Why We Should Never Compromise On Gun Rights

[piezoe]

There are several flaws in your post you continue to ignore.

First, the argument about how other countries have done it. No other country has the amount of firearms in circulation - both legally and illegally that the US has. Not. Even. Close. This is an important distinction in the idea that you can limit the problem by controlling the future number of firearms in production. That horse has left the barn long ago.

Second, your argument that you can reduce the probability of future events by restricting firearms. Can you reduce this probability by some statistical amount? Sure. However, the issue is at what cost? If you tell me you can reduce the amount of car accident fatalities in this country by half by eliminating all travel and forcing everyone to stay at home and cyber commute everywhere, then I (and many, many others) would tell you that the restriction on our liberty is not worth the added "safety".

It all comes down to that. If you restrict the purchase of handguns (as an example), the small improvement you will see with handgun crime (and it will be very, very small because the crime is committed by those who already illegally own handguns) is not worth the restriction to the vast majority of citizens who legally own and legally use these handguns.

My impression is that the majority is fine with the profits due to sales of assault riffles and bump stocks being lost. And the majority seems fine with some additional expense being associated with gun purchases as a trade off against the benefits of uniform background checks and gun laws. Just my personal impression of what the majority favors, your impression my be different. The idea that we should be armed to the hilt for the time when the Guberment shows up at your front door in an Abrams Tank has some appeal to the lunatic fringe of society, but it's just looney tunes to most Americans. It's a no sell to the majority, Sorry.

There is no restriction on your Second Amendment right by any of the Kid's proposals that have any traction. So we can simply dispense with any argument based on unreasonable restriction of liberty. The Constitution, as interpreted by the Court handles this issue nicely.

I'm afraid that your observation that there is already so many guns in the U.S. that any restrictions will have only minimal effect is going to fall on the deaf ears of the majority. But you can keep trying out that argument until proven wrong. And you will be, of course. Because the distribution of guns among the population isn't even close to uniform. A fraction of the population owns the majority of the guns, invalidating your argument.

These kids are going to succeed where adults couldn't. They are going to send those congressmen who refuse the will of the majority packing come November. Most likely they will have the congressmen so scared come Summer that by November we will have sane, effective, and uniform gun laws in place. But it doesn't really matter, because if we don't, then come January we'll have a whole new Congress. And that Congress will pass gun legislation. So either way, it's a done deal.

Finally consider this. The reason we don't have reasonable gun controls uniformly enforced across the entire country is because of money paid by the gun lobby to keep profit impacting gun legislation from been implemented. The lack of reasonable gun control laws has nothing to do with logic or loss of Second Amendment Rights, it has to do with money. The kids from Parkman have figured that out, and they are going after those who have taken the money.

In a perfect world there would be no laws. That would require perfect people. A person who values their personal freedom in the imperfect world we live in will equally value good and sane laws.

 

[Tsing Tao]

they keep bringing up Australia. There the government basically sent the jackboots in and took them at gunpoint.

USA still values the individual freedoms.

But it wouldn't work even if they did that here. Let's ignore the very real possibility that the police wouldn't enforce such a law or that if they did, large portions of the populace wouldn't either resist openly or indirectly (by not surrendering the weapons or hiding them). Let's also ignore for a moment that no such national list exists that lets the government know who actually owns firearms and who doesn't. So ignore all that stuff and pretend we're in unicorn fart land and we can actually do an Australia buyback program and people would adhere to it.

The Australian confiscation took out 660k of firearms in their "confiscation" program at an estimated $500MM in cost. That comes out to about $750 per gun. Keeping the math easy by rounding. There are 330 million firearms in the US currently. Let's just pretend that half of those would be confiscated (silly, I know, but follow along). At the same buyback rate, that is 124 Billion dollars in a buyback program - not including the massive cost of managing such a program or administering it. Do you honestly think there is the political will anywhere to spend $124 Billion on such a program (which would probably be closer to double that with 2018 prices - remember Australia did this 15 years ago)?

Not to mention that this would still leave approximately 115 million firearms still in circulation - not counting the number that would spike once such a confiscation program was enacted?

It's put horsepucky. Bullshit. Will never happen! Liberals don't get it!

 

[fhl]

SATURDAY - Yes we're marching against guns but relax, we're not coming for your guns!
SUNDAY - OK, we are coming for your guns but only the really bad guns!
MONDAY - OK, I really don't know the difference between good & bad guns!
TUESDAY - Fuck it, Repeal the Second Amendment! (trending on twitter)
https://twitter.com/search?q="Repeal the Second Amendment"&src=tren

 

[Poindexter]

Fine, so let's not dismiss individual prongs that may contribute to a comprehensive solution.

The problem isn't guns, it's leftist-induced cultural rot and psychotropic drugs. Undoing the former and banning the latter are "prongs" of a real comprehensive solution.

 

[Covertibility]

John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment


Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.

That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “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.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.

That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.

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The world is a big scary place for some people and thus they need their guns.

The robots will fix this problem.

 

[AAAintheBeltway]

I believe most nra members are willfully blind to the nra agenda and ignore that the nra is responsible for blocking legislation preventing the loopholes that allow for guns to go from legal to illegal.

Nonsense. The NRA Board of Directors is a who's who of prominent people in various professions. The magazine and website could not be clearer what and whom they are supporting and opposing. If anything, the membership is more zealous than the leadership in protecting Second Amendment freedoms.

Your attitude is a perfect example of how the "most qualified candidate" in history lost to a political novice/casino developer.

 

[Poindexter]

John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment


Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.

That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “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.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.

That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.

--------------
--------------

The world is a big scary place for some people and thus they need their guns.

The robots will fix this problem.

I hope demrats run on this in November. All the demrat senators who are up for reelection in red states will lose.

 

[AAAintheBeltway]

They are a truly evil organization with lots of blood on their hands.

I wonder how you would describe the Obama administration then, since it ran an operation that, incredibly, was designed to funnel guns from legitimate dealers to Mexican cartels? And that resulted in the deaths of law enforcement personnel on both sides of the border. Obama's despicable Attorney General, Eric Holder, was held in contempt of congress for his role in covering it up and refusing to produce relevant documents.

 

[AAAintheBeltway]

 

[AAAintheBeltway]