USA Gun Rights/Gun Control Discussion Thread

[eclipse]

7 hours ago, Johann said:

I'm well aware what created the systemic problems. I'm saying that addressing the human side of things directly with police doesn't resolve the systemic issues, and that even the most sincere police officers with the best intentions do things that, unfortunately, have racist impacts. Part of the issue is that when confronted with the possibility that something has racist impacts, there may be resistance, such as in the form of denial.

It's not that I'm saying you're wrong, it's that it's more than just a matter of compassion vs hatred. That's what systemic racism is; systems don't hate or love, they just function, and no matter what you feel, they'll keep happening until enough people understand the system and have the power to change it.

And it's people that change the system.  Thing is, it's not a one-way system.  So, I'm going to do that thing I swore I should cut back on, and play a little mafia.

Part of playing mafia is "tells".  Some are obvious, like "you don't have a role, how did you know that X did Y last night?" (scumslips).  But most people are better than that, so it's a matter of what's known as "tells".  Say, someone who gets really defensive when they're poked at.  Is it because they have something to hide?  Do they just suck under pressure?  Is the accuser taking advantage of the situation?  There's a lot more possibilities, but that's the general idea.

Now, back to the real world.  It's a known fact that black people get the butt end of treatment due to the police - partly because statistics, partly because of more statistics, and partly because the police NOT doing their job properly and making life hell for a minority makes for a juicy story.  Which means that the one making the case (police) are already looking for tells in a population that's been told that they're going to be targeted more.  This will influence the interpretations and actions by both sides, usually for the worse.  And the cycle repeats itself.

That's what I mean by unlearning - police need to get it through their heads that a person isn't necessarily a criminal based on race/socialeconomic/other factors, those in the more heavily targeted demographics need to learn that a police officer isn't something to be feared, and the rest of the public needs to realize that they probably don't know the full story behind every claimed altercation, so immediately judging based on what they think they know is bad.

[Lewyn]

Police should have to take a comprehensive, thorough examination testing for prejudice.  If they fail they are disqualified.  All killings of civilians that are suspect at all should be thoroughly investigated.  

Now let me tell you the big difference between racism from some asshole in a bar and a cop.  If some other civilian does it, and I've experienced it as I'm sure most every other dark skinned person at some point in their lives if not multiple or many times you can tell them to fuck off.  You can retaliate, you can do something.  If a cop does it (and I've had one bad incident, forced unwarranted drug search of my vehicle a bunch of screaming and racist name calling) it is the worst feeling in the world.  You can't do shit.  They have all the power.  They are armed, you do anything likely you will face charges.  It is a difficult problem to solve but definitely a lot of effort and measures should be put in to do this.

Having said that, I have many friends who are police who are some of the most upstanding citizens you'd ever meet, so these bad cops are a small minority.  However just like the pedo priests in the Catholic Church they should not be protected and have no part in the organization.  

[Jotari]

3 hours ago, Lewyn said:

Police should have to take a comprehensive, thorough examination testing for prejudice.  If they fail they are disqualified.  All killings of civilians that are suspect at all should be thoroughly investigated.  

Now let me tell you the big difference between racism from some asshole in a bar and a cop.  If some other civilian does it, and I've experienced it as I'm sure most every other dark skinned person at some point in their lives if not multiple or many times you can tell them to fuck off.  You can retaliate, you can do something.  If a cop does it (and I've had one bad incident, forced unwarranted drug search of my vehicle a bunch of screaming and racist name calling) it is the worst feeling in the world.  You can't do shit.  They have all the power.  They are armed, you do anything likely you will face charges.  It is a difficult problem to solve but definitely a lot of effort and measures should be put in to do this.

Having said that, I have many friends who are police who are some of the most upstanding citizens you'd ever meet, so these bad cops are a small minority.  However just like the pedo priests in the Catholic Church they should not be protected and have no part in the organization.  

Imo even without prejudice any cop that shoots at an unarmed civilian should, at best, be stuck behind a desk and never be allowed to have a gun again. They've demonstrated, in the only test that's actually accurate for this kind of thing, that they can't in fact think critically under pressure.

