Letter to the faithful on the Notification sent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Actually, gun ownership was very common in Iraq under Saddam. There is no empirical relationship between private gun ownership and non-tyrannical government. Run a regression analysis and you’ll see what I mean. Countries that have very strict firearm laws, like the UK, Israel, and Australia, have and maintain robust protection of civil liberties for their citizens, while countries like Honduras, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, where gun ownership is common, have human rights records that leave a lot to be desired.

The Anti-Federalists wanted the 2nd Amendment because they distrusted permanent militaries. They believed a permanent military would eventually be used for illegitimate purposes. In their minds, a citizen militia, under the control of the States, would prevent this. This was a minority position at the time, that wasn’t supported by the history of the Revolution itself, and the idea never took root. By the 1820s, militias had fallen into disuse in the few States that made any attempt to maintain them at all. Maintaining a permanent military became a practical necessity. The successor of the militia concept, per current law, and as the Supreme Court has recognized, is the National Guard. The 2nd Amendment doesn’t actually mention gun ownership: it says “keep and bear”, not “own and possess”, and refers explicitly to a public and civic, rather than private, use. The right to own a firearm for personal defense, hunting, or sporting purposes, on the other hand, was already enshrined in the English common law that the States maintained after the Revolution, and therefore falls under the unenumerated rights, along with privacy, the right to marry, etc., implicitly covered under the 9th and 10th Amendments, and protected by the 4th, 5th, and 14th, not the 2nd, Amendments. In all cases such ownership is to be “lawful”, i.e., in accordance with what the people’s representatives have in fact legislated. The idea that “the people” would tyrannize themselves would have struck the Founders and Framers as quite odd.

 

This is a liberal retcon that has no basis in actual fact.

Michael Bellesisles tried to make the same argument in his book "Arming America". It turned that his "research" was mostly made-up nonsense, and his Bancroft Prize* was ultimately revoked.

EDIT:
I don't want to derail the thread any more than it already has been. Here's a capsule summary of the Bellesisles scandal for those who don't know (and written by a liberal-leaning author to boot).

*One of those literary candy-mints liberal historians give each other for toeing the Party line.

 

The Bible says, Thou shalt not kill, so abortion is wrong.

Show me where the Bible says, Thou shalt ban weapons that can be misused, and I will agree to ban weapons.

When people have no good counter for the truth, they change the subject. That is what has happened in this thread in the last 24 hours.

 

Comments like that only reveal your own ignorance. Cite the relevant primary sources and prove me wrong.

 

I linked the relevant document in my edit. You have all the citation-goodness your heart could desire in there. The PDF linked in the SSRN page is actually a tour-de-force of the argment that led (in part) to the Heller Supreme Court decision, so it carries substantial legal precedential weight. Your assertion has been found to be faulty not just by me, but by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

EDIT: One interesting fact noted in Lindgren's article is that Colonal-era probate records show that colonials possessed more firearms than they did Bibles on average (not surprising, since books of any kind back then were expensive and hard to get). Also, homicide rates in the colonies were actually higher per capita than they are today.

 

All of my humor seems to go over your head. Okay, I'll explain. You said it's the choice of the woman but "especially not of some man." I said it's between the woman and her doctor (obviously a woman needs a doctor for the procedure). And a lot of doctors are men, so I'm teasing you about the "especially not of some man" part of your comment.

You could be right, maybe 'abortion as a preferred method of birth control' is not as prevalent as I'd thought in this country. A 2006 study in the US showed that 46% of women obtaining abortions used it in that way; about an equal portion did use other contraceptives which failed to protect (often used improperly), so abortion became their backup birth control method. I'd have guessed the percentage would be a lot higher than 46%, but it wasn't (at least 16 years ago).

 

I am not talking about Bellesisles’ book, or any other secondary source. Bellesisles’ work was so obviously partisan that I didn’t bother to read it when it was published, and it was rightly debunked and the awards he received for it were rescinded. That was around 20 years ago. I’m talking about primary sources: the Federalist Papers, the Antifederalist Papers, the Convention Debates, the private correspondence of the Framers, etc., sources right-wingers love to cite but don’t seem to have actually read or understood.

I explicitly said above that private firearm ownership is an individual right and was understood to be so at the time the Constitution was ratified. That right was enshrined in centuries-old English common law that the States retained after the Revolution in lieu of statute law. The Constitution neither created the right nor specifically enumerated it, simply because there was no need to do so at the time. The 2nd Amendment doesn’t have a thing to do with gun ownership, nor is it the reason the government cannot confiscate privately owned firearms at will (which they cannot do), nor does it contain an implicit right of insurrection, which the Constitution specifically empowers militia to suppress.

