The NRA argument boils down to a belief that massacres are part of the price of constitutional liberty.
This implies that the Founders were all psychopaths.— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) February 15, 2018
The NRA argument boils down to a belief that massacres are part of the price of constitutional liberty.
This implies that the Founders were all psychopaths.
They might have been. But I’m confident that the whole dang NRA organization is run by psychopaths, who are trying to encourage psychopathy in the American populace.
And there was me thinking that they were just greedy, uncaring bastards whose only interest was getting money from
vile merchants of deathgun manufacturersIf the American founders knew what the future of weaponry would be like, as much as they were slave-holding assholes I still strongly suspect that the second amendment would be written completely differently, if it would be written at all.
(I’d also like to think they’d expand the first avenue to clarify that free speech doesn’t mean you are owed a platform, and people blocking you on Twitter or banning you from a blog’s comments aren’t violations of your free speech.)
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/kimmel-writer-quotes-every-gop-lawmakers-post-florida-thoughts-prayers-tweet-much-money-took-nra/
If liberty was a minotaur, to whom the sacrifice of a bunch of people, each year, must be accepted…
Then wouldn’t tyranny begin to appear as an interesting option ?
The profit motive figures large here. If Americans refuse to hold NRA president Wayne LaPierre and his lobbyists accountable, perhaps they could at least pay them for not making guns. But I have an even better idea:
Make gun ownership mandatory. Every American over the age of sixteen would be required to own, maintain and be trained with a single-round, bolt-action 30-caliber rifle that’s six feet long and painted bright orange. Possession of all other forms of firearms, especially handguns, would be punishable by an automatic life prison sentence. Americans would be allowed to own as many of these rifles as they want and as many rounds of ammunition as they desire. They would also be allowed to take the rifles to bed with them and stroke them all they want.
I think that’s pretty much what the Founders had in mind when they conceived the notion of a well regulated militia. It also fully supports the intent of the 2nd Amendment.
The Confederate Gothmog wants to study how mental illness and gun violence relate.
So he’s been tasked to take that route. I’m guessing the Sexual Assaulter is going to take the thoughts-and-prayers route. I wish we could have footage of the debriefing where LaPierre assigns them their lines.
A country of 300 million is being held hostage by a group of psychopathic gun fondlers.
How much training does a police cadet or recruit in boot camp have to go through before they’re even allowed to touch a loaded weapon? And don’t both go through extensive psych exams before even being accepted for the program?
I don’t know how to post this image, so here is a link:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10215149728681658&set=p.10215149728681658&type=3&theater
When the Founding Fathers were around, guns were single or, at most, double shot weapons which then took a fair while to reload. That’s a far cry from, slap a magazine in and start pulling the trigger until you need another magazine.
So–as has already been suggested–perhaps we need to limit general gun ownership to single-shot or double-shot weapons that have to be manually reloaded after every shot.
C. S. Forester did a nice description in one of the later Horatio Hornblower works. He is given a pair of double-barreled pistols by his wife. They are the very new “cap” style. They had much higher reliability under the sort of conditions in which he might use them (boarding an enemy ship at sea) than the then common flintlock of the day that relied on priming powder that could get wet or spill out. He picks them up, looks them over, and thinks, “I am holding the lives of 4 men in my hands.” That’s still a far cry from a modern firearm, long or short.
Some of our elected Congress critters, mostly Republicans, back the NRA up. They even voted recently to allow mentally ill people to purchase a gun. So much for their renewed interest in talking about mental illness.
Link
Grassley is just one example of hypocrisy in our legislators.
Not the word I was thinking of…. They’re not exactly hypocritical in their shameless groveling toward hate groups, the gun lobby, violence fetishists of every description, conspiracy theorists, fear mongers, and anybody else who might be duped into keeping them in power. They aren’t hypocrites about taking serious and effective steps to treat mental illness, nor about protecting such people (or others) from potential harm. And they’re not actually quite as stupid or incompetent as they might seem. They are simply bullshitters, who never had any intention of creating anything that could coherently be said to resemble a good, just, responsible, safe, prosperous society. They are doing the opposite of all that, and they’re satisfied if they can get a nice view and have a fun ride on their bomb as it goes down.