[PyroPlazma]

Fully pro gun rights here.... Gun homicide in the U.S.A. fell for almost 20 decades before stabilizing recently as gun proliferation has risen. If politicians realistically wanted to deal with the "gun issues" they'd enact social reform like better healthcare, ending the war on drugs and legalizing prostitution, education reform mainly in regards to accessibility from a financial standpoint, increased wages, increased workers right ETC. 

But nah it's easier to just blame guns the instrument of violence rather than address the violence itself, because all of that would require the rich to get less richer. 

I feel  that legalizing drugs and legalizing prostitution/fully legitimizing the sex industry would do more than anything to stop police shootings. Police would be hard pressed to kill people if they barely had any reason to stop people or randomly kick down their doors to begin with. Better screening of cops would also go a long way but unfortunately that's pretty unrealistic. Last thing is cops need their own independent tribunals specifically for handling cases involving them shooting people. The standards courts are to comprised and buddy buddy with them. 

 

Shooting from the hip right here. If anyone wants to respond I will bring empirical data next time.

[eclipse]

Yeah, empirical data please.  Read through the entire thread to see why.

[Sunwoo]

I know people have already discussed this, but in regards to "good guy with a gun", I just want to leave this here.

 

[PyroPlazma]

6 hours ago, eclipse said:

Yeah, empirical data please.  Read through the entire thread to see why.

Well first off the "20 decades" was meant to read 20 years or 2 decades. 

Statement: America is some lawless shooting gallery

Actuality? It's hit historic lows and in only recently began rise but not nearly to levels seen in the 80s. NOTE: Most graphs top out around 2011-2014 (since it takes a long side to fully gather this data) so If you wan't more recent years you'll have to get he numbers directly from the FBI or other crime bureaus. 

Statement: America's gun problem is a result of high gun ownership

Actuality?: The numbers just flat out don't support this presumptive correlation

Statement: America is the mass shooting capital of the world. *warning wall of text incoming*

As Investor’s Business Daily noted on these findings, “Yes, the U.S. rate is still high, and nothing to be proud of. But it's not the highest in the developed world. Not by a long shot.”

If this is true, how did the narrative that the US leads the world in mass shootings become the conventional wisdom? The myth, it turns out, stems from University of Alabama associate professor Adam Lankford.

Lankford’s name pops up in a montage of media reports which cite his research as evidence that America leads the world in mass shootings. The violence, Lankford said, stems from the high rate of gun ownership in America.

“The difference between us and other countries, [which] explains why we have more of these attackers, was the firearm ownership rate,” Lankford said. “In other words: firearms per capita. We have almost double the firearm ownership rate of any other country.”

Lankford’s findings show that there were 90 mass public shooters in America since 1966, the most in the world, which had a total of 202. But Lott, using Lankford’s definition of a mass shooting—“four or more people killed”—found more than 3,000 such shootings, John Stossel recently reported.

Who is to say Lankford doesn’t have it right and Lott is wrong? There’s just one problem: Lankford isn’t talking.

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When findings do not mesh, scholars, in pursuit of truth, generally compare notes, data, and methodology to find out how they reached their conclusions. After all, who is to say Lankford doesn’t have it right and Lott is wrong? There’s just one problem: Lankford isn’t talking.

Lankford refuses to explain his data to anyone—to Stossel, to Lott, to the Washington Post, and apparently anyone else who comes asking, including this writer. (I emailed Lankford inquiring about his research. He declined to discuss his methodology, but said he would be publishing more information about mass shooting data in the future.)

“That’s academic malpractice,” Lott tells Stossel.

[Editor's Note: Lankford has since published his research. It can be found here.]

Indeed it is. Yet, it doesn’t explain how one professor’s research was so rapidly disseminated that its erroneous claim quickly became the conventional wisdom in a country with 330 million people."

 https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-us-leads-the-world-in-mass-shootings/

Does Lankford’s paper also have that problem?

A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center, which one of us heads, has just finished collecting cases using the same definition of mass public shootings used by Lankford.

