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"Like most Americans I believe the second amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms."

Damn Obama trying to take away our guns!

"don't lump me in with Alex Jones"

HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHHA!

So if our government magically becomes tyrannical, they would obviously remove the 2nd amendment correct?

So if there is no second amendment and guns have been confiscated does this magically stop you from stealing/hiding/stockpiling guns and revolting anyway? Or do you just sit on your thumbs and accept the tyranny cursing "damnit! they revoked the 2nd amendment, we were so close to revolting too!"

And if our gov't becomes tyrannical in the right wing fanatic's fantasy world, how does your AR-15 plan on dealing with Apache helicopters? and F-22s? and laser guided munitions, and bunker busters...or SEAL teams?.

When has the lack of a 2nd amendment stopped anyone from revolting against an oppressive gov't?

If you're going to successfully revolt against a tyrannical 21st century America, you;re going to need at the very least"

1) popular support: in other words, if the guy you voted for doesn't win the election, that's not tyranny. Call me when we stop having elections, then you might have a stronger case for tyrannical govt. paying higher taxes isn't tyranny. Sorry.

2) military support: sorry, your cache of small arms, shotguns, and rifles (assault or otherwise) aren't going to cut it. you're going to need many military units to defect and oppose the government. And guess what, the commander of these units that defect will in all likelihood be leading said revolt, not the right wing pundits and chicken hawks (they'll be too busy cowering in the bomb shelters) and it won't be your "patriotic" militia wannabe survival nut.

3) lots of computer nerds and cyber warfare. Sorry son, the era of the jock is over. The world is digital now bitches. bits can be more powerful than bullets in today's world.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. the 2nd Amendment is largely symbolic and nothing more. It basically says that yes, the populace has the right to be armed (something both sides agree with, the degree of which is debatable but I'll get to that in a moment) and that *IF* the government gets tyrannical you aught to revolt

As for what kind of weapons should be allowed. If you acknowledge that its reasonable to keep nuclear arms, and military vehicles and planes and other heavy weapons and firearms out of civilian hands, then you acknowledge that the 2nd Amendments DOES have it's limits. When the founders wrote the 2nd amendment. Muskets were the pinnacle of weapons technology. Everyone was allowed to have them. So if you acknowledge that in TODAY'S world, that there are certain firearms that civvies shouldn't have, then you acknowledge that the founding fathers didn't think of everything and times do, in fact, change

A deep constitutional scholar such as yourself probably already knows this:

"For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “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.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”"

source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html

"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."

The 2nd amendment says nothing about the right of the individual to bear arms. It mentions gun ownership in the context of a well regulated militia, which was the precursor to the American military. The current prevailing anti-government definition of the 2nd amendment is a fiction that has more to do with the revisionist history of 1980s conservative think tanks than it does with the intention of the founders.

source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html

additional reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

@dystopianfutetoday
excellent question and is exactly where the discussion should be.

understand i am not against regulations i.e:background checks,licenses etc etc
i also think a gun safety course should be mandatory.responsible gun safety is just being a good citizen and neighbor.

have a mental illness with a record of violence? sorry.no guns for you.
convicted of a violent crime? no guns for you either.
but these regulations are already in place and responsible gun owners are..well...responsible.

so where is the argument REALLY centered?
unregulated .or more accurately put: weakly regulated gun shows and who benefits from these gun shows? gun manufacturers.
and where do they get their political clout? NRA.where those who are already blocked from gun purchase can skirt the system and the NRA can hide behind the second amendment.

that sound like a fairly accurate assesment?

now..onto your direct question on the downside of only the police and military being armed.
simply put: i do not trust authority or to be more precise,i do not trust power because power begets more power and seeks only to retain its own power which will always lead to you losing your power of self determination in the end.

america was never designed to have a standing army and their are articles that espouse the ending of the republic if we tried.here we are going on 60 years with a standing army.how is that working out for us?

bush had his illegal wars and surveillence and obama has his assasinations.

the police,which was born from the old town sheriffs were put in place to enforce this new and noble idea america had "all equal under law".a local citizenry trained to enforce the law and protect this "property ownership" another new and novel approach to society.

what do we have now?
defense money being spent on SWAT teams who now have high powered assault weapons and tanks...TANKS!..FFS.

do i really have to make a list?
waco
ruby ridge
the list is not short.

do you see where i am going with this?
i am not speaking about right and wrong.
i am pointing to the hypocrisy.
this is about elementary morality.
i totally agree with you that violence begets violence but if we are going to take away peoples right to own guns then we need to take them away from the police as well.

because just as some seriously damaged people have wrought death and suffering,so to has our very own government officials.
having the power of the government behind their actions does NOT make it more morally acceptable.

on a personal note i find the politicizing of the sandy hook school shooting so fucking despicable and grotesque that i literally shake with rage.this goes out to both sides of this political whoring.
the NRA can go fuck itself with a dirty razor-bladed dildo and the tree-hugging,pussified everybody-wants-to-bugger-my-lil-jonny scaredy cats can go fuck off as well.

i do not carry a gun nor am i interesting in owning one but i will fight for your right to own one.they are a weapon and as such should be monitored and regulated,but they should not be banned due to a giant fear storm and an over-abundance of "what if" pontificating.

who wants to live in a minority report world?not me.
most gun owners are responsible.
most police are good at what they do.
do not let the statistics arguments allow you to give up more of your rights.

but if we are going to protest i will be there with not a single weapon on me.

