In South Carolina, a two-year-old found a gun in his car and shot his grandmother.
Bollinger noted that investigators had already determined that the child was not in a car seat at the time of the shooting, enabling him to reach the .357 that was hanging in a pouch on the back of the passenger seat.
“We’re still trying to figure out how the child pulled the trigger,” he said. “We’re encouraging folks as always, keep your weapons secured, especially around small children.”
I have to ask…why did this person need or want a deadly weapon hanging off of their car seat while they were running routine errands? Did it make them feel more safe than putting their child in a car seat, because that also seems irresponsible and dangerous?
In Tennessee, an 11-year-old got a shotgun and killed another child, because she wouldn’t let him play with her puppy.
His parents had a shotgun and ammo easily available in a closet. Why? Did they think a flock of partridges might suddenly take wing in their living room? What was wrong with that kid that he thought using a shotgun was a reasonable response to having his feelings hurt?
We’re swimming in guns. We have so many guns that children are stumbling over them, and shooting people by accident or intent.
The United States has only 4.5% of the world’s population but has 41.5% of its civilian-owned guns. The U.S. has by far the highest gun ownership rate on Earth — nearly 90 firearms for every 100 people.
And no other developed nation comes close to us in firearms fatalities. We’re at 10-plus per 100,000 people. One third are homicides, two thirds are suicides.
These guns are everywhere. This interactive map gives a different meaning to the red/blue divide.
To some degree the split is urban vs. rural. But it is also northern California vs. southern. Northern Utah versus southern. Border counties in Texas had few gun deaths; other parts of the state had a lot.
New England and the Midwest were relatively low on the scale of gun deaths. Vast, vast sections of the South experience very high rates of death by gun. Rural Oregon and other major swaths of the non-urbanized West were disproportionately hit by firearm fatalities.
We’re talking pure unadulterated madness. We don’t need to be awash in guns, they are not making people safer, and coupled to the irrational entitlement of obsessed gun fondlers, they are creating all kinds of new dangerous situations. It’s also getting personal, when a raft of idiots think the solution to campus gun violence is to hand guns to more students.
An emeritus professor, Daniel Hamermesh, has resigned because of the open carry laws on the University of Texas at Austin campus. He’s the smart one.
“With a huge group of students my perception is that the risk that a disgruntled student might bring a gun into the classroom and start shooting at me has been substantially enhanced by the concealed-carry law,” Hamermesh, 72, wrote. He announced his resignation in a letter sent to university president Gregory Fenves on October 4, explaining that he would not be fulfilling his contract to teach fall economics classes through 2017 “out of self-protection.”
…
“Having a gun in his or her pocket, not with any plan in mind, just as an impulse, to pull it out and shoot at me,” Hamermesh explained to Daily Intelligencer, “that’s the real worry.”
Hamermesh says it’s not uncommon for some students to act irrationally about grades and schoolwork. “I’ve taught some 20,000 students over the years, and I’ve had enough students come to the office complaining, and some of them get pretty riled up.”
Remember, one of the dead in the Umpqua shooting was a professor, Lawrence Levine, and his previous interaction with his killer was to correct him on a vocabulary word. These are not situations where anyone needs to be armed, and having a mob of armed students respond to a threat with a hail of gunfire does not ever improve a situation.
It’s a good thing I don’t own or carry a weapon. I’d be tempted to blast away at the next person who mentioned the second amendment to me, because they’re all fucking morons, and they apparently consider shooting a reasonable reaction. Can we please change that thing? The founding fathers done screwed up big time with that one (and with their timidity and greed in dealing with slavery), and it’s long past time that we recognized their failure and FIXED IT.
As much as I realize this borders on conspiracy theory stuff, I do suspect the right-wingers’ push to allow firearms on campus is intended primarily to enable wingnut students to intimidate liberal faculty and students. Couple these laws with ridiculous stand-your-ground statutes, and you have a recipe for it being pretty much legal to execute an instructor or a fellow student for a perceived insult to Jesus or the Founding Fathers.
Not being a USian I was wondering if any state had used the “Well regulated militia” part of the 2nd amendment to require anyone who wants to carry a firearm to also be in the state National Guard? Would seem to be tied together.
I’m really kind of ashamed that it took me so long to come around to this view. The Constitution is not some goddamned holy book, and few of the ammosexuals seem to grasp that the Second Amendment is… a FUCKING AMENDMENT.
Seriously, fuck constitutional originalism. Why should a society be bound to ideals from 250 years ago?
Jason – not so far as I know. And apparently the currently valid legal interpreation of the ‘well-regulated militia’ clause is that it is mere ‘legislative throat-clearing,’ which is to say legally meaningless. So such a law could (under the currently valid interpretation, which I think is incorrect) be challenged as unconstitutional.
I feel less bad every day about renouncing my US citizenship next week…
Because it is almost inevitable for the apologist to come out whining, I’ll leave this here.
#3 / Robert – Especially since their original intent has NOTHING AT ALL to do with home invasions, carrying guns in public, or militias as revolutionary organizations as opposed to the de facto national military (the Constitution didn’t provide for a standing army, so it’s all about national defense).
#1 / Amused – I do have friends (mostly from high school) who do seem to sincerely believe that arming more people would result in fewer gun deaths. Heck, my best friend from high school called me a coward for not owning a handgun for home protection. In Amsterdam….
The question I would ask is “has this problem got worse?” Is it the case that the US has always had this ridiculously high gun murder rate, or has that figure risen worryingly in recent times? I mean, I’m only pushing 30, but I don’t remember this being an issue more than about 10-20 years ago (but, again, I didn’t really pay much attention to US news back in the early 90s when I was a child). Was gun death an issue in the US in the 50s? 60s? 70s? Or even as far back as your Civil War?
Because I have a feeling that pinning all this on the second amendment of your constitution is overlooking the core of the issue. Sure, it’s used as a standard around which the hoplophiles can rally, but is the culture driving their madness really a two-century legacy of frontier times or something brought about by other, more modern, cultural circumstances?
