If we’re to reduce gun violence in America, which I think is ineluctably connected to the easy availability of guns, it will have to be a bottom-up phenomenon. We can’t count on the Supreme Court, which has construed the Second Amendment as allowing a “right” for private citizens to own guns, nor can we count on initiatives from the federal government, whose legislators are under the thumb of the National Rifle Association. No, we have to develop an anti-gun sentiment among the people, and, given that half of Americans think gun rights are more important than gun control (see recent Pew survey here), and that view is growing, I’m not optimistic:
But at least in some more liberal places, there are ways to control guns through stringent regulation. One of them is San Francisco, where High Bridge Arms, the last gun shop in the city, is closing. Why? Because of stringent regulations, both real and impending, as well as restrictions on the sale of ammunition. As the Associated Press notes,
. . . the breaking point came this summer when a local politician proposed a law that would require High Bridge Arms to video record every gun sale and submit a weekly report of ammunition sales to the police. If passed, the law would join several local gun control ordinances on the books in a city still scarred by the 1993 murder of eight in a downtown high-rise and the 1978 assassination of Mayor George Moscone and gay rights activist Harvey Milk.
. . . In the end, [store manager Steve] Alcairo said, he and the High Bridge Arms owner tired of the continued opposition and mountains of paperwork required by the San Francisco Police Department, state Department of Justice and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
and, from Fox News (whose headline for this item is “Surrender”):
Past regulations have required the shop to bar ads and displays from its windows and install cameras and barriers around its exterior. The shop has 17 cameras as it is, and turns video over to police on request, he said.
“This time, it’s the idea of filming our customers taking delivery of items after they already completed waiting periods,” Alcairo said. “We feel this is a tactic designed to discourage customers from coming to us.
The only reason such regulations exist is because the San Francisco City Council sees a connection between gun control and gun violence. The City Supervisor, Mark Farrell, asked the city’s district attorney to draft the camel’s-back legislation because “easy access to guns and ammunition continue to contribute to senseless violent crime here in San Francisco and across the country.”
Of course San Francisco is hardly representative of the U.S. as a whole, but it does show the way forward. Given strong enough public sentiment against lax gun laws, cities can draft constitutional legislation restricting guns and ammunition stringently enough to reduce the availability of firearms. And it can happen on a national level: the history of gun control in Britain, for instance, shows that more and more laws can take a society once ridden with firearms down to one in which guns are rare. There is, for example, no “right” in the UK that allows guns for self-defense. (One must give a valid reason for wanting to own a gun.) Besides banning all automatic and most semiautomatic weapons, as well nearly all handguns, the following is permitted (with strict licensing):
All other rifles and their ammunition are permitted with no limits as to magazine size, to include: target shooting, hunting, and historic and muzzle-loading weapons, as well as long barrelled breachloading pistols with a specific overall length, but not for self-defence; however if a home-owner is threatened they may be used in self-defence, so long as the force is reasonable.
(There are strict laws against illegal possession of ammunition as well.)
And of course gun violence is far rarer per capita in the UK than in the US.
Meanwhile, Ben Carson continues to utter the Republican mantra; here’s a snippet from his public Facebook page:
The striking phrase is, of course, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” But the “right to arm ourselves” produces a lot of bullet holes, and how can one even compare the mental devastation of seeing a bullet-riddled body (especially if you knew the person) with the “devastation” of contemplation a revoked Second Amendment?
How many tragedies will it take before Americans realize that yes, people do kill people, but they often use guns, and those guns help people kill more people than they could with, say, knives or arrows. Will we have to become a Wild West, with all Americans toting a pistol strapped to their waist, before we try to ratchet down the folly that is gun ownership in the U.S.?
OK, if Americans are becoming more enamoured of their guns, why not license the bullets? Bullets to be kept from the gun-owner in a safe place and some form of aptitude and reliability test to be performed before you can get any out? x
There is no plausible reading of arms that includes the gun and not the ammunition. We have discussed this before. This is a hopeless approach that simply looks like an attempted end run around the bill of rights. It strengthens the hand of the NRA.
It’s no more an end run around the Bill of Rights than regulating alcohol or tobacco by putting huge taxes on them. Cigarettes are ten dollars more a pack in Chicago than in parts of the South. Is that unconstitutional? I don’t think so. Drinking and smoking legal, and a right for anyone over 21 (or 18), but you can try to discourage those habits by raising taxes.
“The court says you can have your guns but we’re talking about your ammunition” is clearly a dodge, because it tries to pretend the right to bear arms applies only to the gun and not the bullet.