We know of no way to discover most of the cases where four people have been shot to death in an incident in Africa or many other parts of the world during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s, and that is the reason the new study just looked at the last 15 years from 1998 to 2012 of the 47 years he examined.

Lankford’s data grossly undercount foreign attacks. We found 1,423 attacks outside the United States. Looking at just a third of the time Lankford studied, we still found 15 times as many shooters.

Even when we use coding choices that are most charitable to Lankford, such as excluding any cases of insurgencies or battles over territory, his estimate of the US share of shooters falls from 31 percent to 1.43 percent. It also accounts for 2.1 percent of murders, and 2.88 percent of their attacks. All these are much less than the United States’ 4.6 percent share of the population.

Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.

When Lankford’s data is revised, the relationship between gun ownership rates and mass public shooters disappears.

How could that be? One possibility is that guns don’t just enable mass shooters; gun owners can also deter and prevent such shootings. Another is that culture — not gun ownership — is a bigger factor in shootings.

The media should be wary of any researchers who fail to let others look at their data. At least on this point, the intellectual base for liberal thunder about mass public shootings is wrong.

https://nypost.com/2018/08/30/america-doesnt-actually-lead-the-world-in-mass-shootings/

Statement: America is the only "developed" nation with high gun homicide. 

Actuality: Developed nation is a fairly pointless label that is often arbitrarily applied and doesn't  account for the fact that even if two countries are "developed" that still doesn't mean they're intrinsically similar enough to just broadly compare crime statistics in a vacuum. 

"

Prejudice about the "Developed World" vs "the Third World"

 

But these are the only countries the US shall be compared to, we are told, because the US shall only be compared to “developed” countries when analyzing its murder rate and gun ownership.

And yet, no reason for this is ever given. What is the criteria for deciding that the United States shall be compared to Luxembourg but not to Mexico, which has far more in common with the US than Luxembourg in terms of size, history, ethnic diversity, and geography?"

 

 

https://mises.org/wire/mistake-only-comparing-us-murder-rates-developed-countries

 

If you're just going to actually broadly compare countries based on total gun homicide without controlling for any significant factors then America consistently ranks past 10th place in the world 

 

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/gun-deaths-by-country/ 

 

Observation: People talk about mass shooting the casually throw in the entirety of American gun homicide with them.

Actuality: Mass shooting victims (I'm using the FBI definition) account for less than 1% of gun homicide victims. That's not to dismiss the events the entirely, but if you're argue on the basis of mass shootings then stick to just mass shootings. 

 

 

If you want to argue for dumb measures like magazine bans or banning arbitrarily defined firearms like "assault weapons" (made up term btw) we can address that separately.

[PyroPlazma]

8 hours ago, Sunwoo said:

I know people have already discussed this, but in regards to "good guy with a gun", I just want to leave this here.

 

 

Regular citizens armed with firearms have absolutely stopped mass shootings. You just never hear about it in main stream media because that runs counter to their narrative. Just look at the way they covered the texas church shooting that was stopped with a regular citizen armed with an AR-15 or that recent church shooting. 

 

Thanks to a recent FBI report, we have more data on 2016-17. The FBI found 50 shootings throughout the U.S. that it labeled "active shooter incidents"—"one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area." Of those, four involved situations where the FBI believes that "citizens possessing valid firearms permits successfully stopped the shooter." (Four others involved "unarmed citizens [who] confronted or persuaded the shooter to end the shooting.")

See attached file for FBI report 

You'll find multiple reports just with a basic google search

active-shooter-incidents-us-2016-2017.pdf

[Dark Holy Elf]

4 hours ago, PyroPlazma said:

And yet, no reason for this is ever given. What is the criteria for deciding that the United States shall be compared to Luxembourg but not to Mexico, which has far more in common with the US than Luxembourg in terms of size, history, ethnic diversity, and geography?"

