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Seems pretty clear to me, want to place limits on it, get support for a new amendment.
@freemo right on. And before someone posts the "well regulated militia" argument, the militia at that time was the able-bodied male population. The 2a is definitely about the general public being armed and trained to repel either invasion or tyranny.
If the Federal government wanted to take the 2a seriously, they should be expanding the Civilian Marksmanship Program and offering free rifle lessons in high school.
@mike805 @freemo even if that were the case (it's isn't), you still have them "well-regulated" bit. Also, if the first part is to be taken for sacred, by your interpretation then only white men should have the right to bear arms?
The reification of an old document is a choice. One that is killing our children. Guns are the number one cause of death for children in America! Our life expectancy is way lower than all other advanced countries. Choosing this mortality for an interpretation of an old text is the definition of a death cult. One that is imposed on a majority of Americans who do not want it.
@lmrocha @freemo then change it The Founders put in a procedure to change the Constitution. If a strong majority really does oppose the public ownership of guns, then you should have no trouble getting an amendment passed, right? A previous generation of progressive activists actually managed to get a ban on alcohol passed as an amendment, so it's not impossible.
I don't agree with you, but campaigning for an amendment would be the honest approach.
@mike805 @freemo if we had a democracy that would work, but we have an oligarchy where the lobby of the gun manufacturers out votes the people. Just see what the supreme court did recently to my state of New York. Our democratically enacted gun controls were wiped.
And if you don't believe we are in an oligarchy, see the news about Clarence Thomas. That is why I take issue with this reification of the founding fathers. That is all a smoke screen to face that there is no democracy on this issue. It's the rule of the lobby, which I very much doubt the founding fathers intended. Indeed, a century later Lincoln called the death penalty for profiteers, which is what the gun manufacturers who profit from there daily assassination of American children are.
@mike805 @freemo you have changed the interpretation of only the bits you like: guns for all, when it was meant for well regulated militia of white men. There was no need for amendments to change that interpretation. But if we want to set the limits clearly specified by the "well regulated" bit (the point @freemo was commenting with meme, incorrectly in my view) then we need an amendment. Isn't that convenient? Of course it is all a matter of interpretation, which depends on the supreme court, which depends on money---or a president with the balls to pack it.
The only hope it's that this conservative overreach (as in Tennessee and recent supreme court rulings) will result in a youth backlash that has not been seen since 1969.
@freemo @mike805 This is a case of manufacturers who profiteer from the murder of the citizenry, convincing a minority that wanting to keep their toys has a higher, almost divine reason and it's worth assassinating children for. Again, the number one cause of death for children in the USA is guns. That does not happen in countries not at war. You are siding with the profiteers, not the people, and certainly not the children who are scared and tired of fearing for their lives daily in schools and at home.
Yea thats complete nonsense... the data is quite clear.. at best banning guns does nothing to help improve the violent, rape, and homicide rates... though at best it significantly reduces it (and the data leans towards the latter)
The number one death for children means nothing if you dont compare it to the number of children's lives saved by guns as well, or correct for kids killed in gun free zones.
Again this is like the anti-vaxxers argument "If you ban vaccines we will significantly reduce the deaths caused by vaccines"... while true its an intellectually dishonest argument.
@freemo @mike805 that is just false. It is completely false. All data shows, quite clearly, over and over again, that greater gun control leads to fewer deaths. Why do you think the gun lobby made it illegal for the NIH to study the effect of guns on public health? If the data were what you say, they'd be the first to want to study the phenomenon. Instead they successfully lobbied to forbid such studies---speaking of "hardcore libertarians."
Nope, though I do understand why people who arent experts in data science can easily get mislead by the manipulation to try to sell that narrative... Sadly you will never see the data presented with good intellectually honest analysis (using granger causality rather than simple correlation whcih we all know is invalid when you cant control confounding variables)
the united states is just a horrifyingly volatile country in general. if you look at death statistics completely unrelated to weaponry--more of our firemen die than other countries of equivalent capability.
@icedquinn @mike805 @freemo
Arthur L. Kellermann et al., “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home,” New England Journal of Medicine 329, no. 15 (1993): 1084-1091.
[Wiebe, Douglas J., “Homicide and suicide risks associated with firearms in the home: a national case-control study,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 41, no. 6 (2003): 771-782.
Dahlberg, Linda L., Robin M. Ikeda, and Marcie-jo Kresnow, “Guns in the home and risk of a violent death in the home: findings from a national study,” American Journal of Epidemiology 160, no. 10 (2004): 929-936.
Miller, Matthew, Deborah Azrael, and Catherine Barber, “Suicide mortality in the United States: the importance of attending to method in understanding population-level disparities in the burden of suicide,” Annual Review of Public Health 33 (2012): 393-408.
@icedquinn @mike805 @freemo no, homicide as well. Read the papers.
@icedquinn @mike805 @freemo gun owners who defend availability of high capacity automatic weapons without regulation can believe whatever they want. But we should stop being polite and call their death cult for what it is: a profiteering racket that values dollars and selfish toys over the lives of children.
@icedquinn @mike805 @freemo all part of the same death cult and profiteering racket. FYI, I quit working for the DOE after the illegal Bush/Cheney Iraq war. I have no hesitation calling them war criminals. Putative DOD crimes do not in the least validate letting our children be killed at the altar of a profiteering death cult based on archaic constitutional interpretations.
Please dont take this personal, but you are really comming across as uneducated on the topic with many of your comments, especially this one... Automatic weapons have been banned at a state and federal level for a very long time now (I think 60s or 70s).... There are no automatic weapons on the streets to worry about aside from a very rare few antiques.
The fact that you can make a fully automatic gun in a few hours out of scrap parts, or 3d print one dmakes the whole gun control argument very moot, but thats a separate issue.
> in a few hours
more like a few minutes assuming you have a rifle where different fire selector mechanisms are interchangeable
current laws don't even allow for automatic weapons. Semi-automatic is not automatic no matter what is engraved on the side of the firearm.
> selfish toys
I'd say one of the major contributing factors to lower mental health in this country is the constant need to scroll a feed. Maybe we should ban "smart phones"... you know... for our safety
I strongly support better access to mental health. Hell I wouldnt even mind taxing guns such that the tax pays for some of that mental health access.
That said I also beleive in bodily autonomy and that means the absolute right to suicide and not making the effort to block access to something on the basis that it can be used for suicide... if someone wants to kill themselves with a gun, that is their fundamental right, its their body.
> suicide
yes, that's the majority shareholder of gun deaths in the USA. you will convince zero gun owners to give up their guns because people are sad and we refuse to help them as a society.