No-one denies ammunition can be taxed, or guns either. But prohibitive taxes would fail in court: an attempt to enforce a prohibition through expobitant taxes would be an end-run, whether applied to bullets, parade permits, or abortions, and the court would not permit it.
According to Jerry’s link, modern UK gun regulation – the one that succeeded – started out as taxation. What is “prohibitive” or just high taxes is subjective, which is why I wouldn’t worry about such legal technicalities.
Tax the hell out of gun owners! It’s just hurting their wallet after all.
The UK does not have a 2nd Amendment, so that’s irrelevant to the discussion. Delphin is correct that trying to prohibit a right by taxation is frowned on by the courts. If you guys want guns banned, pass an amendment. If the people don’t want the amendment…it’s too bad, so sad. If the Republicans passed a $10,000 fee on every abortion, you guys (and I) would go apoplectic. The courts are not there just to protect the rights that you like. And at this point, SCOTUS has ruled that the 2nd protects the right to own a gun.
NZ government (most political parties agree) has a goal of stopping tobacco smoking by 2025. They are succeeding. One of the most effective measures in stopping smoking has been high taxation.
I believe it is having a similar effect here in the US. Probably not as dramatic, but smoking has gone down due to taxation.
Our taxes are much higher than yours.
$5,000 a bullet like in the Chris Rock video Ben posted clearly would make a difference. Politicians simply aren’t willing to impose them. You obviously wouldn’t have to go to $5,000 to stop young men (who do most of the illegal shooting) getting hold of so much ammunition.
That won’t happen because legislators are cowards and will never impose such taxes. (Maybe at the local level, but even that would result in a huge backlash. The gun nuts can whip an angry mob together faster than you can say “Sandy Hook.”)
The NRA et al have some awesome power alright!
A gun without bullets is an expensive club. My pet rock, with or without it’s sock, is an inexpensive club with comparable reach and effect.
The pertinent question about gun control is, does it and can it work? Here is an intertesting piece.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/
I am deeply skeptical that it can work. It is not enough to argue that if there were no guns then gun control would help. We live in a country with hundreds of millions of guns. The partial derivative at x=300M might be very different from the partial derivative at x=0. Will prohibiting those who seek a license from carrying a gun *actually* reduce violence? This question has no obvious answer I suggest.
Further, consider the enforcement. I have seen enough of SWAT tactics from the police, home raids, stop&frisk, etc. Do we really want the kind of police power that would be required?
None of this impacts the responsibility to store and handle any weapons legally held responsibly. In that awful case of the 11 year old it’s clear the parents were irresponsible, and they should be charged. An example must be made. Absolute liability laws and the like might be helpful too.
Agreed: zero correlation. But the likely reason for that is that none of the legislation goes far enough to prevent any potential murderer actually getting a gun. How would you dismiss the excellent correlation between low per-country gun ownership and low gun murder rates?
…or, another way of putting it…it’s like citing a study that band-aids are completely ineffective forms of treatment for compound fractures, chest wounds, and myocardial infarction; ergo, there’s nothing we can do to treat those conditions.
b&
I wouldn’t dismiss it. Neither would I see it as proving the case for gun control in a country already awash in guns.
Please read rule #8 about dominating conversations. I prefer no more than 10% of a thread to be comments from a single individual.
Umm… try replacing the word “gun” with the word “abortion” above and see how that reads.
Personally, I think we should be very careful indeed about rejecting Constitutional rights (note no scare quotes) granted to the people which are fortified by the Supreme Court.
And I don’t like celebrating the idea that people who want to exercise their Constitutional rights can be thwarted by deliberately regulating their access away. Think what is happening to Planned Parenthood. The closure of the last gun shop in S.F. because it was regulated out of existence is pathetic, not inspirational.
The vast majority of gun owners will never cause a problem. The vast majority of guns will never be involved in anything untoward.
There are many ways to solve our gun violence problems without rejecting our multiply-attested Constitutional rights, or by effectively regulating our rights away.
“There are many ways to solve our gun violence problems without rejecting our multiply-attested Constitutional rights, or by effectively regulating our rights away.”
Feel free to list some. Then, let me know what the NRA thinks of those very ideas.
I think Jerry is alluding broadly to a bottom-up approach.
The NFL, for example, is concerned and no one has necessarily had to criticize the NFL directly (although some have). Imagine now, in coming years 5 – 20% of all mothers are beginning to remove their kids from football. In my community, it is about 50% drop; the high school (~3000 students) has a joke of a team.