Because ethnic diversity and geography are not remotely predictive of crime rates, while economic development / poverty rate is. So the US is rightly compared to nations with similar economies (i.e. Western Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, etc.), and it does not look good in those comparisons. That big graph you posted includes only one other nation which is truly in a similar position to the US, and that's Canada, which is far lower, but whoever made that graph is hoping you get distracted by the presence of failed state Venezuela which balloons the y-axis.

I'm relatively neutral on gun control overall. One, because I kinda feel like the cat's out of the bag; the US has had a dysfunctional gun-loving culture for years and that obviously has had an adverse effect on it, but you can't easily fix that with legislation now (maybe a slow change of the culture but that'll take generations). And two, I feel other approaches to reducing crime are more productive: reducing income inequality, increasing the quality of education, having a jusitce system focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, and increasing mental health awareness... all not only reduce crime but have other merits besides. The only gun control beliefs I hold to strongly are that that civilians don't need to have weapons which can fire multiple times per second (a feature nearly useless for hunting and self-defence, but extremely useful for mass murder), and that guns should be registered in a similar manner to cars (both useful tools capable of killing others if mishandled).

[PyroPlazma]

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Because ethnic diversity and geography are not remotely predictive of crime rates, while economic development / poverty rate is. So the US is rightly compared to nations with similar economies (i.e. Western Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, etc.), and it does not look good in those comparisons. That big graph you posted includes only one other nation which is truly in a similar position to the US, and that's Canada, which is far lower, but whoever made that graph is hoping you get distracted by the presence of failed state Venezuela which balloons the y-axis.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1477370818775294

"Many scholars argue that diverse preferences and coordination failure stemming from high ethnic diversity results in high social frictions, leading to socio-political failure. Criminological theories suggest that crime is driven by very similar processes. The specialized literature on civil war, however, reports a diversity dividend, arguing that when two large groups (polarization) make up a society, the risk of armed violence is increased. Using data on global homicide rates from the period 1995–2013 for over 140 countries, we find that ethnic heterogeneity is associated with homicide rates in an inverted U-shape relationship. Measures of ethnic polarization confirm these results directly. The results suggests that ethnic polarization and ethnic dominance rather than diversity are what matter for personal security measured as homicide rates. The conditional effect of high diversity and income inequality is associated with lower homicide rates, results that reject the view that societal heterogeneity and income inequality drive social dislocation. Several possible intervening variables, such as unemployment among males and youth, ethnic exclusion and discrimination, good governance and institutional quality, as well as several demographic and political variables, do not affect the basic results. It seems that the heavy emphasis placed on ethnic diversity for explaining social dislocation and violence, in so far as it relates to a country’s homicide rate, seems to be misplaced."

 

 African Americans and other minority groups have long been the victim of white generational wealth and manipulation  along with institutional racism.This in turn can lead to things like being unable to pay for education, not getting care and attention from parents as both are busy working barely making ends meat, dead beat parents, lack of positive role models to look up to. 

In other words all of the factors that are often huge red flags for not passing school let alone going to college and becoming a criminal. Now this the part where the white nationalist start selling you on their oh so precious ethnostates, but fuck those guys (seriously fuck them). Pretending Like this isn't an issue in America is asinine. Smaller ethnically homogeneous countries don't have to deal with these issues the same melting pots like America do.

This is also why just broadly comparing countries based on their relative levels of wealth is a also terrible. Yeah America may be the richest  country on the planet at face value but look at how that wealth is distributed. The distribution of wealth here is horrible! wages are stagnant, rent is insanely expensive with more younger people living their parents than ever before! Health Care cost are insane and many are uninsured or underunsiurred. 

 

 

Yes other countries have their own sets of Issues, but American has many issues that are largely unique to itself. So just taking Country A and Country B and comparing them side by side without controlling for any other factors is massively disingenuous unless the two countries in question are intrinsically similar. America has way more in common with its southern neighbor mexico than it does a small ethnically homogeneous island nation like Japan. But according to lots of gun control proponents you can just compare America and Japan at face value. 

