@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.
@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @lmrocha
Bingo! You've got it!
Nobody wants to ban guns and nobody is coming for your guns. We just want to be sure that they don't end up as easily in the hands of a person that may start shooting indiscriminately in a school or other public place.
Even the founding fathers had some "well-regulated" criteria for who can and who cannot have a gun (white men with wigs yes, founding mothers and people with slightly dark complexion no).
The criteria arguably changed from then but the principle stands.
People have literally banned entire classes of guns such as handguns and imaginary "assault rifles".. not only arr thry coming for our guns, they are explicit about it...
@pj @thatguyoverthere @mike805 @lmrocha
Also no, there was never a well regulated criteria. That was an exemplarly clause as is explicitly stated, not a qulifying clause. Thry have been quotes countless time saying as much.
Yes, they don't explicitly state in the constitution who is and who isn't allowed to have guns, but I think it is pretty clear what would have happened if one of their slaves went for a gun.
You can't run a society without qualifying clauses.
We dont need a definition for people, we all know what a person is and the founding fathers made it very clear they intended that word to include all people.
Yea its an invalid argument in so many ways.. for one its just not relevant, and for another the founding fathers were rather explicit the constitution intended "we the people" to mean everyone.
Again. It is not about how you define "people". It is about having #criteria on who can and who cannot have a gun, drive a car or buy cigarettes or alcohol ...
The founding fathers had such criteria, as ***everyone could not bear a gun***, and we should also have them.
That's all I have to say.
If you want criteria on who can or cant own a gun get support for a new amendment. At the moment it clearly states "shall lot be infringed".
It has been shown in no uncertain terms that the 2A intended to include all people. You want to change it thats fine go through the propernlegal channels.
You've said it is not the gun that is a problem, it is the person, and I agreed with that.
I just don't agree that we all should have to protect ourselves (supposedly with more guns) from bad persons with guns, instead of, as a civilized society, minimizing the chances these people can do harm.
guns arent to protect yourself from a bad person with guns... not sure why you keep repeating something that everyone has told you isnt the case or what is being argued...
We have access to guns to protect you from bad people with knives, or fists, or a penis and muscles they intend to use to force you into submission and rape you... Guns are the great equalizer and to use them against other guns is not remotely the point, yet somehow anti-gun people keep repeating the same nonsense like a broken record to disagree with an argument no one ever said.
Yup in fact criminals already have big barriers (and i think its ok to make access to criminal records easier).
So by its very nature one would expect good guys with guns to far outweight bad guys with guns from the start. Which implies most of the protection from guns is going to be against unarmed people.
Id say even extremely violent people should have a path to get their rights back, the key shoukd be recovery and eventually entering society again... that said they may have to jump through a lot of hoops to get there since thry woukd have to show quite clearly they have been reabilitated.
@thatguyoverthere
You had to "drag me back in"😀
In my opinion if you have to use guns to solve anything (even in case of the police) it means we as a society suck.
@freemo's argument that women use guns to protect themselves from bad penises is also dubious. I think taking a self-defense training or even a bear spray would be much more effective.
> In my opinion if you have to use guns to solve anything (even in case of the police) it means we as a society suck.
Then every society on earth sucks, and I wont disagree with that... Until you eliminate rape and violent acts from even being attempted then you will never be able to rely on cops. Cops will always be some distance away and it will always require you to have access to a phone and early enough warning make the phone call.
Usually if someone is being raped or held at knife point or assaulted in the overwhelming majority of cases there was never a chance to even reach out to the police in the first place.
So yes I am happy to eliminate guns, if the criteria for it is you must first eliminate all violent crimes so you can ensure we dont need those guns in the first place.
When a guy is twice your size physical defense training is perhaps going to help the womans odds slightly but she will still be at a huge disadvantage, afterall men and women can both get that same training so its not a equalizing force.
@thatguyoverthere And SCOTUS recently confirmed this, regarding the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas shooting: "An official has a duty to protect individuals from harm by third parties only when the individuals are in the official’s custody."
https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201914414.pdf
@thatguyoverthere Yes, that was my point.
@thatguyoverthere You've still missed the point. I was agreeing with what you said, not arguing against it.
@freemo @pj @thatguyoverthere @lmrocha in that case, Japan sucks less than most. The police there go most years without firing a shot. They are trained to use their batons with modified sword-fighting techniques to disarm a knife attacker.
However... in the absence of guns, the Yakuza was able to run extortion and protection rackets with basic strong-arm thugs, and force small businesses to pay them a substantial percentage. That's the downside of being gun-free. Organized muscle dominates.
Japan has a much healthier social environment built on respect, and much much better access to mental health than americans... So Japan is just as well explained by the two criteria I already gave earlier than by access to guns.
@thatguyoverthere @freemo @lmrocha @pj only a minority of humans seem capable of rationally overriding their emotions. We have rational thought but the ape mind controls all the rewards and punishments. The rational mind just exists to figure out how to satisfy the ape desires.
@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj that is not the point I made. I was pointing to the capriciousness that gun profiteering apologists use when interpretating the 2A. All concepts that it trades in have changed dramatically, but the apologists treat the inconvenient bits as, well 'it's not like that now”, and the bits they care about as immutable, reified text that only other amendments can adapt.