By having a dialogue with neighbors and friends about “Why own a gun?” we get people to think that maybe the reasons they once thought were important are no longer important. Demand lessens and in decades to come gun shop after gun shop close and guns are a niche commodity, not coveted, but not feared either because the only remaining gun owners will be those who need them to live and know this and treat them with respect.
“By having a dialogue with neighbors and friends about “Why own a gun?” we get people to think that maybe the reasons they once thought were important are no longer important.”
Who is having those discussions? Does the NRA think owning a gun is not important? No, they will wave crime statistics and promote gun ownership as a God given right. Look at Rand Paul and Carson — they are saying we should arm school teachers and put signs up saying “enter this school at your own risk.”
The NRA is despicable – let’s get that clear up front.
I would suggest that if we want to reduce gun violence, we should focus on why people are shooting other people. Very few people are being killed in madman multiple shootings, although these horrible events are what get people motivate to write and talk on the topic.
About half of gun violence is suicide. I am not sure if we even need to address that, for adults. But the other half, I am guessing (guessing because the Republicans have disallowed proper gathering of statistics), is drug- and gang-related. One would think that drug legalization, economic justice for the lower class, and more money for inner city schools would go a long way to eliminate that crime.
We certainly do need to address the suicide issue. More suicides are committed with guns than murders. And when gun availability goes down, suicides go down. This has proven true both here and in Australia. More importantly, suicides of all kinds go down, meaning the lack of a gun does not simply mean a potential suicide then uses something else. The evidence is that they don’t kill themselves after all.
Guns are handy and final. Suicides can be impulsive. If the evidence suggests that a person who decides on impulse to kill himself is less likely to carry out that impulse if no gun is available, then a life may be saved. With firearm suicides occurring at a rate significantly higher than firearm homicides, it behooves us to save as many of those lives as possible.
What on earth is “multiply-attested”?
It was a really inelegant way of saying that the issue has been adjudicated twice by the S.C.
Don’t you mean granted by the people?
No, I meant a specific right (of or) “to” the people, as opposed as to the States.
Again: wrong.
Your post begs the question about whether this right was actually granted by the Constitution. Up until recently, the answer was “no”, so the recent yesses are an aberration.
As for state laws not affecting the homicide rate….I’m quite willing to believe that. The borders between states are highly porous in the US, and as long as guns are easy to get in at least one state, they’ll be easy to get in all states.
On the other hand, I do agree with your comment about regulating the rights away; if San Francisco is creating the regulations solely in order to shut down gun shops, rather than any real benefit from the regulations, than I find this rather shady, just like the regulations enacted by some Southern states intended to shut down abortion clinics.
Maybe, but so what? Its still a right. I assume for sake of argument you’re placing the date of ‘right to individual gun ownership’ at D.C. vs. Heller, from 2008.
If you’re going to argue that its okay to violate Heller because its young and unprecedented, then what the heck do you expect to happen to Obergefell?
The OP hopes to grant an aura of sacredness to individual ownership, so it’s important to point out that it’s new, and therefore not sacred. The right could be dispensed with by a more liberal court, or by a constitutional amendment. It need not be taken as a given.
I find it difficult to appreciate any novelty to the right of gun ownership in the U.S., as it has never been in question.
On the contrary, it was never a federal constitutional right until 2008.
You mean it was an assumed right, not an explicitly delineated one? Because the Ninth Amendment and the history of gun ownership for the entire history of the U.S. would argue that the right was there all along.
I think you will find that Ninth Amendment jurisprudence has never recognized that right, and anyone relying on that amendment would get laughed out of court.
Otherwise, we are a nation of laws, and the federal courts consistently held, up until the Fifth Circuit’s Emerson case in 2001, that there was no such right. And Emerson was pretty much an outlier until Heller in 2008.
Many towns had “surrender your weapons” laws into the late 1800s, so I think you’re whitewashing as much as Jeff is. Yes, it has been unofficially interpreted as protecting an individual right for probably at least a hundred years, if not longer. But the NRA’s brand of absolutism when it comes to opposition to gun control laws is an extremely new thing with no historical justification.
No, it really wasn’t thought of in constitutional terms. Much as when the Second Amendment was drafted, no one really thought much about restrictions on personal arms. It was certainly accepted that a state or local government could forbid ownership of handguns, forbid concealed carry, forbid open carry, and forbid gatherings of armed men.
The current mania can be traced to the 1970s and the newly muscular NRA which started to inundate the nation with hardline dogma about a “constitutional right.”