[PyroPlazma]

Quote

I'm relatively neutral on gun control overall. One, because I kinda feel like the cat's out of the bag; the US has had a dysfunctional gun-loving culture for years and that obviously has had an adverse effect on it, but you can't easily fix that with legislation now (maybe a slow change of the culture but that'll take generations). And two, I feel other approaches to reducing crime are more productive: reducing income inequality, increasing the quality of education, having a jusitce system focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, and increasing mental health awareness... all not only reduce crime but have other merits besides.

If you did these things the gun issue would solve itself. Guns are merely the implement to enact violence in the first place. 

 

Quote

The only gun control beliefs I hold to strongly are that that civilians don't need to have weapons which can fire multiple times per second (a feature nearly useless for hunting and self-defence, but extremely useful for mass murder), and that guns should be registered in a similar manner to cars (both useful tools capable of killing others if mishandled).

How are you defining "multiple times per second"? You make it sound the only basis or owning anything other than a hunting is committing mass murder. The deadliest mass killing in recently history didn't even involve a gun. 

Why should I have to register my own private property that I have a constitutional right to own? Are you aware of the fact that if you got rid of the second amendment (would have to be done in order to implement national registries and licensing) and gave the government that kind of unilateral control over firearms they'd simply make it impossible for regular citizens to own them via excessive taxing and inconvenient means to acquire licenses as some states already do? 

edit: On the subject of national firearm registries post facto, they simply would not work. No one would bother registering them, Canada tried it at the national level and it was so ineffective they got rid of it.

Edited April 3, 2020 by PyroPlazma

[eclipse]

1. It is painfully obvious when things are copy-pasted.  Please don't, and link to the actual source instead.
2. The little plus sign next to Quote enables Multiquote, so I don't have to give out warnings for double-posting.

[Johann]

Thought we got rid of the gun rights troll, is this a new one?

[PyroPlazma]

7 hours ago, eclipse said:

1. It is painfully obvious when things are copy-pasted.  Please don't, and link to the actual source instead.
2. The little plus sign next to Quote enables Multiquote, so I don't have to give out warnings for double-posting.

1. I quoted (copy paste lol) relevant things while ALWAYS providing the citations. Plus I always use quotation marks to indicate those as such.

2. Only double posted because the first one was so long in its own right, But if there's a strict no double posting here then I understand.

23 minutes ago, Johann said:

Thought we got rid of the gun rights troll, is this a new one?

You're just going to call me or anyone else who disagree with your general sentiment regarding gun control a troll? I laid out a pretty well reasoned argument against the notion of gun control. At least actually go through the trouble of addressing my points individually. 

[eclipse]

4 hours ago, PyroPlazma said:

1. I quoted (copy paste lol) relevant things while ALWAYS providing the citations. Plus I always use quotation marks to indicate those as such.

2. Only double posted because the first one was so long in its own right, But if there's a strict no double posting here then I understand.

At the bottom of the screen, you can swap the color scheme of this site.  Change it to Dark Forest, and you'll see what I mean.

And yeah, we have rules against double-posting.  The one with your initial argument+response was okay, due to the fact that you probably would've run into some errors if you tried to fit that all into one post.  Second one (right before I posted that thing about double-posting) wasn't.

5 hours ago, Johann said:

Thought we got rid of the gun rights troll, is this a new one?

You're missing a lot of details behind that ban, and it's for the better.  Besides, didn't you notice something really different between the two?

[Shoblongoo]

On 4/3/2020 at 2:58 PM, Dark Holy Elf said:

Because ethnic diversity and geography are not remotely predictive of crime rates, while economic development / poverty rate is. So the US is rightly compared to nations with similar economies (i.e. Western Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, etc.), and it does not look good in those comparisons. 

^^^
This.
 

On 4/3/2020 at 12:22 AM, PyroPlazma said:

 If politicians realistically wanted to deal with the "gun issues" they'd enact social reform like better healthcare, ending the war on drugs and legalizing prostitution, education reform mainly in regards to accessibility from a financial standpoint, increased wages, increased workers right ETC. 

...this is true...  (See again the Top 3 Predictors of Gun Violence in a Given Country are:  [1] Poverty Rates; [2] Education Levels; [3] Gun Laws)

However, the need to address [1] and [2] does not discount the importance of [3].