Cross posted from the Political Madness All the Time thread.
From 17-year-old junior at Stoneman Douglas High School, Cameron Kasky:
https://www.facebook.com/cameron.kasky.5/posts/1993994157485089
The account has been verified as authentic. Also, there are additions to the post above that were posted later. The kid was also interviewed by the Sun Sentinel.
I liken the NRA to a 21st century god that Americans willingly sacrifice their children to for protection and profits.
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl“
Oh, they might not be psychopaths at all. They might be calculating businessmen and political operatives, who have proven successful at their two main objectives:
1) Secure greater and greater profits for the gun manufacturers they represent;
2) Get Republicans elected, who share their views on abortion and bigotry and taxes and dismantling the federal government and suppressing wages and deregulating industry, etc.
They’ve been very good at pursuing these two ambitions. Calling them crazy is underestimating your opponent.
anbheal @16:
…who lie as easily as they breathe, feel no remorse for the consequences of their (in)actions, and so on. In other words, psychopaths.
I believe the preferred terminology is “job creators.”
They aren’t trying to encourage psychopathy in the American public. They’re just doing what job creators do- selling shit without a hint of ever taking responsibility or facing consequences when the shit they sell kills a whole lot of people. To even suggest that job creators have some kind of responsibility for the things they’re obviously responsible for is communism. Ask yourself which is worse: A mountain of murdered children, or communism.
Don’t pick the obvious one, pinko.
The basic problem, as I see it, is a right-wing attitude of “I want my personal rights, no matter what it costs everybody else.”
“It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
David Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature”. (T II.3.3)
Russian bots are flooding Twitter with pro-gun support in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, Florida.
WIRED link
Well, isn’t that helpful. Not.
Example:
The shooter was actually a member of a white supremacist group.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nikolas-cruz-trained-with-florida-white-supremacist-group-leader-says
It’s about guns.
@15
thanks for that. That poem often comes to mind these days, though some of the references are of specific people it has continued on to be true generally and more so as time goes on.
hardly a city in america whose streets do not fit the opening lines
“I was hiding in a closet for 2 hours”
So, those soldier-looking assholes that assemble in the hundreds when black people say they will peacefully protest… those guys with military equipment and armored vehicles… the guys that know they can shoot virtually anyone they want without legal repercussion… dozens or scores of THOSE guys take hours to find a gunman that’s shooting up a school?
Who pays their salaries again? And why?
I’ve been making this point for years. The frequent massacres of innocent Americans, young and old alike, is the price gun nuts, gun advocates, “patriots” and their ilk is believe is worth us paying in defense of their so-called constitutional right to bear arms. They’re just too cowardly to admit it in public.
There is no gun-related mental health crisis in America. Mental health care is not uniquely underfunded in America when compared to other western nations. There is no epidemic of video-game inspired violence elsewhere in the world, despite the fact that video games are far more graphic and realistic than they have ever been. (Remember when everyone was blaming the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Doom with their pixelated “graphic” depictions of violence? Laughable.)
The only significant difference between the US and the rest of the western world is the gun culture. It’s not even just about the proliferation of guns. Nations like France, Canada, and Germany have pretty well-armed populations (though only 1/3rd the world leader, the USA), but not even remotely the same level of gun violence.
Only in the USA does a significant segment of the population treat gun ownership as a divine right.
Only in the USA is there a significant minority of the population so deluded that they believe gun ownership is the only thing preventing the nation from becoming a dictatorship.
Only in the USA does the government regularly pass laws and regulations that actively make it harder to keep people safe from gun violence.
Only in the USA is zero legislative action taken when our children are mowed down in a hail of gunfire, time and again.