Both the mainstream Left’s and Right’s narratives on the subject are pure garbage, with no historical justification. The government could impose a far stricter regime than what currently prevails, without running afoul of any Constitutional provisions, but that also could not take the form of an outright confiscatory program or a total ban of private ownership. In the 19th century widespread ownership existed side-by-side with very strict local controls, especially in the Western US, without anyone perceiving this as a problem. There is no reason a similar regime could not exist today.

 

Well, you say that...but no politician or activist has managed to come up with a regime that actually does it. Clinton tried it with the so-called "assault weapons ban" in the 1990's, and it was overturned* for the simple reason that it infringes on 2nd Amendment protections. McDonald and Heller simply codified what had been precedent for many years in America (until the 1970's). Liberals keep trying to come up with definitions of "assault weapons" that include the AR15 but do not include such things as hunting rifles etc., but it's a fool's errand because in the end the only difference is "the AR15 looks scary". (Plus there is the fact that the vast majority of homicides in the US are committed with handguns and not rifles, and handguns are clearly protected under the 2nd Amendment after McDonald, so it's not clear what a prohibition on AR15-style firearms would even achieve.)

Also, I grew up in a Western Mountain state and I can tell you first hand that everybody has at least one gun. If you live in a rural area where there are snakes, coyotes, bears, cougars, feral dogs, javelinas (wild hogs) and any number of other critters, you carry a gun with you when you go out. When I was in high school, everybody had a gun rack in the back of his or her pickup, and we often went hunting after school. Until I was in my early teens, most of the meat on our table came from game, not from the grocery store.

In short: city people have no idea what most of America really looks like.

*EDIT: The law actually sunset and was never able to pass renewal, and probably never will be post-Macdonald.

 

Gun-related violence occurs all around the world, including (to a lesser extent) countries in which guns are illegal. However, out of the estimated 250,227 gun-related deaths worldwide in 2019, 65.9% occurred in just six countries: Brazil, the United States, Venezuela, Mexico, India, and Colombia. Gun deaths are considered an epidemic in the United States (which leads the world in civilian gun ownership) by many people, particularly those on the left side of the political spectrum.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country


Gun Ownership per 100 people
Brazil - 8.3 (ranking 97)
United States - 120.5 (ranking 1)
Venezuela - 18.5 (ranking 35)
Mexico - 12.9 (ranking 60)
India - 5.3 (ranking 120)
Colombia - 10.1 (ranking 81)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country

Perhaps it is also worth looking at this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate​

It does seem clear to me that there is more at play here than simply the gun ownership statistics. The Australian experience has been that the significant reduction in gun ownership has resulted in a significant reduction in firearms related deaths, which most Australians see as a good thing. Guns are not illegal in Australia, however Guns must be registered, licenced, and kept secure. There are many reasons you might have to own a gun, including work as a farmer, a security agent, or some other, and for recreation as a member of a hunting or sporting group. Given the lower incidence of gun ownership, most Australians do not see have a gun for personal protection as something they want or need. Semi-automatic assualt rifles are also more problematic for us here.

I note that semi-automatic rifles and pistols are the weapons of choice in mass shootings in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_...ed_States#Deadliest_mass_shootings_since_1949​

The firearms fatality rate in Australia in .88 persons per 100,000 people and we are trying to reduce this. In the United States that rate is 12.21 persons per 100,000 people, and we get the feeling that this is accepted as the price of freedom. A more useful discussion in the USA might be about what can be done to reduce the toll in a meaningful way, given that individual liberty does not include the liberty to curtail another's liberty absolutely.

 

These cases are exceptional and very RARE. In America it is so common place now that the media are loath to even cover every incident unless the numbers are great.
.

 

Okay, but has it resulted in a significant reduction in total deaths overall?

I hope our admins will split these firearm posts off from the existing thread and create a new one....

 

Not even Parliament can legislate away natural causes.

 

Over 1/3 of firearm-related deaths in the US are suicides, not homicides, at least the last time I checked. And they’re overwhelmingly men. In short, we have a major male mental health problem in this country that is going unaddressed. That’s one big part of the problem.