My thought too was that this is a sleazy tactic, and if we condemn the tactic as an end-run around rights granted by the Supreme Court when used against abortion providers, we should also condemn it for the same reason when used against gun stores.
Yes that was my thought exactly. Many southern states are using the same ‘over-regulation’ strategy to make abortion unavailable in practice in large swaths of the country. Its a highly unethical strategy that I strongly disagree with, and wish the courts would throw out such regulation as a transparent end-run around a citizen’s ability to practically exercise a right they constitutionally have. But this gun seller situation is basically similar, so I think its a highly unethical strategy etc. here too.
What I was hoping to read was that it closed for lack of business. That would truly show a grass roots transformation. What S.F. is doing to this retailer is a very sad (and IMO, cringeworthy) substitute for that.
Trite as it is to say, the Court also said you could own people, and they sort of had to change that. And in my lifetime, I saw the Court reverse itself on what “double jeopardy” means within a few short years.
A change of one justice, and Heller can go out the window. And it should, as it is void of constitutional or historical basis. This, again, is why elections matter.
I don’t think the courts ended slavery…that was Congress. They did it the right way and passed amendments.
Good point. But try “separate but equal.”
Chris Rock got it right on this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuX-nFmL0II
b&
Yeah, $5,000 bullets might do the trick.
Jim Jeffries also nails the only good reason to own a gun. Of course if you missed his video (gone viral) they took it offline.
But here is a summary (and video embedded but pan back to 0 min); worth viewing:
http://www.attn.com/stories/3465/jim-jefferies-gun-control-argument
Thus proving that taxation would work.
Yes, that is exactly what they want. For themselves. They want everyone living in abject fear all the time. And most importantly, the want everyone who looks at them to know that they have the power of life and death over everyone else.
What they don’t want is black folk or brown folk packing heat. They say they do, but that’s a lie. Look how they freaked out when the Black Panthers armed themselves. They were sure there must be a law against that. Just not a law that applied to themselves.
At bottom, they are a death cult. They know that their days as top of the heap are probably numbered, but they want to be able to take as many with them when they go. They are absolutely in love with killing and death. And anyone who thinks what I’ve said is silly or cartoonish, well, you just haven’t really thought it through. These are not reasonable people. They are sick, and deluded, and scared.
I have been writing on this subject for almost twenty years now, a couple of published articles, letters to the editor (when people still read newspapers), Internet posts, etc. And nothing brings out the responses, insults and open threats you get than trying to suggest that guns can and should be regulated. Not even banned – just regulated. One letter to the Chicago Sun-Times garnered numerous threatening phone calls within minutes of the paper hitting the street. ON AN UNLISTED NUMBER. IN CHICAGO, hardly what one would think of as an NRA or militia stronghold.
Ben Carson is certainly a guy who only opens his mouth to change feet. Some of his comments make no sense at all and actually we are better off not asking what he could possibly mean.
Most of the gun loving republicans have no concept of guns or have ever used them. It is similar to their denial of evolution because g*d said it does not conform to the bible just ignore it. Having guns is another g*d directed requirement and that is all they need to know. The constitution just confirms g*d’s will.
To Carson’s republican mind the Constitution is just an extension of his religion. That is why a Muslim president just won’t due. And if he were president, that would just be an extension of his religion.
I have a hard time believing that any regulations enacted by a city can be effective enough to make a dent in gun violence. I would be happy to be proved wrong.
Sure, on the one hand, San Francisco could be made a gun-free zone…and people would just get their guns & ammo as usual in other parts of the Bay.
But San Francisco is also serving as a model for its neighbors. It’ll be a lot easier for Oakland and San Jose and Santa Cruz and Los Angeles to mimic San Francisco now that San Francisco has blazed that trail. And for Sacramento to, as well, after enough cities have taken up the cause.
And if what’s now the law in San Francisco becomes the law for all of California…well, at that point, San Francisco is sufficiently geographically isolated from other states that it actually would start to make a difference.
b&
However, there is more of a Constitutional problem with the regulations if guns cannot be bought in an entire state. The Court might consider this an undue burden on the right to keep arms.
“half of Americans think gun rights are more important than gun control…and that view is growing…”
Maybe it’s because gun control advocates have retreated from the public debate? The best they can offer these days is a restriction on assault rifles and magazine capacities, which is useless.
Progressivism seems to be making a comeback so maybe we’ll start to see movement on this issue again. Sadly, even Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem interested in this issue.
