Assault Weapons Ban

[bedstuy]

Yes.

But, I don't think it's the holy grail for gun control or anything.  Banning assault weapons isn't going to save many lives.  In terms of death toll, the most dangerous gun is a cheap, small handgun.  It's really not a panacea and the question of defining assault weapons is pretty tricky. 

That said, I hope we all agree that certain weapons shouldn't be available to members of the public.  If you could buy machine guns, pipe bombs, RPGs, grenades, etc., we'd be pointlessly raising the danger of any crazy spree killer or terrorist group.  Some people on the NRA will actually argue that point, they think if you ban Surface to Air missiles, only the bad guys will have surface to air missiles.  I frankly think that's insane.

So, when you go down the scale, from nuclear weapons, to sarin gas, to anthrax, to RPGs, to bombs, to machine guns, to semi-automatic rifles, you draw the line somewhere.  At some point you say, this is too dangerous as a killing device to make available to the public.  Am I sure that line is drawn at an AR-15 with flash suppressor?  No.  I'm not a gun expert or a law enforcement expert, and they should make the technical choices. 

But, I actually think that the people who want to have dangerous toys have the onus to prove why they need a dangerous toy.  That's what these are, dangerous toys for men.  There's no reason to put police lives in danger because you want a specific toy. 

[bedstuy]

Here's the thing though. Making something not available to the public in this area is an infringement on an amendment. Banning a dangerous type of vehicle I get, but this is a Constituional right. Besides, making them only available to government officers is a very dangerous, slippery slope of tyranny, which is a driving force of the Second Amendment. If we ban the, there will still be mass shootings because criminals wouldn't listen to the law. Ask Columbine.

Wrong!  That's just blatantly wrong.  The Supreme Court has always interpreted the 2nd Amendment to allow regulations on arms.  There's no debate on that point and history supports it.  The only thing you can't ban are the most popular types of weapons like rifles, shotguns and pistols.  And, just think about it, you're saying that any type of "arms" is allowed by an 18th century amendment.  Could the founding fathers actually have contemplated giving average people RPGs, napalm, chemical weapons, etc?  That's crazy. 

[bedstuy]

Banning ANY type of firearm is an infringement on the right to keep them. What is so hard about that?

That's not how anyone has ever interpreted the 2nd Amendment and it doesn't at all follow from the text.

[bedstuy]

Yes, I think that private possession of "assault weapons" should be banned, along with most other guns and ammunition. If the Second Amendment is a problem, then so much the worse for the Second Amendment. It's probably well past time for that to go, too.

Atlas incarnate here. You can't be serious.

Why not? The original purpose of being able to create a people's militia to resist tyranny is no longer valid.

Sure, if you ignore the entire history of the United States.

Yeah, think of all the violent paramilitary groups that have been helpful to progress in this country...

There have been none that I can think of.  Mostly armed groups of citizens lynched black people, massacred Native Americans, bombed government buildings, killed union protesters and eventually became irrelevant because individual violence is totally inimical to social progress. 

[bedstuy]

I can think of cases where the threat of armed uprising aliened the public and lead to a backlash.  The leftist anarchist movement didn't help itself by bombing Wall Street or the Los Angeles Times.  They set back the progressive movement. 

The same can be said for groups like the NOI and Black Panthers who accomplished nothing and were actively detrimental to their communities. 

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Americans have been killed by guns.  And, if you could buy a fully automatic AR-15 or a pipe bomb at Walmart, would that actually make things better for people in reality?  That's what I don't get.  You might have some "Red Dawn" "zombie apocalypse" fantasy about "fighting the government."  Why do people need to die in reality for the sake of fantasy? 

[bedstuy]

Hey!  The definition of these words is what I say it is and if you disagree, you're just arguing about semantics!!!

We are talking about the meaning of words when we're interpreting a law or a Constitution.  We can't just declare things mean what we would prefer, it has to be some meaning that comes from the text and facts and circumstances which inform how we interpret words.

This discussion is about the word "arms."  To quote an etymology website:

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Arms come from the Latin.  I think we can agree that Latin words cannot mean only "guns" and not "missile launchers" because they couldn't have had a word for "guns" because they hadn't been invented.   

[bedstuy]

The F'ing  2nd amendment constitution stops me from supporting it. If it was any other country, I would support it.

No, it doesn't.  Nobody thinks that. 

[bedstuy]

The F'ing  2nd amendment constitution stops me from supporting it. If it was any other country, I would support it.

No, it doesn't.  Nobody thinks that. 

It says you can regulate not ban.

No, it doesn't.  You certainly can't ban all private ownership of weapons or guns.  You can ban types of arms from private ownership, like machine guns, chemical weapons, tanks, pipe bombs, grenades, surface to air missiles.  There's no debate on that really.  Do you disagree?  I don't understand that argument.  That's like saying the United States has a ban on cars because we have restrictions on the emissions and CAFE standards which prevent certain models from being sold here.

The question is where do you draw the line, and according to the Supreme Court, the test is popularity.  If a type of gun is popular and common among the public, it's Constitutionally protected. 

[bedstuy]

No.

First of all it violates any normal reading of the Second Amendment, which like the Bill of Rights is an individual right.

Secondly, "assault weapons" are laughably defined and cause an extremely small proportion of gun-related deaths. The only reason why AWB is talked about is because they tend to kill middle-class white suburban kids in large batches that ends up garnering 24/7 coverage on CNN instead of killing one or two black kids in South Central LA or Detroit that ends up on page A30 of the local newspaper.

Why do people keep saying this?  It makes absolutely no sense. 

Just think about it this way, how could the 2nd Amendment distinguish between assault weapons and machine guns, if neither had been invented yet? 

In truth, nobody has read the 2nd Amendment in that extreme way until the NRA came around.  We've always allowed regulation of guns, because it's simply common-sense and is supported by the text of the 2nd Amendment, IE "well-regulated."  Even according to our super right wing Supreme Court, you can regulate guns as long as you don't ban the most popular kinds like handguns.

As for the second point, we have to draw the line somewhere.  It's not necessarily going to be a neat line according to textbook definitions of gun varieties, but it should be a balance.  So, assault weapons is just a catch-all name for a list of features and qualities that should be banned from common use in guns.  It's like if we had a term for "assault cars" that meant types of cars that aren't street legal.  I don't understand why gun nuts get their panties in a twist about this. 

[bedstuy]

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And yet we live in a country full of people who are obviously lacking in both, and where gun culture remains extremely popular. What would Freud say to that?

Who cares though?  Nobody takes Freud seriously in 2015.