"The whole point of the second amendment... is so we can defend ourselves"

No, it's not. Have you even read your own constitution?

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"

There's nothing in there about self-defence. It's so that you can be drafted into a citizen militia to protect the state.

And every time I hear this argument, I thank my lucky stars that I don't live in a country where people are actually this paranoid.

Proof the Democrats want to abolish the Second Amendment. This has my Democrat friends that own a gun re-think who they are voting for this year. Especially one who voted Obama but brags about his SBR'd AR-15.

none of what you said makes any point showing why gun control shouldn't be discussed or implemented. and i specifically didn't say "a collection of gun laws/regulations". i said "a collection of laws/regulations/policies". there is a plethora of policies or lack thereof that are talked about often to deflect from the gun debate after [yet another] mass shooting but it's always lip service. the main deflection de jour is "mental health" but very little if anything is done about that. and the problem stems from way beyond guns and mental health. minimum wage laws, health care, education, income disparity/poverty, mental health care, gun laws, etc. all play big roles in an event like this. guns are obviously the first issue that needs to be looked at but because of the second amendment, there is never a real conversation about it. it's just shut down. all without even validating the justification for the second amendment to begin with. it's just presumed to be an axiom.

but even accepting that it is, move on to the next issue and it's the same thing: obstruction of any conversation or modernization. "oh we can't do that 'cause it costs money". well, all the data shows not doing it (investing in education, health care, poverty, etc) is many times more expensive than investing in it. across the board.

so now your whole country just sits there feeling bad for itself, wallowing in how fucked your social structures are, and passing the buck from one issue to the next until the news cycle forgets about one specific event effected by all these things and moves on to the next event effected by all these things but is aesthetically different and the whole process starts over again. meanwhile complaining about ineffective your political system is yet consistently voting in low numbers for the entrenched or the psychotic. certainly never for the thoughtful or nuanced. [i'm being hyperbolic here, but your politicians and voting record as a poplulation are fucking terrifying if not useless]



point being: watching this happen time and time and time again: the tragedy, the grief, the looking for answers, refusing to see the answers that are plain as day from the outside, pointing to the closest issue you aren't directly effected by, and finally forgetting the whole thing and/or accepting it as normal is really, truly sad and tragic.

Please take an American history class not taught by Glen Beck. Many Americans would certainly be called 'refugees' by today's definition, many being forced to immigrate by the crown, and many more escaping religious and cultural persecution. Those that came by pure choice were few and far between.

The second amendment is intended to ensure freedom against our own government, and to remove the expensive, often culture destroying requirement for an ever expanding standing army, and since the industrialization of warfare has made little to no sense.

Please don't pretend you speak for 'all your generation and older'. You don't...and I'm incredibly glad you don't, because what you describe is a nation of Trumps. Thank Science his followers only make up 1/4 +- of the quickly dying party, so likely <10% of the population...and that 10% is made up entirely from the 25% of us that are intellectually and emotionally retarded.

US gun deaths since 1968: 1.5 million
Deaths in *all* US wars: 1.4 million
Congratulations, the NRA is officially a bigger enemy of the US than the NAZIs.
This has nothing to do with 'rights' or 'self protection'. This is all about gun manufacturer profits.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/27/nicholas-kristof/more-americans-killed-guns-1968-all-wars-says-colu/

"In the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/battleground-america

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The flaw in this argument is that he is arguing from a non-existent present.

He argues that we can't curtail the second amendment until we reach cultural consensus, but depending on your interpretation, we either already have curtailed it, or never have.

There are basically two reasonable interpretations of the 2nd, either
A) it guarantees the rights as they were at the time: white landowning men can have muzzle-loaded un-rifled scatter guns.
or B) it guarantees weapon parity with foreign and domestic militaries: civilian nuke-ICBMs etc

Functionally nobody has a problem with A, and nobody endorses B. We are already on the continuum, it's pretty late to demand that we never get there. We are not having a debate of quality, only one of quantity.

Well, sure... everyone is trying to decide whether upholding the second amendment is worth the amount of gun violence we accept. For inputs to that risk-benefit analysis though, we are necessarily looking outside our borders... seeing how the balance works in other countries.

I'm not sure what he's trying to say here. Of course the guns issue is partly a cultural one... but there are a whole lot of statistics and pragmatics to look at too...

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Tags for this video have been changed from 'Gun, fails, second amendment, shooting, Gun Appreciation Day' to 'Gun, fails, second amendment, shooting, Gun Appreciation Day, damn thing went off' - edited by calvados

I don't trust anyone with the Second Amendment if they can't grasp the Third Law of Motion.

Go back to school.