It looks like opinion changed when SCOTUS made their ruling on the 2nd Amendment. I think that’s got a lot to do with it. People now see gun control as an attack on the constitution.
Roe v Wade didn’t change people’s opinion in favor of abortion rights; if anything, the reverse.
No, Roe v. Wade was accepted initially, and for quite some time. And by many in the church, for that matter. The opposition really geared up amongst the gang that had opposed integration. It became a big money make for them. But it was accepted in 1973 and for some time after.
Heather is correct, though it is a bit more complicated than that. But the fact that it was officially made a “constitutional right” has been pivotal for many people. Which is why they throw up their hands now. It is very hard to argue against a constitutional trump card.
” Which is why they throw up their hands now.”
I dispute this is why they “throw up their hands now.” My point is that anti-abortion activists didn’t let a SC ruling deter them, they just changed their strategy. They worked for decades to create popular support, which resulted in the conservative court we have now.
Gun control advocates need to do the same thing. The lack of popular support may well be due to their surrender more so than merely the logical consequence of the SC ruling. You can’t possibly know which explanation is the true one.
I pretty much agree.
True, but that’s not quite so closely tied to the constitution in people’s minds I don’t think.
In other countries though, where we don’t have a constitutional right to have a gun, the link between the number of guns and the number of gun murders isn’t disputed. It’s only in the US where that argument occurs.
Perhaps, but you also don’t have a history of insurrection. Or at least a successful one. 🙂
Not saying you’re wrong, it’s just I’m not sure it’s possible to identify a single cause as to the way that a particular culture is. I think that there’s a certain amount of randomness in the way things happen and sometimes a stable configuration of public sentiment occurs.
I don’t think people really care that much about what the Constitution says, unless it happens to support a viewpoint they already believe for other reasons.
I remember when Roe v. Wade was decided, and it most definitely was accepted for quite some time. It was even praised by many clergy.
The virulent opposition started later, when a lot of the old segregationist crowd needed something to gin up the faithful and keep the dollars rolling in.
With Heller, many have in fact taken the attitude of “Well, it’s a constitutional right, so there’s nothing we can do.” That is Scalia wanted, and what he got.
“I remember when Roe v. Wade was decided, and it most definitely was accepted for quite some time. ”
Which isn’t the same as increasing acceptance. But yes, I initially qualified my statement with “long-term” but edited that out.
The heart of gun-nuttery seems to be the desire to revolt against the Federal government, which itself depends on hostility to the fact that the Federal government enforces civil rights. So gun-nuttery is highly correlated with racism. Am I wrong?
Let’s everyone make sure that you try not to dominate a thread. Please read Rule #8 so that we don’t have the same people arguing with each other.
It is also sad that mass shootings actually increase gun sales. People hold the mindset that “after this atrocity, they will finally be forced to take my guns away.”
Perhaps the only way to get meaningful gun regulations is to vote for people who are willing to fight the NRA, and stop voting for people like Carson who fight for the right to be killed by a gun.
That’s probably rational, though. Calls for banning guns are always strongest after a mass shooting.
But it seems to me that gun nuts will be their own undoing. The few bad apples committing mass shootings are going to ruin it for the rest, because those other gun owners refused to support any legislation to make mass shootings less likely.
The cycle of purchasing and approval is largely internal and statistically irrelevant. Mass shooting -> purchase -> NRA approval and subsequent donations, repeat.
Like religion, the whole thing is like a pyramid scheme. If people simply lose interest then the organizations (churches, NRA, etc.) will look like Kmart or Borders or yesterday…unable to keep up with what people want.
Ironically, one of the best ways to insure that more people like Carson get elected is to keep calling for the outright banning of guns. Since it can’t happen, why do well-meaning folks (brace yourself) keep shooting themselves in the foot?
Yeah, gay marriage couldn’t happen either until some people started talking about it as a possibility.
A ban on guns could certainly happen, but it might take a generation. We’d need to at least replace a couple of justices on the Supreme Court with less conservative ones.
The problem is that there are problems that are more important than gun control, and which need to be addressed asap. Like global warming. And we need to elect a lot more Democrats for that, and elect them soon.
Calls for banning guns get rednecks to the polls. Better to wait for Democratic majorities, and then tackle gun control. Be tactical.
Ironically, one of the best ways to ensure that more people like Obama get elected is to keep calling for the outright banning of abortion. Since it can’t happen, why do well-meaning folks (brace yourself) keep committing seppuku?
