But Coach....that really doesn't have anything to do with the 2nd Amendment. That's more related to self-defense/justifiable homicide statutes. I know that's not your main point....just sayin is all.
The NRA basically subscribes to the "slippery slope". They believe that the government will slowly chip away at the second amendment until one day gun ownership is abolished. I understand their viewpoint, I just don't happen to subscribe to it. Unfortunately if you are vehement in your defense of gun ownership you often are grouped with the fringe element that sincerely believes that they should have the right to hunt rabbits with an AK-47 loaded with teflon coated ammunition. There's the rub. What I consider a small collection others might consider a "stockpile". I don't believe, however, that as a US citizen with no history of mental illness or a felony conviction that the Federal or State government should have any authority to limit my ownership of legal firearms.
You are 100% correct, but when we talk about any form of gun control in this country it always leads back to the Second Amendment. How far may the federal government go in "well regulating" that militia? Again, I support certain controls on ownership of weapons. There is absolutely no need for Joe Citizen to have a fully automatic weapon to defend himself and his property but, if he is not a convicted felon or mentally unstable, there is no need for strict control over the number of weapons he has. I have several antique firearms which I would never even load, much less actually use, but if there was a restriction on how many weapons I could own I would be forced to either give up something I cherish (these are guns that were passed down to me from my grandfathers upon their deaths) or give up weapons that are kept for the odd day of skeet shooting and home/personal protection.
I'm sure there are many just like you who have no weapons and haven't been robbed, just as there are people who keep weapons and have been, but a sample that only includes your street is a bit narrow. My next door neighbor had his house broken into while he was asleep and, in addition to what they took from the house they also stole his car. Does that mean I live in a high crime area? Certainly not. My neighborhood is a fairly safe place, but the fact that violent crimes aren't being committed on a daily basis on the block shouldn't be used in an argument either for or against gun control.
This is a part of the logic I don't understand. If I we're a burglar and knew that there's a very big probability that the resident might shoot me if I get caught, I would sure as hell get a gun before I break in and then just shoot him as the first thing I do to be on the safe side. Shoot first, loot later. It's the sane thing to do! KJ
Deciding to kill a person is much more difficult than deciding to rob one. If I know the house owner has a gun I’m not getting in there. If I know he doesn’t have it, I might just use an empty gun to threaten and rob him.
and of all the people, all of the "downtrodden masses around the globe" throughout history who have emigrated to the US, how many do you think were lured over by the prospect of being able to have a gun? I'm sure Freddy Adu must have commented by now that his family fled Ghana because they didn't have the legal right to pack heat on the streets of Accra. It was their beacon of light. To be honest, there are so many guns, both legal and illegal in the US, that changing laws now would be pointless. All they'd do would be to create a black market for guns for all those previously law-abiding people who'd remain convinced they "need" a gun. I'm sure if gun numbers were as negligible as they are in Europe then people in the US wouldn't have the same feeling that they need a gun as many do now (after all, Americans living in Europe never seem to worry about not being armed) but that situation isn't going to happen.
True in the short term; but guns get lost, cease functioning, get captured, etc etc same as anything else-- if guns went off the market today, over a decade or two you'd see more "point" than "pointless." But if patience were an American virtue, we wouldn't have so many shootings... And may not need to happen; give law enforcement an extra tool or two and see what happens... Somehow the discussion has become "yes guns" vs. "no guns," rather than "what can we do that's practical and tolerable and will reduce shootings in the US?" Making guns and ammunition really traceable (in the sense that's needed)would not infringe on people's right to own them anymore than making automobiles traceable does...
The "need" for fully automatic weapons is beside the point- the bigger question should be what is the "need" for the government to deny these types of weapons to law-abiding citizens? Statistically, what the media likes to call "assault weapons" account for a tiny number of deaths each year. Handguns are much more dangerous in terms of actual deaths and injuries. The problem is "assault weapon" conjures up images that are harder for the average person to deal with and are more emotional. Lawyers (which is most of the legislature) are taught to deal on emotion if the facts are not in their favor- this is the principle behind the entire science of jury selection. We need to make this a debate of fact and not emotion. Also, this is a US issue due to the way Mel chose to frame it. If I were from Europe I would probably resent someone from the US telling me I don't need something because they feel they don't need it. Whether or not Europeans, who have very different traditions with respect to these matters, feel that Americans should give up their guns is immaterial to the debate. It would be no different if I said that US drug laws should apply to Amsterdam (BTW, before I get excoriated for saying that, I firmly believe they should not).
This is one of the best suggestions I have seen. It's technically possible and even I don't see the downside.
I have read that they could do something similar to what is being done with other types of explosives where a small amount of tracer material is added to the gunpowder. It's been a while (like a couple of years) but I'll try to find a link. I think it might have been in Science News.
