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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)
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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
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.
@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.
@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.
Ahh personal attacks... I mean lets face it anti-gun people "easily dismiss" anything that doesnt agree with their world view.
The good news is kids who actually have ever been involved in a school shooting are so extraordinarily rare I'd never have to have that conversation in a lifetime...
Its amazing that not saying something that is undeniably false by any measure is being an "apologist" lol.. yes lets not be apologists and make up fact statements and then defend them even when we know they are lies, thats the way to solve problems.
The fact is you've said multiple things that are either lies, or ridiculously uneducated on the subject.. whichever of the two it is it does discredit you in having a valid point of view in the discussion, particularly when you double down on defending it rather than acknowledging and learning from your error.
@freemo @mike805 you don't understand, the "professional distinction" you care about is irrelevant for the fact that 1) guns are the leading cause of children death in there USA, and 2) a lot of people make money from that.
Thought experiment: you guys are such believers in the 2A. Surely you think it is of such great importance that we should at least consider that the role of government is to provide guns at cost (no profit) to the population. Do you think that if we removed cost from the equation the NRA would exist and there would be so many guns in the population?
Your are siding with the gun profiteers who value profit over life, not some grand constitutional principle.
> you don't understand, the "professional distinction" you care about is irrelevant for the fact that 1) guns are the leading cause of children death in there USA, and 2) a lot of people make money from that.
Oh it is very relevant.. it is the equivalent of an anti-vaxxer calling a virus a bacteria... it is relevant because it shows they dont understand such fundamental information that they are clearly unable to talk about or analyze anything more complex about the problem... when you **demonstrate** and then **defend** incorrect information, particularly when you do so in order to defend your incorrect conclusions, it discredits you and rules you out from being taken seriously, and rightfully so... yes its very relevant to the debate at hand.
> Thought experiment: you guys are such believers in the 2A. Surely you think it is of such great importance that we should at least consider that the role of government is to provide guns at cost (no profit) to the population. Do you think that if we removed cost from the equation the NRA would exist and there would be so many guns in the population?
The NRA is a non-profit and as such compared with a for-profit company there are a great many restrictions on the ability for its owners to profit. That said they do get a pretty generous salary but if their main goal was to profit they probably wouldnt have organized as a non-profit... yes the NRA and many of the non-profit gun advocacy groups would probably still exist.
> Your are siding with the gun profiteers who value profit over life, not some grand constitutional principle.
You really do sound like an anti-vaxxer with these sorts of tropes.. its all big pharma this, and profit that.. stick to the topic and not some communist/socialist nonsense of evil profits. I mean if you have a specific issue where money messed stuff up and want to address it fine.. but that doesnt change the numbers, and the numbers show a pretty clear pattern, when you ban guns people die and get rapped in huge numbers as a consequence that could have been saved... everything else is noise.
As I explained to you, there are no peer-reviewed papers that do good analysis and explained in detail why.. there are papers on both sides, some that would appear to support my claim and yours, but in all cases they do not argue a good case.
So our options are 1) I cherry pick data that supports my claim, is technically peer-review but is bad-faith and intellectually dishonest or 2) we have to accept neither of us can find a peer reviewed paper that meets the criteria I set forth early on, and instead rely on direct analysis.
I've offered both of these options multiple times but you sound like a broken record claiming I havent offered up the data.
@freemo @mike805 alas, science is not based on the criteria *you* set forth. I've sent you a large list of peer-reviewed papers from the best medical journals in the world. You say they don't meet *your* criteria and don't send me any paper that remotely validates your claims. Well, good luck with the Dr.Freemo journal!
tthe papers you sent are well performed at answering questions that do **not** apply to our debate and we have covered why.
For example some of your papers argued about access to guns increasing **gun violence** which as we already covered is laughably absurd and irrelevant to what we are discussing which is the effect of guns on "all tyes of violence".
So yea a barrage of copy pasta that very clearly is ruled out as not answering the question at hand does you no good.
The diffference between us is you dont ctually care if a peer reviewed paper is relevant or answers the question.. you are playing a copy-pasta... you paste a bunch of irrelevant papers that do not argue the point being discussed (and explaine din detail many times why) and try to claim you win because you have a longer list... doesnt work that way.
As I said sure I could do that too, post a bunch of unrelated peer reviewed articles that make it look like I win.. but I have no interest in playing that game.. Id rather admit that the body of papers on this subject simply doesnt address the question being debated well.
At the end of the day to me the debate is whether or not any human has more rights than another. It seems like equality is a value many people claim to share, but disarming people because they aren't in the right category argues a different belief set. Everyone has the right to self defense, and that means giving everyone the opportunity to tip the scales in their favor. Sadly criminals abuse that right and by doing so disaffect others of their natural rights. This is when the law should step in. Limiting legal access to firearms only makes it harder for otherwise law abiding citizens to obtain equal or higher footing with criminals.
Those issues, while valid, arent really the main issue here...
When there is a study that says something like "more access to guns means more suicide by guns"... the paper IS correct, peer review was successful and the paper does address that question.
The issue is it isnt even remotely addressing the question that is actually relevant of "does access to guns increase/reduce overall violence rates". Papers are designed to answer individual poitns of facts and the peer review process is designed to make sure the math and steps taken are correct... peer review does **not** mean "scientists agree guns are bad", to draw that conclusion you have to use your own brain and be capable enough and understand the topic enough to be able to make the inference from the body of studies to an actual conclusion.
@freemo @mike805 I posted papers in response to you saying there is no evidence that more guns increase mortality. The papers I posted are 100% relevant to the discussion. In both individual households and society at large, greater availability of guns leads to higher mortality (after controlling for all sorts of demographic factors) , not just in suicide but also in homicide rates.
You want to argue that such analysis is irrelevant to our discussion, which is absurd. It is very much the central point.
You also want to argue that those papers are not considering the whole gestalt of the problem, because they don't account for crimes guns may have prevented. First, that is an orthogonal problem. Even if guns were shown to prevent some crimes (no evidence of that in gun use by civilians), the papers I referred show that, OVERALL, more guns, more death. That is, any putative reduction in crime due to guns, is not sufficient to prevent an increase in mortality with more guns. Now, if this is a topic that interests you, by all means go ahead and publish research that shows that guns reduce some forms of crime, if you can. But a loose hypothesis you have without evidence, does not invalidate the overwhelming conclusion of the papers I showed you. Your dismissal of those, without any peer-reviewed counter evidence is, to use the expression you so like to use, dishonest.
@lmrocha
As Ive said multiple times.. sending a large list of copy-pasta peer-reviewed papers that do not remotely address the question being debated is not how you do science either.. .you dont win the debate by pasting the largest number of irrelevant peer reviewed papers, thats not how this works.
@mike805