvation on a massive scale in the USSR .
Attacking the problem of violent crime that is due mostly to violent crackhead street thugs and their gangs, by making gun ownership difficult and burdensome for law abiding citizens, demonstrably and historically fails dismally. There have been too many such failures to enumerate. But it does fit liberal/leftist social theory on causes and cures for crime. And so as long as these people who ruin cities with easy welfare that promotes illigitimacy and single parent housholds and tolerance toward criminals, are in power, crime will increase and freedoms/ liberties, perhaps starting but certainly not ending with gun rights, will diminish.
I prefer to have guns in my home than street thugs.
Jeff:
I appreciate the well-thought out responses. Believe it or not, I found them informative and your argument about civil liberties is thought provoking, to say the least. There are, I'm sure, flaws in that argument (as there are in any argument), but the most glaring flaw is really one only of semantics and degree (ie, the limited rights of children in a school environment to begin with).
On handguns, your point about the lethality of schoolyard attacks is certainly taken. As I argued early on in this thread with an even more-pro-gunner than I, the availability of firearms most certainly contributes to the lethality of school attacks and, in my opinion, is unlikely to significantly reduce that lethality if teachers are themselves armed against attack. However, I have doubts about the practical ability of the law to prevent schoolyard attackers from obtaining guns (I appreciate your example about China, but as you note, it is difficult to compare from country to country; China is an especially difficult comparison because of the general lack of freedom there to begin with).
All this actually ties in quite well to my original post in this thread (which largely went unanswered). That post asked what I view to be a more important question than the gun control debate (on both sides) when it comes to the school shootings issue. I noted in that post that I think these school shootings are generally too rarely successful to make broad generalizations about gun control policy (pro or con), and I generally find the immediate response to such shootings to be highly exploitive on both sides of the issue. The real question I think we should be asking isn't whether gun control helps or hinders school shootings; instead, it should be the question of why these kids become killers in the first place. Please note, I find the attempts to give the simple answer to this question (ie, video games, violent movies, song lyrics, etc.) to be equally exploitive and simplistic as the pro and anti-gun responses.
To me, this question deserves far more serious consideration, and like most issues, the answer is not likely to be simple and easy. I suggested in my original comment that changes in the way our culture views education over the last 50 years may prove to be an important source for these attacks. I quote the key part of the comment below:
"Part of it, I think, is our increasing emphasis on pressuring kids to get good grades, and get into the right college (remember, it was just a few years ago that any four-year college was reserved for the privileged; now it is viewed as essential even though it is pretty much irrelevant for most jobs). In fact, I think this is the biggest part of the problem- kids who aren't jocks buffing up their extra-curricular activities or honors students buffing up their grades are truly looked down upon. In the past, these kids might have been appreciated for their skills as an auto mechanic, or respected for going on to learn a trade after high school- or even during high school, if they went to a Vo-Tech. So, I think that plays a big role in the spate of violence.
But I would love to hear other theories, because it is an issue that is only ever used as fodder for political talking heads with pet issues. Unfortunately, I suspect that the real answer isn't one that the talking heads will ever find politically advantageous."
I learn from online postings too; if I didn't, why would I bother.
Mark, I think you are entirely correct in that school shootings are so rare that even the entire United States cannot provide a statistically valid picture. And if we factor in another variable we have even more statistical problems: that is the effect of copy-cat events. In other words, these days a lot many more children think about a shooting due to the fact that we have had shootings in the recent past. Since this effect by definition compounds itself, our statistics would be wholly skewed.
I do think that children who are neglected, abused, or otherwise not brought up properly are the ones that are most likely to go on school shootings. But having said that, the argument that school shootings did not happen in the past because we did not have liberalism cannot be valid. Let us assume that a society where all children are brought up with proper values would not have school shootings. But nobody can seriously argue that we ever had such a society; just because what Americans call the liberal revolution happened in the 60's, we all must admit that undoubtedly some children were abused, neglected, beat, starved, otherwise mistreated, and brought up without values at all time periods in our history.
Nor does this let guns off hook for several reasons. One, even the most coherent human society imaginable is not going to be so perfect as to be able to safely function with the ready availability of objects perfected to kill. Two, even the most well brought up kids will have bad days. We know that children do not fully mature with respect to judgment until into their early 20's. Guns are so readily lethal, that it only takes a small slip up for a massive tragedy to occur. Three, some people just simply have medical conditions that make them unstable. Four, this push to prosecute ever younger children as adults is barbaric and not befitting of civilized society.