Only in the USA is the largest political party so cowed by the gun lobby that they won’t even breathe the possibility that lack of gun regulation could be the cause of these massacres.
Only in America do mass shootings not always make the national news.
Only in America are the almost daily occurrences of mass shootings not allowed to be about guns, at all.
And I know exact what the online white nationalist trolls will say in response to this news — that they are not surprised young white males are being driven to do this kind of thing having been told all their lives to be ashamed of being white and from being completely alienated by the dictatorial imposition of progressivism and multiculturalism.
If anything, while they will no doubt condemn the act itself, the alt-right, white nationalists, and white supremacists will feel vindicated, saying they saw it coming, claiming that it is merely a symptom of a diseased multiracial society the Jews have imposed on America. (Yes, they actually believe multiculturalism is a Jewish conspiracy.)
mikehuben, #19
That is certainly one of the basic problem, but the really basic problem exists even before that step: That guns are considered a right.
This is only tangentally related to the terrible shit that happened yesterday, but I thought I’d chime in.
I hear “psychopath” lobbed around a lot, and, well, I’ve known several people, online and in person, who qualified for that descriptor due to a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder (which is the preferred psychological nomenclature these days). Lack of empathy, lack of guilt and remorse, glib affect, forceful personality, and poor impulse control, the works. That’s one of the things that happens when you spend as much time in inpatient and outpatient treatment for mental illness as I have.
And the thing is, every single one of them wouldn’t have done something like this, and none of them, as far as I know, were NRA supporting gun-fondling fanatics. Some of them were unpleasant people, but they all ultimately had their own interests in mind, and sociopaths aren’t supervillains. They only have the power that we as a society enable them to have.
The NRA is not run by, funded by, or supported entirely or even primarily by sociopaths. It is primarily composed of neurotypical people, just like every other group that has ever done terrible shit all throughout human history. Bluntly, blaming this all on quasi-mythical “psychopaths” who somehow take advantage of and harm good normal folks is an abdication of our collective responsibility. This country’s gun violence problem is not a psychopath problem, or a mental illness problem, it is a cultural problem afflicting a huge swath of “normal” Americans without whom the NRA would not have any money or political sway. Yes, the NRA is a problem, but it is just a very visible symptom of the much deeper sickness that is America’s long-standing love affair with the Myth of the Gun, closely tied up with our Myth of the Rugged Individualist.
Until we grapple with these larger issues, this problem will not go away, and scapegoating sociopaths, or the mentally ill, or otherwise neurodivergent people is just a distraction from that core issue.
TL;DR: The problem isn’t that Crazy People(tm) have access to guns, or that Crazy People(tm) are conspiring to keep us awash in guns, the problem is that American culture in regards to guns is deeply broken and sick, and that’s almost entirely due to perfectly “sane” people and the comfortable lies they tell themselves.
#25
Knew it:
(The leader of the White Supremacists group the shooter was a member of.)
That may be the face of the argument but their actual behavior is inexplicable unless they regard the massacres not as a price but a perk.
The founding fathers we’re not a monolith. I’d imagine Adams and Hamilton would be strongly pro gun control. However Jefferson especially would consider mass shootings the price of liberty. The man did write, basically, a little rebellion now and then is needed for the tree of liberty must constantly be watered with the blood of Patriots and of tyrants.
Ideally yes private ownership of guns should be done away with. However given the current geopolitical situation it is irrational to give up that form of self defense. You might as well build the camps if you do.
We’re = were
Mike Smith:
<snicker>
Sure. Only guns in citizens’ hands prevent “the camps” in the USA.
(The rest of the developed world manages without this perceived need, but hey, why even invoke reality? USA! USA! Guns guns guns!)
Ah well, clearly an armed society is a polite society. Right?
—
PS re “self defense” — your lack of google-fu is duly noted. You should look at the data.