As I said, all this is legal interpretation that depends only on a few lackeys the profiteering oligarchy pays up to sit on the supreme court---in another profound constitutional blunder. It is very hard to fight oligarchy, but the youth whose lives it values less than profit may yet have the power to change things.
@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj God is besides the point here. The constitution is to establish a secular society for believers and unbelievers. Besides, I take take issue with equating guns at least with Christianity. The gospels are very clear about Jesus' thoughts on self -defense. You need to be diabolical (in the original sense of the word) to make a connection between "turn the other cheek” and the 2A. I think his surrender to crucifixion is quite clear on that note.
@lmrocha @thatguyoverthere @freemo @pj God is never beside the point. A person's position on that question reliably predicts most of his other views. There is a "root" or top level in everyone's mind, and what resides there decides everything else.
Jesus was advising a small group of traveling evangelists, for whom getting into a violent confrontation could not possibly help them in their mission. Thus "shake off the dust of that place." He was not referring to all people for all time.
@mike805 @thatguyoverthere @freemo @pj wow, so we do have the Gun-Jesus figure after all. Who needs the cross when you have the guns....
@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj "be prepared" is not the same as "be armed". I was raised Catholic, and the idea of using a Christian conception of God to defend gun-based self-defense is, frankly, diabolical---especially when we know it leads to incident children being killed over and over again.
@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj there is much context, and prophecy parallelism, in that passage to make that such a simple case. The sermon on the mount is much more relevant to understand Jesus' moral teachings, than confusing/ambiguous (”two swords are enough”) prophetic statements just prior to arrest.
Personally, and this is just me, I read that passage as an indication of the futility of the few arms his disciples could buy from selling their clothes, in the presence of the might of the Roman army. Certainly two swords weird have both been enough... So, I interpret this as as call to focus on what matters about his message, which is the opposite of swords.
@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @freemo @pj I meant: "certainly two swords would not have been enough."
Except we dont know that, all the data suggests the opposite, banning guns means people die en massem, including kids... But since you have no peer-reviewed data to show that (and neither do I) thats another matter.
@freemo @thatguyoverthere @mike805 @pj that is just patently false. All data points to the opposite. No evidence whatsoever (from all other similar countries) that regulating the use of guns leads to people dying en masse. That's just silly and totally false.
You have not provided a single study that addresses whatI am arguing.. you can scream about "all data" all you want, but as long as you keep posting completely irrelevant studies that are not addressing what I asserted then you dont have a leg to stand on.
@freemo @thatguyoverthere @mike805 @pj I don't have to provide data for what *you* are arguing. That's your job. Go ahead and publish it. I gave you published evidence in strong support of my claim: more guns --> increased mortality. If you have evidence against the current scientific evidence, which can sustain peer-review, by all means publish it. Restating your beliefs without proof (beyond your own mind) is not enough and it is dishonest to claim your belief invalidates current peer-reviewed and replicated studies without demonstration.
> I don't have to provide data for what *you* are arguing. That's your job.
No you dont. My stance is that there is no good peer reviewed data that addresses my assertation either way. I am willing to provide non-peer reviewed data I did myself which is perfectly reasonable when there is an absence of peer reviewed data to address a question, though it is fair to take it as preliminary until better studies are availible.
Now if **you** are arguing that there is peer-reviewed data and it proves my relatively weaker evidence wrong, then that is on **you** to provide, which you have not done.
> I gave you published evidence in strong support of my claim: more guns --> increased mortality.
You keep saying that, saying it doesnt make it true. No you havent, you have not linked to even a **single** peer reviewed study that addresses what I asserted. You posted soem random studies that address other issues that are different from what I asserted, and playing some rediulous game of "I have more links than you"/
As I said if you want to play that game I dont mind posting non-sense peer reviewed articles that dont argue my case but vaguely sound like they do... but I wont stoop to your level, I'd rather keep my integrity as a scientist.
> If you have evidence against the current scientific evidence, which can sustain peer-review, by all means publish it.
there is no current scientific evidence... and you have yet to link to a single paper that addresses the assertion I made, again repeating soemthing that has already been clearly shot down, without actually making a valid argument, wont get you anywhere
> Restating your beliefs without proof (beyond your own mind) is not enough and it is dishonest to claim your belief invalidates current peer-reviewed and replicated studies without demonstration.
Thats not what I said, are you even listening? There is no "current peer-review" for me to invalidate, you have yet to post even a single link to that effect.
@thatguyoverthere @mike805 @lmrocha @pj
Stacking the deck in Luis's favor, especially given the cherry-picked and irrelevant nature of all the studies, is clearly Luis's intent here.
I disagree, the statistics are correct and valuable... the issue isnt the statistics, the issues is that they are being either intentionally abused by cherry picking and not analyzing the data in a way even the most beginer of data scientists would agree is proper.
Dont blame the data for some person trying to manipulate it, especially when its trivial to point out that manipulation and shoot it down, as I have done.
The data is correct, the statistics are correct... the interpretation of the statistics is wildly invalid most of the time.
That can sometimes be an issue, but no I dont find that is generally the issue here, and peer-review will often catch that... the statistics are fine, and they arent usually biased (sometimes)... its purely an issue with "Here is Statistic X which claims Y"... X is correct, the statement it claims Y is not.