Almalieque wrote:
We define what's "legal". That's how prostitute stings and philia stings work. We determine what actions are sufficient before being placed under arrest. Being placed in jail is the ultimate form of infringing on someone's rights, so the argument that we can't take away someone rights who appears to be threat is false. Also, "Without due process" means you get due process. It doesn't mean that you'll get it on your own terms. I'm almost positive that the arrests come before your time in court.
An arrest is temporary, coupled with a right to a "fair and speedy trial" for the specific purpose of limiting the time in which your freedom of movement is restricted. Removing someone's right to own a firearm is a permanent action. In order to be effective at "keeping guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists", you can't just remove that right for a little bit. You'd have to take it away for every day that person might want to buy a firearm. And that brings us to the question I'm asking:
What criteria do you think should be used here? Let's assume you want to expand the list of things that can make it illegal for someone to buy or possess a firearm. What are you proposing that expansion should be? Cause I'm just not seeing any way to do this that doesn't have significant problems in terms of 2nd amendment rights. This guy was under investigation (twice) but said investigations were dropped. So even if you proposed a temporary restriction (say while someone is under active investigation, which would require some kind of similar "fair and speedy" requirement as mentioned above), it would not have helped in this case.
As to others who suggest banning a class of weapons, that isn't going to work. It's really easy to say "let's ban all AR-15s and similar weapons", but what exactly is "similar"? We tried that before, and it had zero impact on gun violence. As mentioned earlier, only a very small percentage of firearm deaths are caused by those types of weapons anyway. And the math isn't such that we could reduce firearm deaths by 4% by banning those weapons. The perpetrators would just use different weapons. A pair of handguns would have been just as effective in this shooting as the weapon used. Possibly even moreso. As Lolgaxe has correctly pointed out, AR-15 type weapons aren't very good in close shooting situations, and don't have as much staying power as other weapons that could be used. Ironically, many of you are more or less arguing for banning of a less effective set of weapons, not out of a rational reason to ban them, but a kind of knee jerk ignorant fear of how the weapons look. Similarly, many yahoo shooter types gravitate to the same sort of weapon for the same reason (it looks scary, so it makes them seem more powerful when using it, even though they aren't). The Aurora Theater shooting is a great example of this. If the idiot had not gone for the scary looking 100 round drum, which promptly jammed, he might have killed many times more people than the 12 he did.
So maybe we should be encouraging nutters to use those kinds of weapons, while arming the rest of us with much more effective concealed handguns. Might be a much more effective method than trying to ban weapons, or restrict ownership.