Because their son would obviously need to defend himself against evil women who don’t let him have what he wants to…
Though cases like this also raise a point about culture. Whenever you talk about “no guns”, somebody will bring up “you can kill people with knives, too!” But while you see cases of “kid intentionally kills person with gun” come up regularly, kids don’t seem to knife each other down in the rest oft he world like that…
Maybe there’s something about the availability and distant killing of a gun….
Nah, forget I said something
“nearly 90 firearms for every 100 people” According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country, over 100 actually. Probably depends on whether you count toddlers. And you need all those guns to protect you against the government when they come to take your guns away.
I assume some gun worshipers are bound to show up. I hope they can answer a genuine query: Can you list any mass murders, massacres, etc. in the US in the last few decades (choose your own time period, I don’t care) that were accomplished by baseball bat, knife, or some other non-projectile-launching weapon or tool?
If it’s not guns that kill people (technically, of course, it’s bullets that do the killing), and it’s people who kill people, then the weapon won’t matter in terms of killing outcomes. Right?
“Unadulterated madness” about sums it up, indeed…
I was unaware of the story of the 11-year old from TN referred to in the OP – an even more horrific story, if that’s possible. A child has been killed, another child has been charged with first-degree murder … and the father, who left a loaded weapon in an unlocked closet, has not been charged with anything.
The lunatics are definitely running things…
#10: When they inevitably do, although they normally try to use examples from China, I can always point out that we’ve had two mass killings in the 22 years I’ve lived here in Holland. One involved a guy driving his car into a crowd attacking the royal family, the other involved a rifle, and both had 7 or 8 deaths. And our overall murder rate, not just from guns, is five times lower. And the suicide rate is 50% lower.
#7 / Cartomancer: I’m 46, grew up in the States. I remember a couple of bomb threats in middle school and high school, but not a lot of mass murders. I do seem to recall some incidents of people going postal (for some reason, it was always postal workers), but never any school shootings until Columbine. That could be faulty memory, but I’m pretty sure mass killings (if not the overall murder rate) are up a heck of lot since the 80s and 90s.
I am not convinced that firearms in and of themselves are the problem. Many nations, such as Canada where I live, have fairly high rates of firearm ownership without the same per-capita or per-weapon rate of firearm injuries. I wonder how much of comes from cultural perception of firearms and their uses? I was acculturated that firearms were tools for hunting and weapons of war, primarily. There simply wasn’t any idea of firearms being ‘protective’ in any way.
I’m not that knowledgeable about guns but how about this:
Maximum of one handgun per household with a certain amount of ammunition (all of it registered in a database) that you can keep in your home[1]. And you must purchase or show proof that you own a safe for storage that meets certain standards. Also, gun safety course and training should be mandatory[2]. No concealed carry. No open carry. Also, strict background checks.
Possession of all other guns (outside of hunting gear) prohibited.
If guns like assault rifles and shotguns had been banned from the very beginning, nobody would be feeling like an intrinsic human right need of theirs was being denied. The right to own guns is a completely bullshit manufactured right. Owning body armor and AR-15s just doesn’t fit in with things like free speech, right to fair trial, privacy from unwarranted searches, etc.
[1] We are limited to how much pseudoephedrine we can purchase and have to register the sale of the tablets. I think we’ll be okay if we possess one gun instead of thirteen.
[2] We have to pass a test and prove competency before being allowed to drive a Honda Accord. I think we can bear to do the same with other machines that can kill children.
Professor Myers:
We can’t. There is no way 2/3 of either house will ever vote to change that, let alone get 3/4 of the states to ratify the change if by some miracle we got congress to pass something. I wish liberals would stop wasting political capital on this non starter.
It is also unnecessary as the Heller decisions does allow for effective gun control.
But beyond that, it is profoundly dangerous to be mucking about the bill of rights and the 14th amendment. I don’t want the dangerous precedent of removing rights from people because they don’t quite line up with my preferred list because of our political culture. Far, far to many people on the right would be all to willing to insert “religion only refers to the various sects of Christianity and Judaism” in the 1st amendment. There is almost certainly more popular support for that than removing an individual right to bear arms.
Let’s not weaponize amending the Constitution because liberals will lose that one.
One thing I’ve noticed about the SA (though I don’t know if it really matters) if you want to get technical. It lays out the right to keep and bare arms. It says nothing about the right to acquire and transfer them. Could it be argued that gun control doesn’t necessarily need to involve taking existing guns, but rather controlling the transfer of weapons between people, and still be unambiguously constitutional?
On a personal note, it scares me to look at my home state on the map. I grew up in the part of MN with the lowest rates of gun deaths. Because of my depression, I’m glad we never had a gun in the house (apart from a brief period when my brother had our grandfather’s antique 12-gauge). Now I look at the region where my brother currently lives with his family. It has the highest gun fatality in the state.
Shit, italics fail.
The problem is that many gun nuts ignore basic gun safety. Like never carry a loaded weapon in public, and keep your guns locked up when not in use. The handgun in the car and the shotgun were not properly locked up. The handgun was loaded, and no loaded gun should be where kids can get them. Enforcing gun safety rules with proper legislation and surprise inspections would go a long way to reducing negligent gun deaths.
There are no accidental misfires except for lightening strikes. All other discharges should be on purpose, or they are negligent.
The constitution and founding fathers (ff) issue is very strange. It seems to me that refusing to critically consider laws set by them and to worship the ff as some sort of sages so wise that their will trupms that of the living, that is truly abandoning the ff’s legacy. AFAIK the ff were people who questioned existing models for enacting laws and whom the law should serve, wrote new laws that didn’t respect the legacy of past monarcs, and were concerned about the lives and well being of the citizens.
Let’s not weaponize amending the Constitution because liberals will lose that one.
We won with the Thirteenth amendment removing the “right” to own slaves.
We also won with Amendments 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, and 26.
The only time a later constitutional amendment represented a definitive loss for liberal values was when the Eighteenth was ratified— and that was later repealed.
So “weaponizing” Constitutional amendments to guarantee rights for the people actually tends to have a very good track record, thank you very much.