(Prevalence of guns inevitably positively correlates with prevalence of shootings, all else equal. Should be obvious, really — kinda hard to shoot someone without having a gun)
@john molares
I’ll note that you just imputed onto me a whole bunch of ideological baggage that cannot being attributed to what I said. For example, I don’t believe an armed society is a polite society. Indeed I happen to think an armed “society” isn’t a society at all. The American republic is dead; we are in a quasi-state of nature.
Likewise I am well aware of the way in which private gun ownership creates a hellish landscape that is extremely more dangerous for everyone than having everyone disarm. My self-defense is better served by having no guns around than having a gun on my person/house. *However* such reasoning only works if everyone disarms or you can trust people to not attack you.
I do not, can not, trust 62ish million Americans to not attack me and more to the point I don’t trust the right to disarm and not use repressive force to subjugate, or in my case murder, minorities of whatever stripe. I’m well aware that my reasoning on this point is fundamentally Hobbesian and boils down to a Prisoner’s dilemma. Unfortunately, we are stuck on the Nash equilibrium.
It is unavoidable at this time. The right in this country is fundamentally unreasonable and they can not be trusted to not violate basic rights…rights such as not shooting up a school. The lesson of this mass shooting is the civil fabric is far to shredded to save.
Other western countries are not facing the main force Trumpianism.
That’s rather doubtful. Jefferson was one of the smartest politicians we ever had. So it’s hard to believe in the first place that he would put so much stock into a flowery quote that you felt like dredging up although it makes no mention of guns or gun control. Even if it’s not something he’d regret saying, I don’t think he’d be inclined to insist that it must be applied dogmatically and have such mind-bogglingly stupid ramifications. That’s not how that dude rolls, based on my reading of history.
Secondly, I think he’d have a lot of trouble, like I do, figuring out what is being rebelled against, in the form of the recent school shooting. Based on my reading of the present day events, it’s absurd to think this has any relevance whatsoever. Are the students/teachers supposed to be the tyrants? Are they the patriots? What is being fought for or protected? Does it instead have basically nothing to do with what Jefferson was actually talking about? Did he even write this statement with the aim of propping up the second amendment, or was it perhaps to explain his support for a very costly/bloody war despite being generally a pacifist? Lots of questions here. But I bet all of these lines of thought would probably lead him to think, along with anybody who had two neurons to scrape together, that the price is certainly not right. This is not a good deal. As a reputable scientist/philosopher, he would easily recognize that the “self-defense” excuse just doesn’t hold water, given all the evidence trashing that idea, which John Morales already mentioned. He might even whip out another tasty quote that ridicule is only weapon against unintelligible propositions, which definitely seems to be the type of thing you’re saying he especially would endorse, despite everything we have reason think we know about him, that he especially would do so even before Hamilton of all people, who was killed by the VP in a fucking duel, for fuck’s sake. It’s all just too fucking ridiculous on too many levels.
No, it doesn’t. Empirically, people who don’t have guns are safer. This is not a society in which everyone has disarmed, yet it works all the same. And what works here is not mere “reasoning” but the fact that your behavior doesn’t add to the number of guns around you in your life. They are dangerous people-killing objects, not things that make you safer. That is why they are made, that is what they do, and this should come as no surprise to anybody. That’s true, no matter what you want to suppose should be the case because of your impeccable reasoning skills, no matter how much you apply your vivid imagination to fantastical scenarios that could result in defending yourself against an attacker, and certainly no matter what you think of our current political situation.
@razor
The quote in question was from a longer discourse on how Jefferson felt about Shay’s rebellion which amounted to an failed armed insurrection. (four thousand men marched on a armory and forced Washington to take the field). Jefferson considered things like Shay’s rebellion has a needful for the proper functioning of republican gov’t. He would horrified by the mismatch between the firepower citizens have and the US military. He would far less alarmed by the citizens being armed. SO in so far as that quote indicates his thoughts I’m inclined to think he would have counted the 17 dead as nature’s manure.