And while it is true that to bring down America's insane levels of gun violence, we need to be improving education and reducing poverty (and by extension tackling things like healthcare costs and mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders as public policy problems that are driving up our poverty rates)

...once you've addressed poverty and education, if you wanna get those gun violence stats down to the levels of other developed nations with comparably progressive policies in healthcare and education and the like...

You still have to do some form of gun control.
 

Edited April 4, 2020 by Shoblongoo

[Tediz64]

I have a question. So when one makes the case for or against gun control, what exactly is being debated? I sorta see multiple angles to approach the discussion but I'm not sure which exactly is the main point. Or what takes priority. 

If it is a legal right or not? If it is a necessary right to be granted to the citizens? How much it impacts crimes where guns are used and if making a change will move the results in a more favorable direction? If it is something that needs to be looked at from the point of view of it being an unalienable right?

I mean I could go on, but I'm sure you can see how confused I am. Are we determining whether they are a "need" or "want"?

Cause as I read this forum, I feel like people's objectives are all over the place. I mean for more than a page of responses, we were talking about police. I see how it came up but don't know how it is relevant to gun ownership on an individual level. 

[Shoblongoo]

1 hour ago, Tediz64 said:

I have a question. So when one makes the case for or against gun control, what exactly is being debated? I sorta see multiple angles to approach the discussion but I'm not sure which exactly is the main point. Or what takes priority. 

If it is a legal right or not? If it is a necessary right to be granted to the citizens? How much it impacts crimes where guns are used and if making a change will move the results in a more favorable direction? If it is something that needs to be looked at from the point of view of it being an unalienable right?

I mean I could go on, but I'm sure you can see how confused I am. Are we determining whether they are a "need" or "want"?

Cause as I read this forum, I feel like people's objectives are all over the place. I mean for more than a page of responses, we were talking about police. I see how it came up but don't know how it is relevant to gun ownership on an individual level. 

The police issue is related to the gun control issue, insofar as people getting shot and killed by police in numbers unseen anywhere else in the developed world is part of the American gun violence problem. And insofar as knowledge of how prevalent guns are among the general populace in this country is one of the big reasons why American police are so quick to panic and draw their own weapons when confronting suspects. (Police in countries with strong gun control and who almost never encounter suspects that can shoot back are much less inclined to take a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to policing)

[Tediz64]

1 hour ago, Shoblongoo said:

The police issue is related to the gun control issue, insofar as people getting shot and killed by police in numbers unseen anywhere else in the developed world is part of the American gun violence problem. And insofar as knowledge of how prevalent guns are among the general populace in this country is one of the big reasons why American police are so quick to panic and draw their own weapons when confronting suspects. (Police in countries with strong gun control and who almost never encounter suspects that can shoot back are much less inclined to take a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to policing)

Oh okay. I grasp why the police thing came up. It's another angle to look at this from. 

[XRay]

4 hours ago, Tediz64 said:

I sorta see multiple angles to approach the discussion but I'm not sure which exactly is the main point. Or what takes priority.

There are a lot of angles, although I am not sure if there is a main point since people have different priorities.

I am moderate/lean-right on this issue. From my angle, I want a balance between freedom and safety. I am generally against all kinds of weapon bans, so I am siding with the Right on this particular policy; as long as you are not going out there murdering people for no reason, you can own any kind of weapon you want, with exceptions being weapons that may jeopardize national security like nuclear weapons and other things like that. However, I think we could definitely use stronger background checks and more stringent licensing requirements, so I favor these policies from the Left. Instead of banning weapons, I think a good compromise is to replace all bans with stricter licensing and ownership requirements.

As long as a person is upstanding, I see no reason to limit their access to guns or any kind of weapon. I have no issue supporting background checks, licensing requirements, taxes, and any kind of regulation as long as it does not prevent a normal, sane person from owning any kind of weapon.

4 hours ago, Tediz64 said:

If it is a legal right or not?

"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."