Woh. I’m glad that northern Utah (my home) is an island of wisdom amidst the stupidity of rampant gun ownership in the Mountain West, but I’m at a loss to explain why. It’s not like you can “Oh, northern Utah is less conservative”, either – parts of Salt Lake Valley are definitely less conservative, but I highly doubt that works as an explanation for all the conservative rural and suburban areas to the north, east and west.
I will say that matches my experience. I’ve lived in the Salt Lake Valley most of my life, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw someone carrying a handgun around in public who wasn’t an off-duty police officer. Some people may have been doing concealed carry, but if they were I didn’t know. Gun ownership was pretty scarce in the conservative neighborhood I grew up in as well, with maybe a few folks owning shotguns for hunting, and only one person I knew of who owned a hand-gun.
AFAIK the ff were people who questioned existing models for enacting laws and whom the law should serve, wrote new laws that didn’t respect the legacy of past monarcs, and were concerned about the lives and well being of the citizens.
Or as I prefer to put it— the Founding Fathers were slavers, so what would they know about freedom?
They belong in a history textbook as one of many intermediate steps between the absolute monarchies of the past and the free democracies that will (hopefully) exist in the future, wedged between the Magna Carta (rights of the 1% against the king) and the Civil Rights Act (nominal equality under the law not enforced in practice).
The latest toddler shooting doesn’t quite pass the smell test for me. A 2 year old kid would have a very hard time pulling the trigger on an uncocked double action revolver. So either the idiots were carrying it in their car with the hammer cocked, or one of them is actually responsible for what happened and is using the kid to cover things up.
@johnrockoford
Numbers of mass murders throughout American history that didn’t use firearms or firearms played little part:
Bath School Disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
Austin Nevada Attack, http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&cl=search&d=DAC18630724.2.13
Charles Sears, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2slaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=D3sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6127,5410815&dq=&hl=en
Ronald J. Popadich, used a gun to kill one person, used a car to injure 17 others. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/nyregion/man-accused-in-hit-and-runs-gets-30-years-in-neighbor-s-killing.html
Mysterious axe murders http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C07E0DA1131E233A25752C2A96F9C946096D6CF
possible connected with the Villisca axe murders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villisca_axe_murders
Seattle knife murder spree, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E01E3D71E31E333A25756C2A9679D946394D6CF
Nicholas Troy Sheley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Troy_Sheley
And of course, the September 11th Terrorist Attacks and the Oklahoma City Bombing.
On a side note China has had a slew of knife attacks over the last fifteen years. On the same day as Sandy Hook Massacre a not-so-nice-fellow in Henan province ran around and stabbed 24 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_School_stabbing
@15 Mike Smith
The divine right of kings was something people thought could never be changed.
Profoundly dangerous? Compared to what, the mayhem we have now? More dangerous than needless killing of 30,000 people each and every year? More dangerous than nearly one 9/11 per month?
Cartomancer @ 7 and Derek Vandivere @ 12:
August 1, 1966: Engineering student Charles Whitman, aged 25, got onto the observation deck at the University of Texas-Austin, from where he shot and killed 17 people and wounded 31 during a 96-minute shooting rampage in the University of Texas massacre. He had earlier murdered his wife and mother at their homes.[124] It was the deadliest shooting on a U.S. college campus until the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.
November 12, 1966: Mesa, Arizona, Bob Smith, 18, took seven people hostage at Rose-Mar College of Beauty and ordered them to lie down in a circle. He shot each in the head. Four women and a three-year-old girl died; one woman and a baby were injured but survived. Police arrested Smith, who reportedly admired Richard Speck and Charles Whitman.
December 30, 1974: Olean, New York, During a 2 1/2-hour siege, honor student Anthony Barbaro, 17, the best shot on his rifle team, shot and killed three adults in and around his high school and wounded 11 other persons. He shot from the windows out at the street and neighborhood. The school was closed for the Christmas holiday.
January 29, 1979: San Diego, California, 16 year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on Grover Cleveland Elementary School from her home across the street, killing two adults and wounding nine persons, including eight children.
January 17, 1989: Patrick Edward Purdy, 24, fatally shot five children and wounded 32 others at the Cleveland Elementary School. Most of his victims were ethnic Southeast Asian refugees. Purdy had a history of violence, alcoholism and drug addiction, and criminality. He shot and killed himself at the school.
November 1, 1991: University of Iowa shooting Gang Lu, a 28-year-old former graduate student at the university, killed four members of the university faculty and one student, and seriously wounded another student. He committed suicide by shooting himself.
March 24, 1998: Westside Middle School massacre: Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, killed four students and one teacher and wounded ten others as Westside Middle School emptied during a fire alarm intentionally set off by Golden.
May 21, 1998: After killing his parents at home, Kip Kinkel, 15, drove to Thurston High School, where he shot and killed two students and wounded 23 others. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to 111 years of prison.
Those are all prior to Columbine, and were well publicized. A lot of people don’t pay attention to school shootings in which the victim count was low. The wiki list of school shootings starts in 1764, and runs to 2015.
Strewh
No you don’t. You got about 30 per 100 while the USA has 112 per 100. Which doesn’t even go to what kinds of guns (hunting rifles vs semi-automatics etc) are owned.
Giliell @26. I said ‘fairly high’, not ‘close’ or ‘comparable’. I would still consider one firearm for every three people a fairly large number of firearms.
@14 (Saad): also insurance. There should be mandatory liability insurance, and it must cover both intentional acts and negligence. Additionally, I’d want to see a law creating a presumption of permissive use in situations where a gun which hasnt been reported lost or stolen is fired by someone other than the registered owner — just like we have with motor vehicles now.
Strewth
It’s a pretty average number for industrialized countries. And it’s not even in the same ballpark as the USA. Of course, gun regulation and culture play a huge role as well.
It’s interesting how Sam Harris is so concerned about evil islam beliefs but not about 2nd amendment lover beliefs. Which is a better indicator of a potential terrorist: libertarian or muslim?
Michael Nugent will be (mis)quoting that in 5….4….3…..
@Mike Smith #15
A slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy even when atheists use it.
