Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

Assault rifles are already illegal to own. But you knew that. Remember when we had a discussion about this and you insisted that no one misused the term in order to make their argument appear stronger than it is?

Want to try again?



Sure. And a shotgun would be a great weapon for a mass shooting in a club too. You get that if you were somehow to ban and seize every single semi-automatic rifle in the country (which you wont be able to do), a nutter with a desire to kill a bunch of unarmed folks in a club will almost certainly gravitate to a combination of shotgun and handgun, right?



I'm not arguing any such thing. I am arguing that attempting to ban a vaguely defined class of firearms based almost entirely on how scary they look is a pretty dumb thing to do.




And again, I assume you meant to use a different term than "assault rifle"?



Sure. If we're talking about a handful of nutters holed up in a compound. You get that that's not what the founders were thinking about though, right? They were thinking about a government that had become so oppressive and so hated that a large percentage of the entire civilian population desired to overthrow it. Like had just happened when they wrote the 2nd amendment. And in that situation, any number of any kind of firearm is sufficient for successful overthrow of said government. When the active duty military is outnumbered 100 to 1 by angry civilians who don't like their government, and when presumably a large number of those military are also among those not happy with their government, and there may even be whole commands willing to turn their flags to support a revolution against said oppressive government, all it takes is a small number of lightly armed people to start it going.

What exactly do you envision our modern military doing in that situation? Carpet bombing neighborhoods? Going house to house searching for revolutionaries, while being sniped at from rooftops and blown up by IEDs? How's the morale for your troops going to be after a few weeks of that? A few months? Small arms are more than sufficient. But you have to have them first. Without them, the government can gradually just go around and disappear people until everyone else falls in line. Angry people without guns can do nothing more than protest and complain and be arrested and detained. But when roughly a third of all households in the US have guns, they can force the government to tip its hand militarily, and that's usually the point where the floodgates open up historically. And that rarely ends well for the government.

What's the point of all this? Call it an insurance policy. We'd like to think that our government would never become that oppressive. And maybe it never will. But maybe it never will *because* of this insurance policy in place. Because somewhere, in the back of any potential tyrants mind will be the knowledge that he can't go "too far", or risk just such a rebellion. All policy actions in the US have to be weighed against this potential. It's what prevents the president from just declaring martial law because he feels like it, dissolving the Senate, and destroying Alderaan with his military might.

Ok. May have mixed in something else there, but you get the point. Our system involves a set of checks and balances. But those checks only work if there's some force enforcing them. If the president is also commander in chief, and we assume (as you seem to do), that the military will simply blindly follow his orders no matter what, then there is no real check against him just declaring himself dictator for life. Congress can pass all the resolutions and laws they want, but the president is the head of the branch that executes those laws. How exactly are they going to get him to arrest himself? And anyone you'd ask to do the job works for him, not congress. The courts have no power except to the degree the other two branches agree to follow their rulings.

The only real check against that is an armed civilian population. Because while popularity polls are important as long as the rules are being followed by all parties, they're meaningless metrics if the guy in charge doesn't care if the people hate him. He will care if they hate him and are armed though. Which will, hopefully, ensure that our nation never comes even remotely close to that kind of situation.

Remember that the 2nd amendment does not say that the right to keep and bear arms exists only for those serving in a militia. It says that a well regulated militia is "necessary to the security of a free state". But before you can have a militia, you must have civilians with weapons who can form that militia. It exists precisely so that on the off chance that civilian fighters are required to secure "a free state" (as opposed to an oppressive one), they will have the resources needed to be able to come together and fight. On their own. Without official government sanction. Just as they had done themselves.





Edited, Jun 22nd 2016 9:06pm by gbaji

I remember correcting you on what is and isn't an assault rifle and you not only ended up agreeing that you were the one misusing the term but also spent like five posts afterwards repeating what I was saying to try to cover how badly you messed up. You mean that time? Yeah, I remember. Why?

That's another one: "It's NOT AN ASSAULT RIFLE!! It's not deadly or excessive because it's technically called something else which makes me right about everything!"

Yeah, it's funny how these arguments go:
"But cars kill people, too!" -- Cars are constantly being given new safety features and increased regulation to prevent this
"But fast food kills people!" -- There's a constant push for healthier options and increased transparency regulations (such as mandatory nutritional info labeling)
"But once someone used a fertilizer bomb!" -- Said fertilizer was then heavily regulated almost to the point of being impractical for agricultural use
"The 9/11 hijackers didn't need guns!" -- Which led to a billion regulations about what you can bring onto a plane

It's as though everything else that "kills people" goes under regulations to prevent people from being killed by it. With one notable exception.

Yeah, it's too bad that guns are basically given away on street corners.

Yeah. That's great. But what are you advocating we do in terms of gun control measures that would have prevented this guy from being able to kill those people in that club? I'm well aware that in the case of restricting someone's rights when arresting them, you have due process involved. I'm the one who said it. What I'm less clear on is how this applies to restricting someone's 2nd amendment rights. That's what I'm asking you to explain. It's not exactly the same. It's not even a little bit the same. So please elaborate on what exactly you are proposing.

But doing nothing and being quiet for seven seconds is.

-Make background check requirements the same for commercial gun sellers, and resellers.
-restrict gun purchases from people who are on a terror watchlist (and create a legal procedure to contest false positives)
-create tax incentives for guns with safety features
-restrict concealed and open carrying of guns in population dense areas.
-require safe gun handling training as part of gun liscensing.

There you go, Who?2018!

The sheer iron knee.

Well you got my vote at least; at minimum it's better than the proposals that make the rounds in the political spheres.

If it's just the voters doing that, sure. The problem is that your representatives are doing the same thing. "No fly, no guns" isn't a proposed legislation. It's a slogan. It's also, pardon the pun, not going to fly because the process of putting someone on a no fly list is not remotely "due" enough to pass constitutional muster. So there's only two possible results:

1. The law is laughed out of every courtroom it's challenged in.

2. The requirements to be placed on the no-fly list are tightened to meet the constitutional due process requirements of the 2nd amendment, which will make it no longer effective for it's primary purpose of preventing suspected terrorists from boarding passenger airliners.


At some level, a representative system does actually require representatives who act like adults and not children. We're not seeing that right now. We're seeing representatives acting like angry voters demanding "someone do something!". Which is kinda bizarre.

Edited, Jun 23rd 2016 1:05pm by gbaji

They're too busy believing that if you just be quiet hard enough it'll create a forcefield to protect people.

But at least we're both in agreement that the conservatives the NRA bought need to go.

Edited, Jun 23rd 2016 4:06pm by lolgaxe