Hmm-- point; I was assuming it would have to be done by alloy variations; to be useful though, you probably need to be able to trace ammuntion by both region and date... and it would be good if "region" meant something more specific than "Pacific Northwest." I'm assuming that from the manufacturer/distributor's point of view it is less painful to produce smaller distinct lots which may be shipped in their entirity to Omaha or Orlando and then so logged than it is to have to gear specific production to Orlando in advance... but I may be wrong... I'm also advocating presale firing of all newly produced weapons to create a ballistic database, so that every recovered round can be traced to a specific gun. That would add to the price of each weapon, much as the mandating of catalytic converters did to cars. And of course there's the upfront cost of the database expansion to taxpayers... though I am idealist enough to think that over the long term there would be a reduction of "crime costs" to the body politic to offset this and then some. The added expense of weapons and ammunition would presumably lower sales figures at least initially, which would mean fewer in circulation; existing untraceable guns would inflate in cost, and probably continue to do so ad infinitum, which might reduce really stupid crime by a certain amount... But its my understanding that ballistic evidence from a given crime scene has, at the moment, a less than 50% chance of connecting to anything; if you can raise that to 70 or 80%-- original buyer, region and time of purchase for ammunition, and previous crimes on the weapon, not only have you raised the chances of catching someone on their first shooting, you are getting close to a certainty of catching them on one of their first three... Before too long the impulse shooter will be using a traceable weapon 99 out of a hundred times, and the career cases will be experiencing enormous attrition and running out of "safe" firearms; or such is my current fantasy anyway...
I will say this has been one of the best gun debates I've read, well at least the parts about emotion being left out, couple of comments though: - the NRA and slipperly slope issue. I am a former NRA member, quit cause of thier extreme opinions of some stuff. But, the "slipper slope" position is well founded. HCI has stated, publically that they will not stop until all guns are banned and their strategy is to chip away, starting with hand guns. Well with one of the most powerfully political foes publically stating that the "slippery slope" is their exact strategy, the NRA has foundation to have this opinion. - The "tracer" idea in gun powder would not work very well, logistically there would be HUGE problems to solve. They could put tracers into the batches of gun powder, but then the gun powder is put into bullets/shotgun shells/sold in bulk and sold in small amounts, worldwide. Tracing the tracers would be a huge nightmare. - fingerprinting the gun for a ballistic database would only work on a some of the guns. Guns that are shot alot actually would change the fingerprint. Cleaning the gun can mark up the boar which can also change the fingerprint. Some of this changing can be made illegal (filing down the extraction port), but some (heavy use) cannot. - Things like the teflon coated "cop killer" bullets have gotten a bad reputation. These bullets were designed to prevent/slow barrell wear and to make a more consistent shot, for high grade target guns. The "cop killer" part was an unexpected side effect. - What the media has called "assualt weapons" and what many people think of as "assualt weapons" are not assualt weapons. ANY gun capable of firing in full auto mode, is already tightly controlled. In fact I believe the only full auto gun used in a crime since 1968 (when they began being controlled) was owned LEGALLY by a police officer. What the media calls an assault weapon is nothing more than a semi-auto rifle that might look mean, but is the same, infact LESS powerfull than many peoples deer hunting guns. I have no issue with instant background checks, I've gone through a couple and it took less than 2 minutes. There are issues however, my cousin has been rejected twice, incorrectly both times, due to someone withi his name being a deadbeat dad. He has had to jump though loops to get it cleared for purchase. There are plenty of gun laws on the books already, what needs to be done is to enforce the ones we have. The gun portion of any arrest is many times plea bargained away since it is the most serious or changes the entire aspect of the crime. Someone mentioned above about if a criminal thought the house had an armed person, just shoot him first. This completely changes the crime and punishment. Simply committing an identicle crime both with and without a gun, drastically changes the stakes if you get caught. Enforce the laws we have, stop plea bargaining and move on.
Actually, I think that the issue is undestanding the realities of the 2nd Amendment and its historic interpretation by every SCOTUS. That is, that ITN, Gringo and McGuirk have no inherent right to own a gun; that local and state governments can always exhibit gun-control; that the federal government can also take any action in terms of gun-control IT wants as long as it doesn't interfere with state militias. That that is, and has been, the interpretation of the SCOTUS, regardless of ideological bent, and that that truth is totally misunderstood, by most, IMV, is the big issue for me. We can talk international gun control agreements if you want; we can even talk int'l arms dealing and arms control, but we'd have to agree that that discussion is outside of the frame of this thread, yes. I'm not sure where this fits, but I don't resent anybody telling me anything that I think makes snese or that they both think makes sense and gives me time to reflect upon it; sometimes that reflection takes one minute, like when Jehovah's Witnesses knock on the door; sometimes it takes longer, as in when I first came across the story of Buddha (in a Seoul hotel room at the World Cup). I agree; that's why I said I'm not sure where you were going with this.