Because of the hordes of Mexican rapists pouring across the border and taking over our precious
whitecountry, of course.While visiting my relatives in Arizona over Christmas, I was informed by my sister and her husband that a beautiful mountain range and National Monument nearby is no longer safe to visit because it is swarming with “illegals”. I told them I highly doubted that, but they insisted it was true. So, I checked the website for it and of course there was no warning or notice of any danger like that at all.
Thanks, Fox “News”!
@Jake
And that was during a vastly different era(s) in which the basics of our Republican (philosophical, not GOP) form of gov’t was not under constant attack from the left, right and center. I don’t trust the populace to not remove rights any more, once we say it’s OK to muck about in the bill of rights.
the gay marriage bans.
@Robert
1) England still has a monarch.
2) The Divine Right of Kings ruled for a ~1000 years, so by this logic we got about 800 more years to go.
3) Divine Right of Kings has nothing to say for it. Private ownership (if highly regulated) of firearms facilitates the only natural right people have, i.e. the right to self-defense.
4) Liberals don’t even have half the states loyal on most issues, so tell me how you plan to remove the 2nd amendment when it requires 3/4 of states to go blue. it’s not possible. it’s not possible for at least 50 years. it’s not worth the political capital it would cost to spend on this.
Given that the federal gov’t as been systematically ignoring the most important parts of the bill of rights in greater and more dangerous ways I rather they still have to pretend to respect the protection laid out in the bill of rights. Because if mucking about the bill of rights happens the collapse into organized state violence is going to happen…which is way worse.
Besides, a little loss of life is nature’s manure.
@34 Mike Smith
Go fuck yourself.
@Charly #32:
Slippery slope arguments aren’t always slippery slope fallacies, though. Plenty of slopes are actually slippery. @Mike Smith’s comment comes close to some actually slippery slopes without correctly identifying any.
@Charly
A slippery slope fallacy only applies if I am arguing that mucking about the 2nd logically or inevitably leads to others being mucked with. I am not saying that. I am saying that under current conditions liberals going after the 2nd amendment is going to encourage the right to go after other ones. We have a republican candidate openly campaigning on changing the 14th. We have another openly campaigning on positions that destroy the 1st. And they are currently winning
It’s not that I think if we drop the 2nd we will change the 1st. It is that I think if we change the 2nd the 1st is more likely to be changed. Indeed as I said limiting religious protections to Christians enjoys far far more popular support than curtailing gun ownership. I’m not willing to risk that, especially on such a fool’s errand.
A slippery slope fallacy only applies if I am saying we will go down it. I am only saying one could exists.
tell me how you plan to remove the 2nd amendment
Wake the fuck up and smell the coffee. Look what has happened to the 4th amendment. The 2nd can be similarly reinterpreted and eroded. It’s just a question of political will.
The constitution is ignored all the fucking time. It is not a holy document.
@34 Mike Smith
Excuse me? It’s happening everywhere, almost every day, with cops killing unarmed people. And it’s partly because there are so many guns and they are everywhere. On top of the wingnut culture and racism affecting many cops add paranoia because they suspect everybody of packing because many gun worshipers actually do. Unfortunately it’s not the gun worshipers (who are mostly white) who get shot but mostly black people and even black kids because they picked up a BB gun at Walmart.
@marcus
“It’s just a question of political will.”
My point is there isn’t the political will to do this…at all. progressives lost this fight years ago.
“Look what has happened to the 4th amendment. The 2nd can be similarly reinterpreted and eroded.”
And that happened under bipartisan support and with agreement with the powers that be. The general will allowed for that to happen. Such a consensus doesn’t exist for gun control. Wake up yourself. progressives lost this. Stop wasting time and energy on it.
The problem with amending the second amendment is that too many gun nuts have said they will violently resist any change in the law to restrict gun ownership.
quotetheunquote(#11):
Even better, Tennessee has a Child Access Prevention law. The bad news it only pertains to handguns. yay for technicalities *barf*
@johnrock
So cops are literally organized to kill black people now? no? then what I said was true.
The police problem in this country is bad, maybe the most pressing issue in the country but it is not organized and systematic genocide and other horrors that come out in illiberal societies.
@Mike Smith
Uh-huh. Well, let’s take a guess here. You are one of those smug dudebros who equate devaluing human life and hand-waving away human suffering with steely-eyed logic. You confuse emotions with values and motivation with method. And you fail to see the palpable logical flaw on the face of your argument: if death is nature’s manure, then what’s your problem with state violence? States have been more effective at manuring that half-baked philosophical garden of yours than anything or anyone else. Why is it suddenly bad? Besides, you fail to give any thought to the idea that the whole point of rights and liberties is to make people’s lives better — more comfortable, more prosperous, more fulfilling, less painful. But if, in your view, human life has no value except as manure, and suffering is an emotion that men of logic virtuously ignore (unless they have a toothache), then what benefit are ANY rights to humanity?
Why don’t you stop telling us what to do? Stop wasting your time.
The militia was initially considered as a combination of police force and state army. The old posse of the western movies was how the police force worked. A very small professional staff augmented by civilians. Same for the state militias. But, things have evolved so that every state and political subdivisions thereof has a professional police force, and they don’t use civilians due to the liability issues. The state militia has been nationalized. The old militia doesn’t exist. Therefore, there is no need for people to own guns. It has been effectively neutralize, but the conservatives on SCOTUS will do and think anything not to face reality.
Hah! Dream on.
Rather than getting bogged down in masses of statistics, or comparing country A vs country B, here is what I think is a clearer way to think about it. I don’t have any guns in my home. One of my brothers is an NRA type. He is calm, sober, and there is no animus between us. But if he walked into my house with one of his guns, the odds of me dying just jumped up.
[ To make it explicit: the odds that the gun accidentally fires through mishandling, or that we get in an uncharacteristic argument leading to a shooting, as low as they might be, is far greater than suffering a home invasion that he is able to fend off with his gun. ]
If i lived somewhere infested by gun violence, the calculation might be the opposite, but thankfully most of us (including me and my brother) live in safe neighborhoods.