You need to fix your goalposts son. To start off, the burden of proof is on those that seek to prohibit something. You could never show, for instance, that anything "won't help" anything else. That's asking for proof of a negative. It belies your profound misunderstanding of statistics. We had a nationwide assault weapons ban. It's efficacy was unimpressive. It certainly did not provide any conclusive evidence that the ban was effective which is where the burden should lie for restrictions on liberty.

There are also these things called "priors." For example: "An extremely small proportion of homicides are conducted using assault weapons. Thus, the maximal impact of their ban would similarly be small." If you want to ban anything it should be handguns, but I don't view that as consistent with the second amendment at all. You would (or at least should) need a constitutional amendment to pull that off.

Finally, I view homicide in general as a relatively small problem in comparison to other matters of public health and safety. That is if I look at numbers, as opposed to guessing at probabilities while I'm crying a river over news broadcasts designed to make me feel unsafe.

Sometimes being educated means considering other points of view. I'm a liberal and I don't own (or wish to own, or even really enjoy) guns. You have a fucking gun in your avatar.

Respectfully, I think this reply illustrates our collective efforts to rationalize the gun culture in an attempt to relieve the cognitive dissonance we feel.
Guns are fun to shoot. They also are designed to kill.
"It's fun to play with the tools of death" is a hard thing for us to say out loud.
So, we layer on the excuses: "The second amendment", "shooting is a sport", "hunting is quality time with the family", "It is irresponsible not to be prepared to defend one's family."
With every pop at a target on the range, the truth smacks us in the face, and each time we bury it away below the sham we have built.

total straw man.
and her presentation is quite bland.
that being said:

assault rifles were banned in 1986 yet people can still get a hold of them if they really want.so how is more stringent gun control going to affect the sale and possession of assault rifles?

furthermore,how is putting stricter rules going to change anything with people who are already in compliance?

if the argument was directed at the NRA,which is just a powerful lobby for gun manufacturers hiding behind the second amendment,then i would be more prone to side with you folks...but the argument (appears to me anyways) is directed at the private citizen,who is already in compliance.

i hate to go all blankfist on you guys but that smacks of statism.

or is that a reality you all are comfortable with?
that the only people armed in this country would be police and military.

and i am not just referring to this thread but including almost every argument i have seen lately.
am i misunderstanding the argument?

I considered them Pro-intelligence first. I don't understand why people hold up the constitution as something we should follow to the later, it allowed for Slavery. The second amendment is selectively followed. Also what sanity? What about owning guns is more sane than not?

Contemporary commentary on the second amendment indicates that people at the time considered that it guaranteed an individual right to bear arms. Our Supreme Court ruled that that is the correct interpretation.

Ok, I'll start with a few things that most people would probably agree with, but the police force currently would fight like hell to avoid. How about we decide to actually punish cops who break existing rules and laws. Use testing to weed out unbalanced power hungry or corrupt types from becoming cops. QUIT hiring COMBAT veterans to become PEACE officers. I'm sure there are many things that could be done to fix the problem with the police, its just that it's not being done because the police think the only problem is that we, the lowly people, dont always follow ALL commands,and sometimes we need to be put in our place. >> ^shveddy:
False dichotomy, among other things. There are innumerable intermediate steps between "allowing them to do whatever they want to you" and "shooting the motherfuckers." I'll admit that there is a point where armed resistance is warranted, but if you think that we have arrived anywhere near that point with enough frequency to warrant armed resistance, then you are crazy.
Yes, there are plenty of instances of people's rights being violated - but in 99.99% of those occasions, I think the problem can best be solved through other means.
Do I think that the students who got peppersprayed at UC Davis had their rights violated?
Yes, I do. But this guy seems to suggest that the proper response is for the students to pull guns and start a shoot-out. Let's imagine what that would look like for a second:
One of the students peers through the caustic mist with righteous fury and a wet t-shirt over his mouth. He can feel the comforting weight of his Barretta, held close to his heart in a chest holster, and he knows that this is the moment to act. He stands up tall despite the onslaught of bright orange asphyxiation, reaches for his piece and takes aim. Somewhat startled, the officer is suddenly defenseless with his canister and it is not long before he crumples to the ground in an ever expanding pool of blood. He basks in a brief moment of clarity before chaos reigns. His fellow students are quick to bear arms themselves, but the training, body armor and poise of the officers allows them a significant head start and the students suffer heavy casualties in this initial volley.
Not to be deterred by the deaths of their friends, the occupy movement takes up refuge in the life sciences building which, designed in the late sixties with a brutalist aesthetic, is mostly concrete and as such is a perfect fortress from which to outlast the ensuing siege and inspire innumerable citizens on the outside world to take up arms as well. Guerrilla warfare is the only tactic effective in such asymmetrical circumstances, and after a few weeks of violence the powers that be succumb to international pressure and agree to negotiate with the 99%...
...or we could launch an official investigation, fire the guy as a scapegoat after an admittedly long, expensive and cumbersome process, and let the public outrage that ensued lead to a more cautious approach to future student protests. Bloggers and editorialists collectively write millions of words on the subject, increasing awareness and generally shaming the agency that allowed it to happen.
Not perfect, but a whole hell of a lot more civilized.
Any time you use guns against a government entity in he US, you will eventually be caught and put in jail. Period. The only way to avoid this is to be a small part of a large popular movement that eventually overthrows the US government, and I don't see that ever happening with citizen gun-owners unless it involves guerrilla tactics. Imagine gunfights erupting at your local municipal buildings. Imagine pipe bombs at your local police station. People need to realize that this is what they are advocating when they argue for second amendment rights as a fourth check and balance.
If you disagree with that statement, feel free to fill in a reasonable sequence of events to span the gap between "guy whose fourth amendment rights are violated guns down cop" and "said guy is vindicated, and massive changes are made to our law enforcement policies." I suspect that we are far more likely to see a greater militarization of the police in response.
I humbly propose that we join the civilized world and come up with more creative ways to correct our problems.