Even more ironically, it seems that only liberals are the ones who tend to use such twisted logic to cede the fight with nary a shout.
b&
The ultimate problem with gun control is the millions of guns already in people’s possession. I have yet to hear a plan that explains exactly how those are to be dealt with, and have trouble imagining one that isn’t going to end in violence.
It would probably be good for the federal government to enact a permanent trade-in policy. That way, when the gun nuts die (of natural causes or whatever; I’m not trying to imply anything), their kids who may not be so nuttish can get rid of them without having to either go to a dealer or put them in a landfill.
That is a very interesting scenario. It would get rid of a number of guns while not treading on anyone’s rights and not requiring any Constitutional amendment.
In Australia in 1996 we had a compulsory buyback, which collected 660,959 long arms so if you had a gun you handed it over and got some money. The guns were then destroyed. Taxes were raised temporarily to pay for this.
We also have periodic amnesties where you can hand over an illegal gun and not be charged.
I doubt that a comparison between the US and the UK is very useful when comparing the effects of regulation. The US has has a much higher level of all types of violence than the UK and always has.
Laws in Britain have become stricter over the last century but with no obvious effect since the background has been one of decreasing violence in general in which guns have always played a relatively small part. Even when firearms have been more widely available shooting each other just hasn’t been a British thing.
Looking across from Europe the US seems to have a problem that can only be improved by changes from the top and changes in general attitudes at the same time. The decrease in violence and crime as a whole in recent years at least shows some hope.
For an interesting read on the subject I heartily recommend “The Better Angels of our Nature” by Steven Pinker.
i’ve long argued that the onus of effective gun control in this country should land on the makers and sellers rather than the buyers. after all, they’re the ones responsible for the ocean of weapons drowning us and while the supreme court may believe in a right to own a gun, there’s nothing in the 2nd amendment that guarantees anyone the right to sell one.
I’m actually opposed to the threat of mass shootings being used to garner support for restricting gun rights. It’s little different from using the threat of terrorist attacks to restrict rights to travel, communicate, be secure from unwarranted searches, etc. In both cases, they are statistically insignificant events that are hyped into some kind of big threat to the country.
Gun violence has been dropping for decades. Homicides by gun make up less than a fraction of a percent of deaths in this country, and mass shootings make up a tiny fraction of a percent of gun deaths.
I wish as a nation we could allocate our resources to dealing with the most significant problems, rather than the ones that inflame emotions.
That said, the frequency of mass shootings has increased quite a bit from decades ago, and although they remain statistically insignificant in terms of deaths, it raises the question of what has changed in our culture.
Here’s young-earth neurosurgeon Dr Ben on how to deal with “active shooters”:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/a348b4e767/ben-carson-shows-you-how-to-confront-a-shooter
Oh shit that was funny! 🙂
The practical problem with the San Francisco method is that we already know it doesn’t work if the outlying communities don’t follow suit. Just look at Chicago with it’s strict regulations. Any perp can just hitch a ride to a suburb and buy a gun.
Furthermore, if outlying communities follow suit, the Supreme Court will likely start striking down the restrictions since they would be unduly burdensome to a Constitutional right.
Basically, for the San Francisco/Chicago method to work, you need to change the Constitution.
” Just look at Chicago with it’s strict regulations.”
Chicago has the reputation of having tough gun laws, for instance, Donald Trump just claimed (wrongly), “”You look at Chicago, it’s got the toughest gun laws in the United States,” as proof that stricter gun laws don’t help. In truth, Chicago’s gun laws have been gutted by court decisions, so that where they once banned both handguns and gun shops, both are now allowed. The concealed carry ban was struck down in 2012, and other provisions that most angered gun advocates have been overturned. There are still no gun shops in Chicago, so every gun owned legally or illegally is bought outside the city and brought in – and Chicago confiscates more illegal weapons than any other city, about 5500 so far this year.
What’s needed, first, are the closing of loopholes in gun regulations, gun shows being one of the biggest. Recently, a Chicago man was sentenced to nearly three years in prison after pleading guilty to purchasing 43 firearms from gun shows in Indiana to sell on Chicago’s South Side. Background checks in many states are either nonexistent or not enforced, and there are other measures that could be taken. Of course, the NRA fights these every step of the way, and that’s where gun regulations end. The NRA and the politicians they control have the final say on gun laws, and they will not give an inch.
Even if those regulations have been struck down, they seem to have done little to help when they were in force. Also, it just furthers my point to note that Chicago has no gun shops (since that is the San Fran method I have been talking about).