@latsot#32
I am aware of that. However constitutions in many countries around the world were and are amended, changed, rewritten and invented from scratch pretty much all the time. If in this regard there were some real slippery slopes, it should be pretty easy to find some historical precentents with regard to this issue.
None were mentioned, and I personally know only one such precedent – US case implies, that if almost unregulated acces to weapons is grounded in constitution, it leads to out of control spiral of gun related deaths and violence.
@Mike Smith#37
This: “Let’s not weaponize amending the Constitution because liberals will lose that one. in the context of your post directly states, that some (unspecified but previously hinted at) negative consequences inevitably follow from pursuing the revoking of second ammendment. I am fully aware of the weasely words you were using in previous sentences that in your mind disqualify your stance as slippery slope fallacy (like “…far to many people on the right…” “…almost certainly more popular support for that …”), but you forgot to include them in your last sentence. And even if you did not, weasel words do not suddenly make a fallacious reasoning magically OK.
You are fearmongering about the consequences of proposed constitution change, nothing more, nothing less.
@ Mike Smith:
Here you go, dudebro. Your stoic strength is so very admirable.
@timguegen #23:
Factory-set trigger pull weight for a .357 Magnum is 13 pounds. You are claiming that a 2-year old can’t generate that much force on the trigger.
You may not be aware that children from infancy have a grasp reflex such that they can hang from their hands and support their own weight. My mother used to tell the story of my pediatrician swinging me from his fingers before I could walk. A 2-year old will weigh at least 20 pounds, and that’s a short and thin child. They can hang all that 20 pounds from their fingers, briefly. They can certainly pull a 13-pound trigger.
@Mike Smith #34:
The United Kingdom does still have a monarch, who performs the ceremonial duties of a head of state without holding any political power; Crown prerogatives reside in the Prime Minister and the Privy Council. Technically, the monarch can still choose not to give Royal Assent signing a Parliamentary bill into law, but in practice not one of them has done so since Queen Anne in 1711.
The monarch is left with the duty (or right, if you prefer) to “advise, encourage and warn” the Prime Minister of the day, something which prime ministers only pay lip service to when it suits them. Basically, the two of them get together for an hour most Wednesday afternoons for a nice cup of tea and a chat.
It’s pretty safe to say that your suggestion of it being another 800 years before the remnants of the Divine Right of Kings is fully abolished here is, um, unrealistic. The old dear who currently waves at people is quite popular, but once Brenda pops her clogs her son and heir, the Speaker To Plants, is going to have to restrain his tendency to make himself a laughing-stock else his eldest may never see the throne. I already know which way I’ll be voting.
Because if you don’t succeed on the first try, fuck it. Good attitude, dude.
The first three of those Amendments I mentioned were the ones that created even the most technical right of black people to vote— rights that were not granted to them in practice in any significant capacity until the 1960s. Towards the middle, you’ll find the one that let women vote.
And you think those were passed during a “different era in which the basics of republican government” were unquestioned? Our country was a stable democracy, in which a majority of the populace was simply told outright that they were not permitted any say in government? I guess in your little dudebro fantasy world, only white men count as human.
Which Amendment was that in? When did it get ratified? Because the Supreme Court explicitly upheld the right of gay people to marry not that long ago; how did a brand-new constitutional amendment overturning that ruling get ratified so quickly?
Concern troll is concerned.
I believe the only way to achieve decent gun control in USA is to make it very profitable. If the NRA started underwriting the insurance policies, think of the cognitive dissonance. Heads would asplode.
My point is there isn’t the political will to do this…at all. progressives lost this fight years ago.
I am in Massachussets, as I read that, and I am laughing at you. There are states in the union that have gun laws. Wake up and smell the maple nut crunch.
regardless of how hard or dangerous amending the constitution is it is not a question we should avoid. Before that it would be much easier to get real in depth statistics on all deaths and death by guns to include broken down into race of all parties involved, education, sex, age ,geographically and time of year even weather if it is useful. We do not have anything near as complete, So we are pardon me for this “shooting in the dark” on this question there may be more to this than just “banning guns” though it may be that simple but my skepticism is wary simple solutions that fix everything. magic bullets exist as plot elements not so much in real life.
uncle frogy
This is a situation where I’d say “clearly this was irresponsible even by gun’s right advocates’ standards”, and there are a large number who would say the same.
Then I see online posts from said gun right’s advocates and I die a little inside… like I got shot through the heart, and they’re to blame… that terrible pun was really lame…
For everyone like my dad who believed that with great gun comes great responsibility, there’s people who literally believe guns are just absolutely and perfectly safe even around babies, or to use as can openers, or whenever, who say this was a “tragic accident” and nothing more.
Ugh… Look, I know that actually outlawing guns in America is just… not going to happen in my life time. However, can we at LEAST model our gun laws after Australia? I mean, that’s made a huge impact over there.
The first incident – toddler shoots grandmother – is the standard product of gun culture; a “tragic accident” that is the inevitable result of the deliberate choice to give guns to toddlers. (And if you leave it in easy reach of a toddler, you have given it to them; a two-year-old doesn’t understand the concept of safety precautions or other people’s stuff.)
However, the second incident – boy shoots girl over puppy – sounds more like the intersection of gun culture with rape culture. Sure, being 11 years old he’s too young to really understand the concept of sex, but he’s old enough to have understood and internalized the omnipresent messages that, as a boy, he is entitled to commit violence against girls who don’t give him what he wants. Being so young, “what he wants” from a girl may be a puppy but the idea that it was appropriate to shoot her when she refused to give him what he wanted was provided by rape culture to perpetuate rape culture.
That said, the implication that they might charge him as an adult is absurd. It takes an incredibly barbaric country to impose a life sentence (let alone a death sentence) against a kid barely out of elementary school no matter what he may have done.
Well, gosh darn it, if only his grandmother had had her own gun tucked into a holster in the small of her back, it would have deflected the bullet and she would have been okay! Checkmate, liberals!