Second, the shooter of the recent one trained with a white nationalist militia like a year ago. All signs point to this being a fascistic terrorist attack. So what was he rebellion against? liberal gov’t. His blood can feed the tree as the bastard wanna be tyrant.
(Hamilton in federalist paper 29 seems to indicate that owning a gun needs to be tied to militia training and as such I think he would be far more amendable to limit the *individual right* to firearms. He was a far more tolerate of strong central gov’t than Jefferson)
@razor
given where I live I am surrounded by guns. I don’t know a single neighbor who doesn’t have one. I am forced by my current circumstances to carry one because otherwise people who are manifestly opposed to my basic material well being can kill me with impunity.
It’s absolutely is a Hobbesian trap but damn it we can’t get out of it yet.
Also, the empirical data you are referring to is pre-Trump, it’s irrelevant to my claim as the bonds of trust were stronger then.
Seriously, WTF? The school shooting was not in any sense “needful for the proper functioning of republican gov’t,” nor was it an insurrection, failed or otherwise.
And even if he would be horrified by this so-called “mismatch” between civilians and our military, that is what we already do have with an extremely expansive reading of the 2nd amendment, which is presumably meant to correct such an imbalance, not what we have without one. So if he had that kind of information, as we do, it’s fairly plausible that he might say, “shit, somehow it all looked good on paper, but in fact it doesn’t fucking work that way after centuries of trying, and on top of that causes tons of totally pointless and avoidable harm — it’s all downside and no upside, so let’s try something better. How about drastically shrinking the military, folks, since I’m actually very much in favor of peace anyway?” Or something to that effect. The point is that there’s clearly more than one way to solve that mismatch, if it’s going to be considered a serious and fixable problem to being with, and from the beginning it had to be blindingly obvious that an internal arms race within the population was not likely to be the most prudent or effective way to address it. Yet against all odds people tried. And they fucking failed. So you’re saying he’d want to try again even harder? How does that make any fucking sense to you?
What blood? The shooter isn’t dead, so unless you’re saying you want him executed, that’s a pretty weird thing to say. Well…. it’s fucking weird either way. I’m pretty sure Jefferson wasn’t begging for more tyrants to come along, just so we can water “liberty” with their blood — I’m sure he would’ve preferred fewer tyrants, not more. It was actually just liberty that he wanted, not blood to spill on it as it were. Needless to say (for others, though you may be too far gone), shit was not liberated in this situation.
This was, is, and always will be typical gun nut bullshit. This is exactly the reason why we can’t have a rational debate on gun control. I read all your arguments and there isn’t a single reasonable justification for such nonsense, just more of the same gun nut paranoia that is contributing to putting more of America’s youth into the ground.
I’m still puzzling over it, but this kind of sounds like you saying you’re more scared/paranoid/etc. than you used to be, and that’s supposed to be a reason why you’ll toss out data. Not a good reason.
Look, it had nothing to do with trust in the first place. You may think this is all supposed to be “obvious” or “common sense” or that your reasons for doing so are more justified now because of how you feel or perceive things to be. But you are not safer trying to “defend” yourself against somebody who sees you as a deadly threat and may kill you. One thing that should strike you immediately is that you are pointing a fucking gun at them, hence why they see you as such a threat and may very well respond in kind even though they wouldn’t have otherwise. So if you miss, or if they shoot first, or if Han shoots first and you’re Greedo, or if you shoot yourself in the fucking foot, or you shoot a random bystander while trying to hit the attacker, or you aren’t even involved in an attack but an accident that your or anyone else may be responsible for, or whatever the fucking case may be….. then in a very wide variety of circumstances which are sadly all too common and not generally under your control, you have probably made yourself or others near you less safe. Even if you had imagined that it would result in successfully defending yourself/others and this is why you now think it’s a good choice to be making, the chances of that happening are not in fact very good. The chances of shit blowing up in your face however are pretty good, unfortunately. Those are the types of things you have to weigh and compare here, not whether your subjective estimation of how much you trust others has gone up or done in recent years.