Basically, San Fran won’t really benefit from closing all gun shops, since guns can still be bought down the road.
The argument that “Chicago [or wherever] has tough gun laws and still has lots of gun crime, so gun laws don’t work” is pretty weak. It’s as if you had a restaurant, declared every other table to be non-smoking, and then concluded “non-smoking zones don’t protect people from tobacco smoke”.
Jerry,
One comments I often hear favoring from pro gun people is that a gun is to protect citizens from their government. They claim that every government that became socialist or comunist had unarmed the population first.
How do you think we can debunk or offer counter-evidence for this claim?
First, the premise is untrue. Hitler, if anything, liberalized gun laws in favor of possession and use. In fact the Nazis encouraged it. With the Nuremberg law, Jews were forbidden firearms, but the non-Jewish populace wasn’t. Had the citizenry wished to oppose Hitler, they certainly had the guns to do so.
The Russians had a right to keep arms as well. Even Lee Harvey Oswald had a gun, and shot at a local range when he lived in Russia. And he hadn’t even been made a citizen.
Second, if Americans want arms to oppose their government, they must look elsewhere than the Second Amendment. It is impossible to deny at least a state right to an armed militia in the amendment. Yet the Constitution states one duty of the militia is to suppress insurrection. There is no right of insurrection in the Constitution, nor did the Second Amendment create one. Otherwise, rebellion against the government is defined in the Constitution as “treason.”
I’m not sure there is any good new argument to be made. Its been true for probably about 70-100 years that the US military can drastically outgun the private citizen. So drastically, that the deterrence value of having access to handguns and rifles etc. goes to zero against a government that really wants to get the citizen for some reason or another. The 2nd amendment’s “authoritarian government deterrence value” is only strong in situations like the Bundy Ranch standoff, where the government decides that not injuring citizens is more important than doing something like collecting backtaxes. But against a true dictator? Phhhhht.
Lots of people have been pointing this out for a long time. It would be nice to be able to communicate this same old point more convincingly, but as for new arguments, I don’t think there are any good ones. The answer to “deterrent value!” has always been “it doesn’t offer any.”
It’s a very good argument. However, is it true that socialist/comunist governments had unarmed the population?
Or this is just a pro-gun propaganda?
The population as a whole greatly outnumbers the military, and would win if the two were pitted against each other, even if they only had hunting rifles and shotguns.
However, I can’t imagine a popular uprising that doesn’t also sway much of the military to its side, and if an uprising is not popular, then it’ll fail. Even if a minority of states seceded, pitting the bulk of the military versus the populations of those states, the government could institute conscription and have superior numbers to draw on (as happened in the civil war). So even if the population could theoretically defeat the military, I can’t imagine a realistic scenario that brings them fully into conflict.
But even if you grant that the people may need to fight off the government, I would argue that we could keep long guns, which are best for military purposes and effective for home defense, preserving people’s rights under the 2nd Amendment and the spirit of opposition to a hostile government, and still ban handguns, which are far less effective militarily but convenient for murder. Handguns are used in the overwhelming majority of gun deaths.
Really? A force of civilians armed with Glocks, shotguns and rifles would beat 50 cal machine guns, tanks, missiles, RPGs, and who knows what else? To say nothing of the vastly superior ability and training that the military has? Good luck with that.
I agree that no rebellion would be successful unless the military is swayed to its side, which is why the thought of “tyranny” is laughable. People who speak of “tyranny” existing now are deeply unserious people. And American troops are not going to slaughter their countrymen.
“Opposition to a hostile” government” is merely the “insurrectionist” fantasy, which gets sanction from neither the amendment nor the Constitution. The Constitution is not, as has been famously noted, a “suicide pact.”
It’s even worse than that. Not only is insurrection not sanctioned by the Constitution, but Article I, section 8 expressly gives Congress the authority to call forth the state militias to “suppress insurrection” and to “execute the Laws of the Union.”
It seems ironic to the max, then, that anyone would claim that the right to bear arms — which arises at least in conjunction with the raising of a militia, if not for the sole purpose of raising a militia — is meant to arm citizens to do battle against the federal government.
That’s utterly unrealistic though. If you look at the Nazis, Khmer Rouge, Taliban, and view them through Milgram’s experiments, it’s pretty clear that a large majority of any population is going to be go-alongs, even with some very bad oppressive regime. If we go by Milgram, we can expect something less than 10% of the population to resist, and very likely those resisters will act subtly, not form a mass army and try and fight back.