I once came across a claim that the militia in question were located primarily in the South, where they would search slave quarters for weapons and keep themselves ready to suppress any slave revolts. It was supposed that the Southern States were worried that if the Federal government came to be in control of their militias, they could starve them of funding and effectively eliminate them, making slave holding more difficult. Southern representatives were supposed to have lobbied to get the amendment passed.
This doesn’t seem to be a commonly held explanation of the history of the amendment. Can anyone comment?
Imagine someone invents a human remote control with the single button “mute (temporary)”. No doubt this invention would be banned as an unconstitutional violation of freedom of speech. Unfortunately someone actually has invented a human remote control with the single button “kill (permanent)”. It’s called a gun and for allegedly constitutional reasons that make no sense whatsoever some (most?) Americans insist they absolutely cannot be banned.
I can’t recall ever actually seeing a gun in my home country. That’s the way I like it. Even seeing cops routinely carrying firearms overseas seems weird (at best) to me. I’ve never met anyone who thinks the American obsession with guns is healthy or rational. Not even any Americans actually.
Strewth@13: some data: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/24/9183525/gun-violence-statistics
The US has way, way more guns per capita than any other country in the world. More than any other country at all in fact, no matter how small. Monaco or the Vatican would need just a few thousand guns to match the US rate, but neither does. Among similarly-wealthy countries, it’s got almost twice as many guns as Switzerland, and Switzerland itself stands out as a gun-happy country.
Figures 5 and 6 show that the rate of gun ownership explains much of the rate of gun death. Canada actually has more gun death than you’d expect from our rate of gun ownership, but since we have half as many guns as the US does, we have a lot less gun death.
I’d be morbidly interested in seeing a county by county map for Canada.
Interesting article:
http://isp.netscape.com/news/us/story/1001/20151013/6647
Mike Smith @ 35
“Besides, a little loss of life is nature’s manure.”
Strange how that’s fine and dandy when it’s not someone you know and love, or your own loss of life, isn’t it? Besides, it’s just those people you see on telly, and it isn’t like they are *real* humans anyway, not like you and yours.
I literally had a new age hippy type tell me the same thing about ebola virus (which they also explained to me was quick and painless as far as death goes). If the victims are not in your own back yard and you don’t know them, or better yet if they belong to a different social class or have different ethnicity to one’s own good self, that somehow makes it okay?
We don’t need no stinking guns!
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/indiana-woman-uses-cosplay-combat-skills-to-capture-intruder-with-a-ninja-sword/
What baffles me about the belief that some Americans have that they need guns to protect them from the government is that they know damn well that if the US government wanted to it could squash them like bugs. These are the same people who were whooping for joy when the US extrajudicially killed Osama Bin Ladin, well he was a heavily armed guy in a heavily armed compound which doubtless had more than one AK 47 lying around. The US wanted him dead, he’s dead.
@ Mike Smith
Here’s a thought, right wingers would go after amendments they don’t like and laws they don’t like anyway.
Mike Harban
Yeah, but that’S two sides of the same story. The USA don’t trust children with a fucking Kinder Egg, but guns are fine. Keeping a loaded weapon within the reach of children is apparently “responsible gun ownership”, but when something happens you’re going to pretend that the problem is that one evil kid who needs to be punished extensively. I absolutely agree with your analysis that this killing was an expression of toxic masculinity and entitlement, yet at 11 years I will not hold the kid responsible for believing what he was taught his whole life.
GErmany has seen a few horrible schoolshootings in the last decades. The first one was Erfurt. The shooter only got the weapons because the responsibles hadn’t done their job properly AND we further restricted gun access, implemented obligatory psychological evaluation for under 25 year olds who want to buy guns (though I’d extend that period to “until you’re dead”) and stricter laws for keeping your guns.
The next one in Winnenden was only possible because the father* had not locked his weapons according to the law. He was convicted of manslaughter and has to pay the medical bills of the victims.
*They sound like an extra-special kind of assholes. While they’re totally denying that their son had been in psychological and psychiatric care (this might actually be a rare case where mental health plays a role) they’re also sueing the therapist they saw a few times. Apparently you can be excused for not locking up your guns in the presence of a clearly disturbed teenager, but a person who’s met him a few times in their life is supposed to literally look into his heada nd see he’S going to murder many people.
Oh, and here’s a case in Germany where a former pupil went ona killing spree without having access to guns. Spot the difference.
@Gileill: Differences such as the body count (zero, including the attacker living through the event)?
dianne
Don’t you say, right? It must be a total coincidence that has nothing to do with the weapons as such, right?
Well, to be fair, the kid who was a volunteer fire fighter may have played a role in preventing deaths as well. It sounds like they acted quickly and well and prevented any deaths without needing a gun to do so.
This issue is one where my views diverge with the left. PZ quoted the statistic in the OP: two thirds of gun fatalities are suicides. The suicide rate in the US is, among western nations, pretty high but not all that different from a country like Australia which, as many people here have pointed out, confiscated guns in their country. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate#List_by_the_World_Health_Organization_.282012.29)
So most of the harm done by guns is to people who were actively looking to kill themselves and presumably would have done so without a gun.
The idea that governments disarm groups with which they disagree politically is part of the reason the 2nd Amendment exists, and was cited specifically in the Supreme Court decision a few years ago to uphold the 2nd Amendment. And while the US military does have larger and more efficient weapons, the number of privately owned weapons in that country is almost certainly a deterrent against aggresive government action/overreach. See this recent incident as evidence: http://abcnews.go.com/US/nevada-cattle-rancher-wins-range-war-federal-government/story?id=23302610
I suppose it would take a sea change in American politics for a substantial number of citizens in the country to declare that the time had come to revolt against a tyrannical government, but it’s happened before, and the US was founded as the result of a revolt. As long as there are people who wish to control other people’s lives, a path of resistance is necessary.
This is not really a useful comparison without knowing the baseline rate of suicide in Australia prior to the changes in gun laws in Australia. The data appear to be somewhat mixed, but most analyses conclude that there has been a decrease in gun related homicides and suicides in Australia since the change in legislation and little evidence of substitution (i.e. no increase in the non-firearm related homicide and suicide rate.)