You can get rid of all of your trust, whatever may be left of it, and everything I just said remains. There is nothing about less trust that should render that evidence irrelevant, on account that it never did depend on your trust. These were not surveys about how much you trust others — if you wanted to toss out those, if they would’ve meant anything to you, then I can understand how you’d come to think attitudes have changed. But that is not what you’re doing. What I have in mind are crime statistics, among other things. Of course, it also isn’t just evidence about this country specifically, since (if you bother to look into it at all, rather than go with your gut) this kind of thing has been studied worldwide for a long time. Does any of this make it a little clearer for you?
People keep harping on the “mental illness!!!” part of this particular shooting, but many people who are killed or injuried with guns in the U.S. are not shot in mass shootings and many are shot by accident, or as a result of someone shooting at someone or something, missing and hitting someone else. David Waldman at dailykos used to have a post he would put up every couple of weeks called Gun Fail that was a collection of that week or months shooting deaths or injures gathered from local print and digital media, here are just a few:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/14/1658351/–The-new-National-Pastime-GunFAIL-CCXLIV
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/10/1649646/-Is-no-one-safe-Embarrassing-wave-of-accidents-befall-experts-GunFAIL-CCXL
Here’s an especially ironic one:
FAIRFAX, VA, 4/06/17: A National Rifle Association employee accidentally shot himself while doing firearms training at the organization’s headquarters, according to police. The 46-year-old man’s pistol accidentally discharged Thursday afternoon as he holstered the gun in Fairfax County, Virginia, police said. The accidental shooting happened at the NRA’s National Firearms Museum at 11250 Waples Mill Road in Fairfax. The employee suffered a minor wound to his lower body and was taken to a hospital for treatment, police said. Officers worked with the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and no charges are expected, according to police. News4 has reached out to the NRA for comment, but has not received an immediate response.
@razor
I’m saying that the data that shows being armed decreases safety isn’t irrelevant because it’s from a vastly different geopolitical situation. You are not safer disarming during a war. You are not going to drown in a desert.
second, by everything I have seen this attack *was* a politically motivated. It’s an act of right wing terrorism. As such I’m fairly certain Jefferson would be nonplussed by it.
Third, all you are doing is asserting that my line of reasoning results in a Hobbesian trap. That by arming for self-defense I am in fact placing myself in a situation that is worse off. I haven’t denied this at. I utterly agree that carrying weapons or having a civil society soaking in guns is stupid and dangerous along self-defense lines; My position is actually predicated on this being true. What I am saying is you don’t lay down arms when there is a quasi-fascist in the white house and when a nontrivial portion of the population would literally see me castrated, tortured and murdered. The USA is no longer a civil society. No peace is possible so by all means we must protect ourselves. I don’t trust my so-called neighbors to not kill me (they are most likely trumpkins.) It’s why I don’t talk to them, will no render them aid. It’s also why I lock my doors, as I am sure you do.
The center-left is on the horns of a dilemma here. Either Trump and Trumpianism forms an existential threat to minorities OR the body politic is strong enough that, for example, queer people don’t need to worry about Christian Reconstructionist getting powerful enough to stone us.
Fuck me. I used Hobbesian trap for a reason. Disarming and strict gun control is the most rational thing we as a group can do. But it’s not rational from an individual point of view. It’s totally a prisoner’s dilemma and we are stuck on a Nash Equilibrium.
To Tabby in #2 and others
I think it’s a mistake to view this as a “my way or the other way” issue. I have little doubt that the founders were not absolutist, nor idiotic. I believe almost all of them would be in favor of requiring training and a license in order to drive a car on public roads, and I also believe that most would be in favor of requiring training and a license in order to have a gun.
Remember that the founders created the second federal militia act of 1792, which more or less required every adult white male to go buy a gun, but it also required all adult white males to show up for mandatory military training once per year. People were “enrolled” in the militia, and had to report for militia training. The government had a list of all gun owners (which was more or less everyone). IMAO, it’s just a baby-step from that historical practice to a modern practice of requiring licensing of gun ownership and requiring significant training for the gun owner’s license.
