The Second Amendment

[Little_Miss_1565]

and food stamps are actually food that little food fairies make in their easy bake ovens!

What drugs in particular are you on? I'd like to know because it sounds fun.

[Godxilla]

There is a man in Boston that went to jail a couple years ago. Apparently, this man had quite a criminal rep. Then one day, he decided, with a friend, that it would be a good idea to kill a boy. So they found one, and suffocated him with a gas-soaked rag. Then they stripped the body and had sex with it. Then they stuffed the body in a plastic box, filled the box with concrete, and chucked the box in the Charles River. This man doesn't deserve to die?

No, say the liberals. Rather, he is instead serving a prison sentence, and trying to legally change his name to some Wiccan babbling. And that's okay, say the courts.

But it's not okay. If people had the right to shoot killers and criminals, this pathetic joke of a man would be dead. And this is bad?

[Static_Martyr]

There is a man in Boston that went to jail a couple years ago. Apparently, this man had quite a criminal rep. Then one day, he decided, with a friend, that it would be a good idea to kill a boy. So they found one, and suffocated him with a gas-soaked rag. Then they stripped the body and had sex with it. Then they stuffed the body in a plastic box, filled the box with concrete, and chucked the box in the Charles River. This man doesn't deserve to die?

First off, whether or not this man "deserves to die" is irrelevant. You don't have the right to make that judgment and neither do I (that is, if you give any respect to what the Constitution says about fair trials and the justice system). And more importantly, it has nothing to do with the 2nd amendment (it actually has to do with the 6th Amendment, which guarantees a right to a fair and speedy trial). Even if we agreed that you had an unlimited 2nd amendment right to own any weapon ever made for any reason, that still wouldn't give you the right to kill someone in cold blood, because that violates the right of the accused to a fair trial. So if that's the reason you want a gun, so you can kill accused criminals in violation of their 6th amendment rights (as well as their right to life), then I hope you're ready to abandon your 2nd amendment constitutional right as well.

Second, I have a counterexample: one time, there was this woman who bought a bunch of guns. One of them was called the Bushmaster rifle. She bought them legally, and did not have a mental health record or history of violent crime, so she had no problem buying the guns. Her son Adam Lanza stole some of the guns, shot her to death with them, then shot a bunch of kids at a school nearby.

If guns were illegal, that mother would not have purchased those guns and Adam wouldn't have been able to use them to kill those kids. And you say gun control is bad?

Please note, I'm not actually using the above as a genuine argument for gun control. I'm just demonstrating how stupid and asinine it is to have this discussion in terms of anecdotal evidence. Gun advocates dig up some anecdotes of situations where guns supposedly could've saved someone's life, and that's supposed to override the evidence that gun control does drive down crime significantly when it's enacted properly, and that states and countries with "right-to-carry" laws don't actually correlate with decreases in gun violence:

The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime. The estimated effects are highly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in the model specification and control variables. No link between right-to-carry laws and changes in crime is apparent in the raw data, even in the initial sample; it is only once numerous covariates are included that the negative results in the early data emerge. While the trend models show a reduction in the crime growth rate following the adoption of right-to-carry laws, these trend reductions occur long after law adoption, casting serious doubt on the proposition that the trend models estimated in the literature reflect effects of the law change. Finally, some of the point estimates are imprecise. Thus, the committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.

---National Research Council, 2004

Research, wherever it is done, indicates that higher rates of gun availability are consistent with higher rates of gun fatality, both accidental and homicidal. And so any real discussion of "the gun problem" in America must necessarily consider these statistics. Anecdotes may sound cute and they may be short and sweet and easily C+Pable and recitable on internet forums, but they don't take the place of actual facts and statistics.

For example, my grandpa was a cop for years; he has several anecdotes about drivers who got into horrible accidents, but survived solely because they didn't put their seat belts on. These would largely be considered freak accidents, fairly uncommon, but using your logic, I could easily cite them as evidence that wearing a seatbelt is actually deadly, and you should never wear one.

No, say the liberals. Rather, he is instead serving a prison sentence, and trying to legally change his name to some Wiccan babbling. And that's okay, say the courts.

If by "the liberals" you mean "The Constitution," then I agree. The Constitution says that you have a right to a fair and speedy trial; the courts judge the degree of punishment for a crime, and we are legally and constitutionally bound to accept that judgment. If you violate that judgment, you are acting as a vigilante and you are violating that criminal's 6th Amendment right to a fair trial.

EDIT: Also, you'd be in violation of Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, which determines that "The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority...The trial of all crimes, except impeachment, shall be by jury..."

But it's not okay. If people had the right to shoot killers and criminals, this pathetic joke of a man would be dead. And this is bad?