Source: http://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/australia.php
Dianne
I’m not sure if guns are really helpful if you need to put out a fire…
Penny L
1. That’S not “Government overreach”. That’s government trying to enforce the law.
2. That’s not somebody bravely standing up to the bullies, that’s somebody being the bully.
3. The only reason this didn’t end in a bloodshed was because the armed federal officials decided that they’d rather let this guy get away with stealing one million dollar than risking the lives of humans.
As usually, you don’t even understand your own sources.
So, do you think that people should be able to opt out ouf paying for services because they have guns?
Well, no, but according to the NRA a Good Guy with a Gun (TM) will solve all your problems. I’m sure they could come up with some convoluted explanation of how it would have all been better if the student who put out the fire or someone else had started shooting…
Actually, there was a similar incident not far from where I used to live in NY: A guy with HIV dementia walked into a bar carrying a jar full of gasoline and a lighter and threatened to blow the place up. He was taken down by an unarmed couple: One woman distracted him while the other jumped him. No deaths, no major injuries even (I think he stabbed the woman who actually jumped him, but not particularly badly.) How would that situation have been improved by someone with a gun? I suppose if they’d had a gun (and were good shots and had a clear line of fire and were lucky) they could have shot him and gone back to their drinks undisturbed, but it doesn’t seem like a very good risk trade off to me.
re: #76 Not even George Washington let people get away with that.
Now then
-Dark Jaguar @ #59
I’d be a bit careful with that phrase “made a huge difference”, not that I disagree with the sentiment. You’re not saying this but I have seen gun advocates and others misuse Australian numbers before. So, say we’re talking about the numbers before and after the Port Arthur laws. NRA types often point out that burglaries rose after the buy-back schemes were implemented. Which they did, a little. The mistake would be thinking they are in any way connected. Such folks obsess over guns as a psychological deterrent to crime (and tend to imagine “criminals” as some sort of winged species that waits in the dark to swoop in on the unprotected). But for that to work guns would have to have been used for home defense in the first place. Which they weren’t. Even if you buy the home defense theory (which I don’t) the number of burglars deterred by the possible presence of firearms in any given urban Australian residence would be pretty close to zero in the last 100 years, I wager. They’re just not a factor.
That’s just an example anyway. In short, the phrase I’d use is probably more “small, but significant”, rather than “huge”.
Amused, #29
Good point. I never even thought about how absurd it is that you don’t have to have insurance.
Penny L
No government overreach for trying to get your contracted rent paid? What a simpleton fool and liar you are. You sound like a right wing tool.
#26 / Caine – Thanks for that. I do still have the perception that the ‘canonical’ mass killing was more of a workplace rampage than a school shooting up until around Columbine, but that might just be my perception and what I paid attention to growing up!
Penny L:
You assume this but it isn’t so. Not all suicide attempts are successful. Using a gun is dangerously “effective” at turning an attempt into a successful attempt. In addition, not having the means to attempt a suicide around reduces the incidence of suicide attempts. Reducing the convenience of a suicide attempt often means preventing the attempt altogether. It is not often a thing that will happen anyway, no matter what you do to try to stop it. It isn’t an inevitability.
Disarm groups with which they disagree politically? Please, elaborate on this. Where is this happening or even being proposed? In terms of disarming specific groups, I might only see that happening if the groups were violent hate groups (e.g. the KKK). In terms of what most people here propose….we would want everyone to be subject to gun control, not just Republicans or Christians or people who want to keep pot illegal, or whatever.
Lolwut? If you think that the only reason the government doesn’t “overreach” is because of fear of armed retaliation, you live in one strange, scary world, thoroughly disconnected from the real one.
Also, citing Cliven Bundy favorably? Wow. You really are laying all your cards on the table.
(You do realize that the federal government didn’t stop pursuing Cliven Bundy because they were afraid of him and his guns, right? That the federal government de-escalated the situation because they didn’t want people dead? Specifically, Bundy and his protestors? Because they could fucking just bomb him just like we do with all those evil foreigners, if they were truly just afraid of losing their own lives? And that they gave concessions to end the armed protests, but still are trying to get money out of him through the court system?)
Do you legitimately think it is a good or even coherent idea for a government to specifically include a provision allowing for people to violently topple said government? It does not make sense. There is a reason that the Second Amendment doesn’t say “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, or necessary to overthrow that state if they view it as insufficiently free, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”. Where did the Founding Fathers hide this “Right to explode the federal government” clause? Is it the same place where they tell you to ignore that whole “well-regulated militia” thing as well?
Controlling other people’s lives is what government does. It is what society does. It is what law does. If you think that the ability to violently resist that at a whim is a necessity, what you are calling for is nothing short of bloody, violent anarchy. At least have the honesty to fucking admit that is what your vision of the world entails.
Giliell@70:
I would argue that there should still be a psychological evaluation for dead people trying to buy guns. And maybe a physiological evaluation as well.
After Penny’s last performance, I’m so not going there.
I’m just going to repeat what I said over on Mommyish the other day:
Though the comments are far from being You-Tube quality, there are a few ammosexuals on M’ish, and they’ve been… vocal… about their stupidity.
And then there was the person who argued that guns and porn are similar because OMG think of the children. (Uh… right. Get back to me when two kids stumble across a stash of Hustlers and one uses a nudie-mag to bludgeon the other to death.)
Which is, btw, the reason why, though women attempt suicide much more often, men have way higher suicide rates: they use much more drastic methods with guns being the #1 culpable. Take pills and there’s a good chance you’ll be found. Slit your wrists and there’s also a good chance you might notice that actually, you don’t want to die and you call an ambulance. There are people walking around who have been cut down from the ceiling. Fact is that most people who attempt suicide and who are rescued and given help do not finally commit suicide. But hold a gun to your head and your chances of a second chance are pretty much zero.
@Marcus
“I am in Massachussets, as I read that, and I am laughing at you. There are states in the union that have gun laws. ”
excuse me, I’m not talking about gun laws, general. I am talking about repealing the 2nd amendment as that is the part of the discussion I am most stridently against for various reasons. Most common sense gun control measures that we should adopt are allowed by the Heller decision and yes there is a general consensus on those points. If you want my opinion of specific gun control measures, ask.