There are also plenty of examples of limitations in the founder’s era for public safety on what may be carried in what circumstances and by whom, including laws on the safe storage of powder, and laws on brandishing and threats, and so forth. It’s easy to extrapolate that to laws that forbid possession of certain dangerous weapons while inside city limits, i.e. significant quantities of explosives.
Waiting periods for gun purchases also seems like a good idea. Etc.
However, the simple facts are that almost the entire founder’s generation felt very strongly that everyone should be equal before the law, including cops, and that no one should have special privileges concerning ownership, possession, carrying, and use of weapons, including cops, and most of the entire founder’s generation felt very strongly – rightly or wrongly – that a population that was well armed and well trained in war was vital to prevent tyranny, so much so that they passed an amendment, the federal second amendment, which makes this claim in the text more or less verbatim. I have little doubt that the position of most of the founders and their generation, if they knew about modern tech, would be that the second amendment should cover at least any weapon or item that is part of a typical kit of a soldier in the field, albeit with significant licensing and training requirements, and with and restrictions and bans on possession within city limits for a lot of the weapons.
Please see my google doc which contains a plethora of citations and arguments which everyone should know about this topic.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ak6bx8jyDxIlsLuFHHevw-4RQ7R5vJb15RtTNG5d79w/edit…
I think this is reasonable. This is a different hypothetical to the one posed above. The hypothetical posed above is “what if the founders knew about modern tech?”. This hypothetical is “what if the founders knew our history and could see the effectiveness of the second amendment?”. That might well have a different answer.
…
IMO, mostly false. The founders saw advancements being made, some of which were quite substantial, and IIRC at least one had a patent concerning a kind of firearm that had a faster rate of fire. The founders were well aware of the following historical guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_air_riflehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalthoff_repeaterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puckle_gunI think a better argument could be made that the founders didn’t have a proper understanding of modern high explosives, and the relative ease of obtaining high explosives does concern me. Fertilizer is basically high explosive, and it’s really hard to control fertilizer because every farm needs lots of it.
…
Maybe in other countries. I strongly suspect the United States police academies almost uniformly suck. I bet the psych evals are almost non-existent. Hell, many jurisdictions specifically deny applications from people who are too smart (according to IQ tests), and only take dumber people. I’m not making this shit up.
Some Americans are fucking weird. They think that endlessly pondering the intent of long-dead politicians is the appropriate response to mass slaughters of children. Over and over and over again. It’s sickening and infuriating.
To Rob
I’m just responding to what I see as misinformation, for the goal of preserving proper constitutional jurisprudence and rule of law, in order to protect my other civil liberties.
I agree with Rob Grigjanis…who cares what the founders would think about a mass shooting some 200 years after they (the founders) died. They’re dead after all and tend not to say or think much. In the end that argument/discussion usually seems to be about a plea for constitutional original-ism in an argument from antiquity kind of way.
We are here now so it’s ours to fix and pretending that some long gone person is going to solve this or any problem is the height of insanity.
*adds founder seance to Bingo card*
I believe that originalism is the only proper form of jurisprudence. I am using an extremely broad and expansive meaning of “originalism”, to distinguish from dishonest attempts to use and monopolize the label by “conservative” judges.
To explain myself, if the first amendment meant that the government could not fund a particular church and ban the practice of all other religions, then this is what the first amendment must mean until it is repealed or amended. This is what rule of law requires.
We should not and must not carve out an exception to rule of law for the second amendment just because we really don’t like it. The rule of law is more important.
In a certain sense, I don’t give a fuck what the founders thought. We should try to make society for the better, and while the founders were relatively smart and decent guys by the standards of their time, they suck by today’s standards, morally and intellectually. However, as to matters of proper jurisprudence of constitutional issues, their opinions, written statements, etc., become quite relevant.