I find it interesting that so many gun advocates also express such disdain for the court system; those types who would murder someone because of personal reasons are exactly the kind of people who should be deemed mentally unfit to own a gun, and yet they are the ones primarily lobbying for an individual gun right. How is it that the second amendment is non-negotiable and absolute, but the sixth amendment is negotiable if you don't like the guy? Which is it? Are you for constitutional absolutes, or do you think the Constitution gives people rights they shouldn't have and should thus be ignored? It wouldn't hurt to have some consistency here.

[MOTO13]

Actually, High Treason is "the most sacred law on the planet". Child rape and murder, well, a huge amount of cultures and societies have been quite okay with that. High Treason is that one penultimate crime that no matter where you are, or what time period you're in, or what type of regulating body you commit it against, they're going to make you to suffer as much as they can possibly make you suffer. If the most liberal and "criminal-friendly" government in the world thought they could get away with cutting out a traitor's heart and showing to the mob, they'd do it. No question. If you had to name one law or tenet that's fundamentally inherent and sacred to human beings, it's High Treason.

And about those guys who wrote that little constitution of yours....

I am speaking of a more personal tone directed at a previous comment. Don't muddy the friggin waters. China is another world altogether if that is where you meant. I don't equate being unfaithful/dis-loyal your government in any way to killing a child or murdering an innocent person in cold blood. Maybe you do...you're an idiot.

[Static_Martyr]

I am speaking of a more personal tone directed at a previous comment.

You're still wrong.

[Little_Miss_1565]

Hang on, so by all this logic here, every time someone threatened my life on these forums (which is illegal), I could have been within rights to track those people down and shoot them? Because they're criminals, so what rights do they have really.

Seriously, fuck everyone who espouses this line of thinking.

[MOTO13]

If we ever get invaded, we have a fucking military.

Only cowards use deadly force when your life isn't in danger.

1. Well, if we ever get invaded, 100,000,000 additional armed personnel couldn't hurt.

2. If you ever have your home broken into, make that decision quick, your further existence may depend on it. As for me, I want to give the criminal more problems than solutions. So the person actually stealing or invading a home is not the coward? The coward is the unsuspecting, completey innocent person defending his property that he was simply dumb enough to work their entire life to aquire just to have some pillar of the community steal it.

You know what stops crime? Immediate consequnce to the action.

[Godxilla]

1. Well, if we ever get invaded, 100,000,000 additional armed personnel couldn't hurt.

2. If you ever have your home broken into, make that decision quick, your further existence may depend on it. As for me, I want to give the criminal more problems than solutions. So the person actually stealing or invading a home is not the coward? The coward is the unsuspecting, completey innocent person defending his property that he was simply dumb enough to work their entire life to aquire just to have some pillar of the community steal it.

You know what stops crime? Immediate consequnce to the action.

Ya know what's funny? Nostradamus predicted an army of 200 million will fight the final battle on Earth. Us, plus militia? Russia plus Warsaw pacters? EU? Islamists? China? India? Really, these are all formidable enemies if they take up arms. The world is a dangerous place. Does owning an AR15 make you feel better? For me, I'd rather an M60 or M16A1, but for some, yes it does.

By the way, with all the talk about banning guns, there has been a huge uptick of gun sales. Epic backfire for the libs there.

[Static_Martyr]

Hang on, so by all this logic here, every time someone threatened my life on these forums (which is illegal), I could have been within rights to track those people down and shoot them? Because they're criminals, so what rights do they have really.

Seriously, fuck everyone who espouses this line of thinking.

^This.

Ya know what's funny? Nostradamus predicted an army of 200 million will fight the final battle on Earth.

Nostradamus? You mean the pharmacist from the 1500's who also predicted that the world would be taken over by an undead King in July 1999?

By the way, with all the talk about banning guns, there has been a huge uptick of gun sales. Epic backfire for the libs there.

I don't know which to attack first --- the idea that gun violence is only a problem for "libs," or that a short-term uptick of gun sales is evidence of a "backfire." The same thing happens any time something is taken off the market; people spam-purchased fucking twinkies when they heard the company was going under. Anyway, most bans have a grandfather clause allowing people who already purchased them before the ban to own them legally; those people won't be able to sell them legally after the ban is instated.

"But, but, but they can sell them illegally, so the ban is useless!"

Yeah, just like I can still murder someone illegally, so I guess laws against murder are useless, too. But then we're getting into a different argument about law enforcement.

Second, even the NRA demographic is showing record support for gun owners, and several formerly hardline pro-NRA Congressmen have come forth saying it's time to clamp down on our gun regulations.

You can only accuse this of being a "liberal conspiracy" for so long before you start sliding into a fringe that is disconnected from reality.

[MOTO13]

...By the way, with all the talk about banning guns, there has been a huge uptick of gun sales. Epic backfire for the libs there.

Not only increased gun sales, NRA membership has increased by over 100,000 since Sandy Hook.