There is, however, not a consensus or the stomach to repeal the 2nd amendment. I do not believe ANY state, let alone 3/4, would vote to do so. It is extreme minority position. If you have polling data that contradicts this, produce it.
You live is Mass. great. It is among the most liberal states in the union, and even there repealing the 2nd amendment would be a tough slog.
@bonza
“Strange how that’s fine and dandy when it’s not someone you know and love, or your own loss of life, isn’t it? ”
I’m a community college adjunct.
@Jake
“And you think those were passed during a “different era in which the basics of republican government” were unquestioned? Our country was a stable democracy, in which a majority of the populace was simply told outright that they were not permitted any say in government? I guess in your little dudebro fantasy world, only white men count as human.”
Yes the civil war amendments and the woman’s suffrage amendment were passed at a time in which rights were consider natural, adhering to the very concept of being a person. We failed to fully extend those rights to all persons who should have gotten them, much to the shame and injustice of the country. However, the core notion of Republican gov’t, that the gov’t may not do certain things to people qua people by virtue of natural right was in place. It is because of this notion that we were able to explicit recognize the rights in the amendment you mentioned.
Today, ideologically speaking, we are in a very different place. rights are no longer natural rights, but contract rights that are generated via agreement from an idealized positions. I have rights because I won’t agree to not have them. Structurally this means rights are what we say they are…which is why I think it is so dangerous to now be removing some from the list.
“Which Amendment was that in? When did it get ratified? Because the Supreme Court explicitly upheld the right of gay people to marry not that long ago; how did a brand-new constitutional amendment overturning that ruling get ratified so quickly?”
Don’t be dense and disingenuous. I am referring to the 25+ states that passed constitutional bans in the late 90’s-2008. Even CA passed one, you might have heard of it it was prop 8. The LGBT community, a community I belong too, was damn lucky that conservatives loathe to change the federal constitution for any reason because otherwise we would not have marriage now as DOMA could have easily became an amendment to the federal constitution back in 1996 and I still think about a 1/3 of the state would put one up now.
@rich
“It’s pretty safe to say that your suggestion of it being another 800 years before the remnants of the Divine Right of Kings is fully abolished here is, um, unrealistic.”
I misstated what I meant. the DRoKings was the dominant ideology for roughly 1000 years. If we are to take the analogy seriously we got about 800 years more to go of the 2nd amendment being dominant.
Regardless, my major point is the DRoKings has nothing to say in its defense whereas the 2nd amendment does at least touch upon the right to self-defense, which is an actual thing that should be respected.
@Charly
“You are fearmongering about the consequences of proposed constitution change, nothing more, nothing less.”
Right now we have a consensus in this country that you don’t fuck with the bill of rights or the 14th amendment because of how important they are. This consensus keeps certain elements at bay. To wit, if it was a thing to change the constitution for preferred policy goals LGB people would not right now have marriage rights as DOMA would have been a amendment in 1996.
If progressive successfully go after the 2nd amendment even to the point we it seems possible that it may be removed, consensus is broken. It doesn’t follow from the consensus being broken that the 1st amendment goes down. I does however mean we will have to fight those battles, battles which I don’t think liberals can win.
We shouldn’t risk, there’s not a direct connection but the risk is too great otherwise.
TLDR: it isn’t fearmongering if there is legitimate fear.
No right, just a bias. Some people think self-defense is wearing guns to intimidate people of color. That is aggression, not self defense.
Pessimism is concern trolling. Optimists get things done….
@Nerd
“No right, just a bias. Some people think self-defense is wearing guns to intimidate people of color. That is aggression, not self defense.”
I’m not in favor of either conceal carry or open carry. I’m in favor of far more stringent gun control. That is not my point. it’s a red herring to bring up the issue.
My point is the Divine Right of Kings says this:
“The Windsors have a the right to rule Britain as a father rules a child because of bible”
That is nonsense. No liberal view can respect that.
The 2nd amendment, under Heller, means that an individual can own a gun, under substantial regulation. This right makes sense to me in so far as it bumps up against an actual right people have, ie. the right to self-defense.
It’s conceptually related. There’s an actual argument to have there. That argument even in favor is recognizably liberal in the boarder sense of the word and does necessarily include crap like the Oathkeepers.
With the DRoKIngs not so much.
Given that in America white guys can wander around areas of unrest with assault rifles, but black kids can get shot for having a toy gun, the 2nd amendment doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of preventing this.
Where is this right specified in writing by the constitution? The “well regulated militia” is needed for the right to own a firearm, even for self-defense (an oxymoron since a gun is an offensive weapon). I’m 65, and a white male. I have never attended a meeting of the “well regulated militia” in my life. It died years ago.
Nerd, at least in some states that ‘well regulated militia’ spent most of its effort capturing escaped slaves and fighting Indians. Hence it no longer being necessary. Time for the second amendment to follow?
Well, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with gun ownership, as has been said. If we could just get folks to realize that, there would be no need for any alteration of the Constitution. And we might get people to wonder what else they have been wrong about.
Yeah, I know about the Heller decision. The Supremes were just wrong, a product of the times and the gun-makers’ money.
Anat is right, too. The militia is no longer needed – the army that the Constitution tried to prevent is firmly established. The Second could be cut.
And even if the Founders fully intended us to own guns, we don’t have to. They didn’t define what kind of guns, and they were writing at a time when a guy going on a shooting rampage in a theater would have been beaten to death with walking sticks after getting off one round per pistol packed. And if they wanted us to be able to defend ourselves from government tyranny, we would have to own fighter jets, or, politically, we could just say that after 230 years, we haven’t had a tyranny, so forget the self-defence.
But we have had a Civil War, which was pretty much the government rolling out on the southerners who wanted to ditch the government – not just letting them go. And, also, it was a complete failure of the gun owners to stop the government from burning them to the ground. So how do the Southerners still argue for their view of the Second Amendment?