Moreover, the ‘anti-authoritarian gun hoarder’ group strongly overlaps with the ‘libertarian survivalist’ group. An oppressive regime has a trivially easy way of dealing with such people: stay in your hole, don’t oppose us, and we won’t screw with you. Very likely, most wouldn’t. After all, that’s pretty much how they behave towards the federal government *now*, when given the opportunity.
I’m surprised that no one has brought up Federalist No. 46, which was written by James Madison. He believed the sort of nightmare scenario of a federal government takeover to be ludicrous. But, he wrote, in the extraordinary chance such happened, then the states had their own militias to combat federal troops. Today, that’s the National Guard, which are run by the governors of the states except when called into federal service.
Worth a read.
Speaking of “go-alongs,” at the start of the Revolutionary War, the population of the colonies was essentially divided in thirds — a third supporting independence; a third, the Tories, remaining loyal to George III; and a third sitting on the fence waiting to see which way things were going.
It wasn’t until well into the Revolution — probably after the French joined the war effort following the Continental Army’s victory at Saratoga — that American independence could claim the support of a majority of the colonists.
Australian comic Jim Jeffries about what they did in Australia to get rid of guns, and about Americans and their irrational love of them. Have a look, Jim Jeffries — Guns.
The way to alleviate our gun problem is to eliminate “gun culture” — the pervasive belief that resorting to armed vigilantism is noble and heroic — rather than by eliminating firearms themselves.
This is similar to how the way to alleviate rapes is by the elimination of “rape culture” rather than by the elimination of penises. (But, really, as to both guns and penises, does anyone need more than one — or one that fires from a 30-round banana clip?)
I’m still trying to figure out how a penis is supposed to fire from a 30-round banana clip. And something tells me that I really, really, really don’t want to know the answer….
b&
Don’t know about other guys, but I flip the selective-fire switch on mine to “full auto.”
This might be worth a shot (no pun intended):
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/guns-cigarettes-cultural-shift
Something I posted on Twi**er a couple of days ago: https://twitter.com/HeatherHastie/status/650809501663125505?lang=en
As a gun owning liberal, I am continually dismayed at the gun grabbers in my side of the political divide. When debating in neutral sites, they would claim “no one is going to ban gun/going after your guns”, but in the safety of their liberal echo chambers, they gleefully plot to ban all or almost all guns. Talk about doublespeak.
I will defend everyone’s right to own a gun, no matter how “new” you claim it to be. It took some time before “we the people” started including blacks, women, asians, gays, atheists, etc. This novelty argument is as dumb as the gun grabbers who propose it.
And I will remain a liberal, but fighting to change the left’s attitudes about guns. It has been working, as the graph shows above. We’re reaching the moderates and moderate progressives. It’s the left wing nuts who are beyond reach, but I hope their numbers continue to dwindle.
Yes, a few more shootings should take care of that. One way to get rid of them damned liberals.
Why do you defend everyone’s right to own a gun? Do you really mean everyone? I have to wonder what you see as so positive about it, that everyone should be able to have a gun.
I think you missed some sarcasm there.
And all my other posts.
The gun culture in the USA is a symptom of the disappointment of the population with the whole political system. It is supported by people’s fear of the future in a country where a sudden disease can cause bankruptcy and poverty is god’s way of telling you you’re not good enough. Until America is no longer such an unforgiving country to live in, and people have a reasonable expectation of a decent life, Americans will cling to their guns.
With apologies to Karl Marx. I expect the gun laws in America will not be rationalised until the hegemony of the billionaires is broken. This may never happen. Billionaires are hard to beat.
Progressives with guns:
https://youtu.be/yiqJubtLrTI
Shocking video – this can’t be real. This must be some underhanded NRA tactic or something…
I’ve heard the odd comment recently that goes like “why do you need a 15 round banana clip?” This video demonstrates why – it’s because when you’re shooting in a 3-gun competition, if you have a standard 15 round magazine, you don’t have to make as many mag changes…
“Progressives with guns” – surely an oxymoron.
Actually, all the video demonstrates (the first minute anyway, which is as far as I could stand watching) is that some LGBT people can be just as paranoid triggerhappy f*ckwits as anybody else. Why is this a surprise?
cr
I grew up in Detroit also–it is one of the most heavily armed cities in the USA and one of the most dangerous,with about 350 homicides per year, so this makes the trope more guns=safer places a non sequitur
sub
The Daily Mash (UK spoof news-site)’s take on Carson: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/both-world-wars-could-have-been-stopped-if-everyone-had-guns-says-presidential-candidate-20151009102773