Conservatives argue it is a right as sacred as the freedom or speech. With how it is phrased in the Bill of Rights though, I do not think it is a right for individuals, as it is strongly tied to the responsibility of the militia or some kind of security force. In my opinion, the Right is bending over backwards arguing it is an individual right like the freedom of speech or trial by jury. While I appreciate that they are trying expand the Second Amendment to include the individual right to bear arms, I think the proper way to do it is to simply remove the language on militia and security. Twisting the words of the Constitution and misinterpreting it to this degree just is not proper in my opinion.

4 hours ago, Tediz64 said:

If it is something that needs to be looked at from the point of view of it being an unalienable right?

4 hours ago, Tediz64 said:

Are we determining whether they are a "need" or "want"?

Sort of? Depends?

In terms of political self determination as a group of people, having an armed military force is definitely necessary to the security of the state, so the people as a group definitely should have the right to bear arms. And I think decentralizing the right to include local governments' militias is a good idea too.

In terms of the individual though, I am a little less sure. Do individuals really need the right to carry guns in day to day life? Probably not, so I am a little hesitant in saying that the right to bear arms as an individual is an unalienable right. On an individual level, the right to bear arms feels more like a want than a need. However, I agree with conservatives that it is something nice to have. Ideologically, my main disagreement with the Right is with the interpretation of the Second Amendment: conservatives think the right to bear arms is already a right, which I disagree as we need to elevate it to a right first.

Edited April 5, 2020 by XRay

[eclipse]

1 hour ago, XRay said:

"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."

Conservatives argue it is a right as sacred as the freedom or speech. With how it is phrased in the Bill of Rights though, I do not think it is a right for individuals, as it is strongly tied to the responsibility of the militia or some kind of security force. In my opinion, the Right is bending over backwards arguing it is an individual right like the freedom of speech or trial by jury. While I appreciate that they are trying expand the Second Amendment to include the individual right to bear arms, I think the proper way to do it is to simply remove the language on militia and security. Twisting the words of the Constitution and misinterpreting it to this degree just is not proper in my opinion.

Two questions:

1. Why was that little bit thrown in the Bill of Rights?
2. Assuming that we take that passage (the one that's a link) at face value, how can it be done without guns?

[PyroPlazma]

9 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

^^^
This.
 

...this is true...  (See again the Top 3 Predictors of Gun Violence in a Given Country are:  [1] Poverty Rates; [2] Education Levels; [3] Gun Laws)

However, the need to address [1] and [2] does not discount the importance of [3].

And while it is true that to bring down America's insane levels of gun violence, we need to be improving education and reducing poverty (and by extension tackling things like healthcare costs and mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders as public policy problems that are driving up our poverty rates)

...once you've addressed poverty and education, if you wanna get those gun violence stats down to the levels of other developed nations with comparably progressive policies in healthcare and education and the like...

You still have to do some form of gun control.
 

 

You have absolutely zero evidence to back up this notion of more gun control=less gun homicide besides broadly comparing America to other countries based on being "developed" (despite this being a massively flawed way to categorize nations as this article breaks down)

You haven't even stated what kinds of measures from said countries you want to implement. Or maybe that's because in most of these "developed" countries which usually just means Europe+Japan+Australia they effectively ban all private/recreational usage of firearms. 

It's also worth nothing to the fact that many of these nations (such as the U.K.) have NEVER throughout their entire history seen high levels of gun homicide at any particular point. 

 

[PyroPlazma]

I'm double posting because for whatever reason this editor refuses to save when I try to paste this to the first post

 

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The police issue is related to the gun control issue, insofar as people getting shot and killed by police in numbers unseen anywhere else in the developed world is part of the American gun violence problem. And insofar as knowledge of how prevalent guns are among the general populace in this country is one of the big reasons why American police are so quick to panic and draw their own weapons when confronting suspects. (Police in countries with strong gun control and who almost never encounter suspects that can shoot back are much less inclined to take a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to policing)

Americans have a constitutional right to own firearms. So because the cops are paranoid goons who suck at their job and are incredibly trigger happy (thanks in no part to a broken accountability system that often acquits them of blatant wrongdoings) We the regular citizens have to suffer? You're allowed to legally own and in many cases carry a firearm in America, if you can't handle that fact then you probably shouldn't be a cop. 

