Seems pretty clear to me, want to place limits on it, get support for a new amendment.

#2A

@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.

@lmrocha

Nah, the amendment says nothing of white men, and the foubding fathers made no hijts that is what they intended... well regulated militia is very obviously an exemplary clause not a qualifying clause

@mike805

@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.

@lmrocha

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.

@mike805

@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."

@lmrocha

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)

@mike805

@freemo @mike805 dude, I'm on several data science study sections at NIH, and on the editorial board of several days science journals.

@lmrocha @mike805

Great then you should, at least in theory, be able to understand why sooften the data presented is intellectually dishonest. I myself am an expert/professional data scientist, so we shouldnt have any trouble having this conversation.

Doesnt change the fact, that as I said, most people fall for the intellectually dishonest analysis, and by the sounds of it, you might too. But I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

@freemo @mike805 I'm talking about analysis based on pseudo randomized trials, which you can do comparing the times of introduction of regulations in different locations. You are the one assuming that when we speak of data we mean simple correlations. But again, you cannot underestimate that the gun lobby prevents the gathering of relevant data in the usa. They are not interested in serious data analysis.

At the end of the day, your can justify your toys however you want. But American children are dying from guns much more than children in other rich countries. Taking my kids to school in the USA, everyday there was the ever present fear of a gun attack, with corresponding drills they had to be subjected to (you can only wonder the damage to mental health such insecurity caused them.) I am so happy they decided to go to college in Europe. We never worry about such a situation anymore. And that's how life should be.

@lmrocha @freemo you are arguing this from a statistics point of view. You may well have a point. If you want to debate with gun rights supporters, please understand: many of us believe in natural rights which existed before civilization and which civilization cannot legitimately take away. Personal defense is one of those.

People with that POV will not be swayed by numbers. Our response is, why was this not a problem 100 years ago? Personally, I suspect psychiatric drugs play a big role today.

@mike805 @lmrocha I mean there was a problem 100 years ago just as there is now.... violence, if that is via a gun or countless other means is very much secondary to the violence problem.

@freemo @lmrocha kids don't generally get shot in Japan. Yes that is because the Japanese public has no guns. Nuts occasionally get stabby in Japan, but kill fewer victims.

But 100 years ago we had a society with guns everywhere (even kids owned them) and mass shootings were practically unknown. Gang violence yes. Personal revenge yes. Rage-fueled mass shootings, no.

SSRIs are known to produce a hypomanic rage-monster state in some males under the age of 25. Most mass shooters were on SSRIs.

@mike805 @freemo there were no automatic weapons 100 years ago. Europeans are on SSRIs in similar proportions as Americans.

No one needs automatic weapons for self-defense.

@lmrocha @freemo no automatic weapons 100 years ago? As I recall, there was a pretty big war in Europe that ended in 1918. Automatic weapons played a significant role in that war.

The modern self-loading pistol - which seems to be the main mass shooting weapon - was patented in 1911.

The restrictions on Evil Machine Guns started after Prohibition and corresponding mob violence became a problem.

@mike805 @freemo do you think this is how schools l get attacked in the USA today?

@lmrocha @freemo well most of the weapons used for mass shootings are either (a) pistols evolved from the 1911 patent, often with modern materials and additional safeties or (b) self loading rifles descended from the WW2 era M1 by way of the Vietnam era Armalite.

So both of those general types of weapons were available to the public by the 1940s. Kids got bullied then too. Why no rage monster shootings? That is the question the gun controllers ignore.

@mike805 @freemo why no rage shootings elsewhere but there USA? Actually, they exist, but when they happen elsewhere laws change and high capacity shootings disappear. It's only the USA where profiteers have been able to engineer a profitable death cult around the second amendment.

@lmrocha

Again, this is the antivaxxer argument "If you make vaccines illegal there wont be any vaccine deaths"... True but grossly intellectually-dishonest to anyone who actually can look at the problem objectively, in which case you must talk about the effects on overall violent acts, and not on "mass shootings", and thats before we even get into how ridiculously rare they are when compared to other rare events like lightening.

@mike805

@freemo @mike805 your parallel with vaccines is silly. Vaccines are not engineered to kill like all guns are. Vaccines may very, very rarely and accidentally kill. So the argument for gun control is nothing like the antivax argument.

@lmrocha

What they are "engineered" to do, whatever that means, is irrelevant to the point that your using the anti-vaxxer's failed logic. I'm sure an anti-vaxxer will try to tell you vaccines are engineered to kill too, which would be just as weak a counter.

@mike805

@freemo @mike805 what guns are engineered to do is not a matter of opinion.

@lmrocha

It also isnt a mstter of fact. You have some guns explicitly engineered for sport and in competitions and is not designed to kill as a primary purpose.

@mike805

@freemo @mike805 yes, but those are not the ones used in school shootings and which the majority of the population wants to regulate. It's they killing machines.

Also, no one, except killing machine profiteering apologists, cares about the distinction between automatic or semi-automatic. The available high capacity, semi-automatic models are automatic enough in their killing design and need to be regulated.

@lmrocha

If you call a non-automatic gun an "automatic" you are 1) showing unprofessional bias by using an explicitly incorrect word to refer to something for dramatic effect.. 2) Appear uneducated on the subject and are easily dismissed.

@mike805

@freemo @mike805 you are easily dismissed, and sound like l you need a voight-kampff test, when you want to tell the parents of children who had to identify body parts of their 6 year-olds that the carnage was not really from an automatic weapon, but a semi-automatic. Your distinction my be relevant to the "professional" profiteering gun apologists, but certainly not to the victims.