Jeff:
I agree with you on this point. However, I'm not sure if you misread my post (which, admittedly, may have been poorly worded) or are more responding to arguments generally made in the school shooting context. In either event, I just want to make sure it's understood that I am not blaming "liberalism" for school shootings; indeed, I'm going to explicitly disclaim the standard "blame the parents" argument for pretty much the reasons you gave- there are always going to be good and bad parents and besides, on social issues, libertarians like me are a lot closer to Progressives than conservatives.
My point was more that there has been a cultural shift and emphasis on a particular kind of education that is not necessarily the right fit for everyone- not because some kids are stupid, but because different kids have different interests, yet we as a society try to fit them into a particular mold and then expect that forcing them to fit into this mold will somehow make them better, happier people. (Indeed, in a way, this is more a critique of conservatism than liberalism).
I don't know if you are familiar with Gregg Easterbrook's the Progress Paradox, but his central argument is that most things in the world are getting better by every statistical measure, yet people are less happy for some reason. One of the statistics he cites as particularly encouraging is the absurdly high rate of college attendance as compared to 30 or 40 years ago. But I wonder if this statistic is as inherently good as it sounds- college just isn't necessarily appropriate for everyone, and too many kids going to college means that too many kids are being pressured into life-paths that just don't suit their goals.
For those of you trying to educate "ken", you are wasting your time.
"ken" is really sarah brady.
Mark, I didn't necessarily think that you were blaming liberalism for school shootings, I was more just responding to a common refrain.
I have not heard of Gregg Easterbrook, but the progress paradox has certainly been discussed in The Economist for example. Part of what is going on is that most people look at their relative well-being to others.
I think we have done a great job of discussing the gun issue here; I am hoping that there are actually a lot more people reading these posts who do not post themselves but follow along.
Whereabouts do you live? I am outside of Philadelphia. If I don't have time to post on here or I seem to be gone, I can be reached at liechter102@yahoo.com.
As others have said, I believe that the war on drugs is behind much of the violence in the US. Violent crimes have risen throughout the war on drugs and many violent crimes are drug related. The war on drugs has also been responsible for more loss of civil liberties than any other single phenomenon.
I'm not sure what the best approach is to solve the problem of drugs, but what we are doing now isn't working and is causing a lot of other problems. We should deal with that, then worry about guns.
EI
Jeff Goldman
Your ascertion that Europe has tighter gun control laws and less crime is somewhat mistaken. In fact some European countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Norway) actually have higher gun ownership percantage-wise than the US and crime rate lower than ours. This may be a result of a population density lower than the US, or stricter control over their borders which allows better narcotic enforcement, or a combination of the two. Furthuremore, as I posted earlier, I went to school in a rural school district were it was common for kids to to bring firearms to school during hunting season. We never feared a school shooting, granted this was prior to Columbine, but the individauls who carried out that mass killings actually attended for the majority of victims to be a result of home made propane bombs that thankfully malfunctioned. In the 19th century many children on the frontier were expeceted to travel long distances to attend school, many in territory that was contested by Natives, or the realm of rogue outlaw gangs, and thus went armed to school. Taking away guns is simply a feel good means, a reaction to stress that we have trouble adjusting to. This manifests itself in the new American Pediactric Association rules that require Doctors to ask if people have firearms in there homes and how they are stored. This in spit of the fact that kids are far more likely to drown in a five gallon bucket than kill themselves with a gun. One Dr. in Boston went so far as to report legal gun owning parents to the Police and CPS because he disagreed with the way they stored their gun. Media has created a fear of legal gun owners that far outweigh any evidence of their dangers. This is further illustrated by the fact that when the gun-control debate is divided between rural America (where most have been raised around firearms and they themselves own firearms) and Urban centers, were gun ownership is far more rare. Rural populations tend to be less receptive to gun-control and urban individuals more open to the idea. Ignorance drives fear, and that is what gun-control comes down to, a debate on how fearful we are of legal gun owners.
As stated before, lefties have given us a morass of idiotic socialistic law and regulation based not upon fact but upon social agenda. And now that Americans are trying to live day to day with these fetters around our wrists, with more socialistic fetters to come(LOST treaty, birth control to babies, sanctuary cities, no enforcement of our borders, The Hague wanting to dictate to states how law shall be enforced, on and on it goes)they will want more control. I say no.
No one has to fear gun owners except those who want to force their will on us, as any human being would react to, heres that word, "tyranny".
Fear the government that fears your guns.