Also alot of the people cops kill (especially minorities) aren't even armed..... 

 

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I am moderate/lean-right on this issue. From my angle, I want a balance between freedom and safety. I am generally against all kinds of weapon bans, so I am siding with the Right on this particular policy; as long as you are not going out there murdering people for no reason, you can own any kind of weapon you want, with exceptions being weapons that may jeopardize national security like nuclear weapons and other things like that. However, I think we could definitely use stronger background checks and more stringent licensing requirements, so I favor these policies from the Left. Instead of banning weapons, I think a good compromise is to replace all bans with stricter licensing and ownership requirements.

Strict licensing requirements to own firearms runs contrary to the fact it's a constitutional right. What you're proposing would be to turn gun ownership into a privilege not a right. At which point state and local governments will over tax and place needlessly stringent requirements on obtaining licenses to make it impossible for regular citizens to own them.

 

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Conservatives argue it is a right as sacred as the freedom or speech. With how it is phrased in the Bill of Rights though, I do not think it is a right for individuals, as it is strongly tied to the responsibility of the militia or some kind of security force. In my opinion, the Right is bending over backwards arguing it is an individual right like the freedom of speech or trial by jury. While I appreciate that they are trying expand the Second Amendment to include the individual right to bear arms, I think the proper way to do it is to simply remove the language on militia and security. Twisting the words of the Constitution and misinterpreting it to this degree just is not proper in my opinion.

It is a sacred right dude. You do realize the definition of a militia (per the militia act of 1903 is all able bodied men between 17-45 years of age) is that of armed body comprised of regular citizens right? In 2008 the Supreme Court upheld that the second does indeed protect the individual right to own firearms in America. 

It's a very easy right to understand within context. The colonist had just finished fighting a bloody revolution to establish their new/own country. The straw that broke the camels back in this case was when the British tried to seize a munitions depot in concord! Not to mention all the other grievances the colonist faced such as unfair taxation, or forced quartering of British troops. 

If you actually interpret the constitution within the context of the colonist having just liberated themselves from Great Britain everything makes tons of sense. 

They made the first amendment for citizens to legitimately and legally protest the government if they so choose, and then they made the second amendment so that the newfound freedom may be protected by force if necessary!

You're actually the one reading and interpreting it all wrong!

 

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Two questions:

1. Why was that little bit thrown in the Bill of Rights?
2. Assuming that we take that passage (the one that's a link) at face value, how can it be done without guns?

 

Are you actually asking us this, or posing this to the other guy? 

Edited April 5, 2020 by PyroPlazma

[XRay]

31 minutes ago, eclipse said:

1. Why was that little bit thrown in the Bill of Rights?

You mean the Second Amendment being thrown in the Bill of Rights or the militia and security part being thrown in?

For the former, if I remember my American history correctly, the Second Amendment was a response to the British taking away the guns of the local militias and population in general I think. I will have to double check this.

As for why the militia part was thrown in, I am not 100% sure, but it seems to make sense to pair the right to bear arms with the responsibility of being part of the militia. The document was written at a time when we were revolting, so mentioning the militia and the security of the free state just sounds right?

31 minutes ago, eclipse said:

2. Assuming that we take that passage (the one that's a link) at face value, how can it be done without guns?

Woops! I just realized I did not actually put a link in there. Fixed it now.

Taking it at face value strictly from a national security perspective, I would argue we cannot do it without guns, and we definitely need guns to help safeguard our democracy. Having a standing national army is necessary in my opinion, and decentralizing some of that to local militias, reserves, and other security forces would help with mobilizing for war and other emergencies.

Edited April 5, 2020 by XRay

[eclipse]

2 minutes ago, PyroPlazma said:

Are you actually asking us this, or posing this to the other guy? 

Generally, if I'm quoting someone, I want them to answer it.