If we’re talking about homicides per 100K, the US isn’t even in the Top 10:

Countries with the Highest Rates of Violent Gun Death (Homicides) per 100k residents in 2019

1. El Salvador — 36.78
2. Venezuela — 33.27
3. Guatemala — 29.06
4. Colombia — 26.36
5. Brazil — 21.93
6. Bahamas — 21.52
7. Honduras — 20.15
8. U.S. Virgin Islands — 19.40
9. Puerto Rico — 18.14
10. Mexico — 16.41

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country

None of these countries/territories have gun ownerships rates anywhere close to the US. In fact, there’s no empirical relationship that I know of between ownership rates and homicide rates. In all the regression analyses I’ve seen, the correlation coefficient was so low as to be meaningless. That doesn’t mean our system isn’t in need of reform. It just means the nature of the reform has to be something much more specific than simply reducing the number of firearms overall.

My point in bringing up firearm policy, as I hope is obvious, is not to discuss the subject for its own sake, but rather to throw into sharp relief the hypocrisy of any position that would go so radically far as to negate the very rights of privacy and sovereignty over one’s own body, out of a belief that microscopic clumps of cells that just happen to have human DNA also possess a magical entity conferring immortality, and thus, in their minds, “personhood”, and yet not be willing to lift a finger to do something as small as raising the minimum age to buy long guns to 21, in order to prevent deaths of actual persons, especially our nation’s children.

 

Interesting. I'm going to look further into the demographics. How many of these men recently lost their jobs, were recently divorced and all but lost their kids, etc.? I'm not saying that women have it made in the shade, but life can be sink-or-swim for men. The requirement to "man up" hangs so heavily on some men that even the prospect of asking loved ones for help means they failed at life. That's not necessarily just their personal error in judgment; society plays a role in drilling that mentality into men.

Sorry if I went too far down the men's issues path, but I wanted make sure your point about men's mental health doesn't get blamed on toxic masculinity.

 

At that stage the gun lobby was the ruling lobby in Australia,” says Philip Alpers, associate professor at the University of Sydney. “What happened at Port Arthur is that they were outpaced, outflanked and outwitted by a man who had the power to move in 12 remarkable days.”

Do you actually bother to do any research at all before you post?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...lia-made-gun-control-happen-after-port-arthur

After Martin Bryant, our leaders passed gun control legislation and we haven't had a massacre like that since. The leaders who did this included the National Party, which is even to the right of your GOP party.

Tim Fischer was leader of the National party and Howard’s deputy prime minister in the Coalition government, charged with persuading sceptical country voters to support, or at least accept, reforms. “Port Arthur was our Sandy Hook,” he says. “Port Arthur we acted on. The USA is not prepared to act on their tragedies.”

 

John 11:26. Believest thou this?

 

In fairness to my American Brothers and Sisters, I think we should recognise that there is a difference in our cultural appetite for owning weapons. Part of this may go back to the foundations of our European Settlement. Australkian was settled by convicts and soldiers who were sent here. Basically nobody really wanted to be here. The great irony of Richard Johnson's first sermon in Australia 'How good Lord to be here', may well have meant how glad we are to be off the boat and on solid ground, or a more problematic view, based on the idea I know that none of us wnat to be here, but lets make the most of it. The USA was funded by religious groups seeking independence and freedom from persecution at home.

The Australian view of a free society is based on the notion of the freedom of that society to live together in peace, whereas the US view as I understand it is mare based of the notion of individual liberty. Australians were willingly encouraged to sell their arms back to the Government, and we did so in great numbers, because we wanted a free-er society, a society were we live with less fear.

The last and next President of the US addressing the NRA convention said, 'the best defence against a bad man with a gun, is a good man with a gun'. The Australian view is that we are all safer if we minimise the opportunity for the bad man to get a gun in the first place.

We are all appalled by gun violence, and the needless waste of human life, however the response seems to be more guns or less guns.

In reallity I don't see the place for semi-automatic assault rifles (even if they come in pink) in civillian hands. The NRA has been helping some of our extremists to lobby for laxer guns laws here. To date they have been reasonably unsuccessful. The mind of the average Australian voter is to prefer less violence to more need of defence. I do understand the differences between our two great nations, yet we grow weary of being apalled by the level of gun violence you experience, seemingly with no way out.

Someone was asked what the chance of the US outlawing guns was, and the reply was somewhere between zero and minus 10 percent.

 

?? The 'next' ?? If you mean the orange man who hates women and migrants and anyone who isn't rich and white and preferably famous, I pray to God that doesn't happen and that he is convicted of something soon.

 

If unborn children had guns and could defend themselves, there wouldn't be any abortions.

Now I see why the pro-abortion crowd has such a big problem with firearm possession! Just kidding.