We all HAVE the same right to OWN A GUN that you have to speak publically! 1st vs. 2nd amendment freedoms... so either read the amendments or cease and desist making asinine statements!
Several perfect arguments are presented above to try our hardest to control guns as much as possible on the state and local level.
United States v. Miller, and all its upholdings. Without "some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia," there is no inherent right to a gun; in addition, local and federal laws can enact and exert gun-control anytime they want (excepting federal gun control over militias). That's the law, and that's been the law. Again, this thread has illuminated the failure to clarify the law, and the subsequent debate over rights within areas that allow gun-ownership aregarding types of weapons one can own in those areas. The latter is totally different from the former, clear law and upholdings. Don't have to like it; it's still true.
Please explain how the US House of Representatives overruling the DC city council is a victory for states' rights?
Certainly everyone should take an extra measure of caution in considering these issues, so as not to give the carriage away with the horse; but the HCI's intentions are not a good reason for the body politic to deny itself options. If the debate develops a consensus to impose some new limits but only those limits, HCI can be told to buzz off at the next stage... I am coming to the issue in light of the recent discovery that "ammunition evidence" used in a gajillion cases has been unreliable, due to the very kind of "unsorting" you allude to; for several decades the experts thought the metallurgical variations were consistent enough to draw conclusions from, and I fugured if everyone thought the manufacturing process was consistent, it must be possible to make it consistent without too much extra strain. But it doesn't have to be perfect; the idea is to provide law enforcement with a starting point. 95% of the time if they figure out who, they'll be able to make the case without relying on ammunition evidence, won't they? You are right, the powder manufacturer isn't at present distribting his product in controlled lots-- but how does the ammo maker handle it? Could he add small amounts of tracer to a given run of ammo and log the details? Yes and many of the recovered rounds are too damaged to compare-- so what? The idea isn't that we MUST come up with something PERFECT. Its that if we enhance investigatory tools we'll catch a lot of the people who give gun owners a bad name, without eliminating the rights of the responsible ones... My "plan" already gives up the untested existing guns, handloads, smuggled weapons, zip guns, etc etc; I'm just trying to take a significant number of unsolved cases from "hopeless" to "workable" instead of banning firearms... if we cut the incidence of shootings in half over the next ten years its worth it; if we cut it by 3/4 this controversy wil go to sleep... Sho'nuff-- but we need to figure out what to do about the side effect... I have personally cleaned up blood spatter from a homicide committed with a military weapon in 1984 or 5 (although to be fair, a repeating handgun would have achieved the same 2 hits; the bulk of the damage was to the wall... which would not have had as many holes in it.) Whatever it was fired a burst of six or seven fairly small caliber rounds in the length of time it took a frightened man to run 10 or twelve feet. Was that semi or full? And does the fact that it was a gun designed for the purpose of killing people have any relevance? It didn't have a lot of stopping power for sure-- the fellow was shot through the torso and ran out the door and off into the fields where he either froze to death or bled to death, and we didn't find out about it till the dogs brought parts of him in in the spring... This is a constant problem with databases and needs to be addressed-- I wonder if the no fly list is still punishing all "David Nelson"s Nobody plea bargains because they want to let people off-- plea bargains exist to make sure people are gotten off the streets for at least some time, and to get as much of a record on them as possible; that is to "felonize" them so they lose the right to bear arms, for example, or to get probation and parole restrictions on them so that no trial is necessary to incarcerate them if they're caught again... And remember a judge has to sign off on a plea bargain too... Of course some prosecutors' judgement is better than others, but the plea bargain system is not the problem... in fact the guy in the case I mentioned above was caught in another state for another crime, plea bargained out of the death penalty on that one, and confessed to this case in the process. He's doing life in that state, and New Mexico can still charge him in this one if he's ever released there... It cost about a tenth what trying him on everything would have, and achieved a pretty optimal result...
to add to that, the right to property. And property should be the right to stuff, that is, the right to own whatever you own. Once you go down the path of saying "but that's dangerous", you'll soon find yourself in a society where common kitchen knives are banned. If you think that's silly, go talk to the British medical association.
Um-- so then I have the right to burn my American flag? To keep my decaying containers of hydrogen cyanide gas? To assemble my lumber into a building that doesn't conform to fire codes? To operate my vehicle without headlights at night? You can limit use without limiting ownership, and there are things you can't reasonably be allowed to own...
Some varmints just need killin'. I live in an suburban area and the other night, I saw a coyote less than a mile from my house.
We've been getting a few coyote sightings around here, lately. Perhaps the coyotes are attempting to take back the land? Hell, when they went to demolish the Dr. Pepper building at Greenville and Mockingbird they found an entire family of red foxes living inside! I wonder if any of them had ever been peed on during the St. Pat's parade?