False dichotomy, among other things. There are innumerable intermediate steps between "allowing them to do whatever they want to you" and "shooting the motherfuckers." I'll admit that there is a point where armed resistance is warranted, but if you think that we have arrived anywhere near that point with enough frequency to warrant armed resistance, then you are crazy.

Yes, there are plenty of instances of people's rights being violated - but in 99.99% of those occasions, I think the problem can best be solved through other means.

Do I think that the students who got peppersprayed at UC Davis had their rights violated?

Yes, I do. But this guy seems to suggest that the proper response is for the students to pull guns and start a shoot-out. Let's imagine what that would look like for a second:

One of the students peers through the caustic mist with righteous fury and a wet t-shirt over his mouth. He can feel the comforting weight of his Barretta, held close to his heart in a chest holster, and he knows that this is the moment to act. He stands up tall despite the onslaught of bright orange asphyxiation, reaches for his piece and takes aim. Somewhat startled, the officer is suddenly defenseless with his canister and it is not long before he crumples to the ground in an ever expanding pool of blood. He basks in a brief moment of clarity before chaos reigns. His fellow students are quick to bear arms themselves, but the training, body armor and poise of the officers allows them a significant head start and the students suffer heavy casualties in this initial volley.

Not to be deterred by the deaths of their friends, the occupy movement takes up refuge in the life sciences building which, designed in the late sixties with a brutalist aesthetic, is mostly concrete and as such is a perfect fortress from which to outlast the ensuing siege and inspire innumerable citizens on the outside world to take up arms as well. Guerrilla warfare is the only tactic effective in such asymmetrical circumstances, and after a few weeks of violence the powers that be succumb to international pressure and agree to negotiate with the 99%...

...or we could launch an official investigation, fire the guy as a scapegoat after an admittedly long, expensive and cumbersome process, and let the public outrage that ensued lead to a more cautious approach to future student protests. Bloggers and editorialists collectively write millions of words on the subject, increasing awareness and generally shaming the agency that allowed it to happen.

Not perfect, but a whole hell of a lot more civilized.

Any time you use guns against a government entity in he US, you will eventually be caught and put in jail. Period. The only way to avoid this is to be a small part of a large popular movement that eventually overthrows the US government, and I don't see that ever happening with citizen gun-owners unless it involves guerrilla tactics. Imagine gunfights erupting at your local municipal buildings. Imagine pipe bombs at your local police station. People need to realize that this is what they are advocating when they argue for second amendment rights as a fourth check and balance.

If you disagree with that statement, feel free to fill in a reasonable sequence of events to span the gap between "guy whose fourth amendment rights are violated guns down cop" and "said guy is vindicated, and massive changes are made to our law enforcement policies." I suspect that we are far more likely to see a greater militarization of the police in response.

I humbly propose that we join the civilized world and come up with more creative ways to correct our problems.

Is this what the rest of the world thinks of the second amendment?

>> ^ChaosEngine:

I have the solution to the US's gun problems: ban guns.
BUT BUT BUT the 2nd amendment! Ah, but the second amendment say people are allowed to keep their arms. No-one is proposing mass amputations (as if the health system could manage it!).
Oh, that's not what "arms" means?
Fine, solution 2.0: still banning guns but everyone gets a sword.
Seriously, this is not as crazy as it sounds.
1. It's hard to use a sword well. People will have to train with it for years. This kind of training builds character and discipline.
2. Swords are awesome.
3. It's possible to defend yourself using a sword, but pretty hard to hold up a bank with one.
4. Gun fights are boring, sword fights are epic.


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