Second Amendment Discussion
 

See, you Americans are weird. As far as I know, in no other country is it legal for a private citizen to carry a gun; the only people allowed to be armed are certain police and the military. So how do you - non-Americans too - feel about the 2nd Amendment? Does it need to be tightened up? Is it fine as it is? Should I just raise my hands and back slowly away?

Ban all guns.

But start with the government. Start with the nukes. Work your way down to the cops’ pistols. Then start disarming civilians.

This from a man whose current response to most things is
http://www.kalashnikov-encyclopaedia...ted%20AK47.gif

What part of start with the government confused you?

In a way, I agree with Hawk. Though I'm not in favor of banning guns in general.

Gun control is gun centralizaiton. Need guns to enforce gun control. Need guns to enforce taxation. I'll give up my guns when the government gives up their guns.

To be more specific, I'm not opposed to more checks and balances - strong background checks, closing gun show loopholes, etc.

The ban all guns part.
So are you going to use guns to disarm the Feds, and then, what? Throw yours away? Melt them down into ploughshares? Violence don't defeat violence and two wrongs don't make a Republican senator on Capitol Hill.

Yes. If the government completely disarms I will too. I genuinely mean it when I say I want to ban all guns. There has to be a sane process though.

Right now we have a system that allows power hungry senile angry narcissistic lunatics (and that’s ANY president) access to the nuclear football. That’s insane. There’s a starting point and it’s not my revolver. My revolver is literally last. But unlike other gun control advocates I have a sincere position to eliminate ALL guns and all weaponry from the planet. I believe in banning ALL guns.

There were some lower court rulings dating back to the 1980s iirc, but the second amendment as a protection of individual gun rights was only just established by the supreme court in 2008.

You shoulda kept the original.

Background checks remind me of free speech caveats that ban advocating violence against the government or support for an enemy of the state. Free speech as long as you don’t threaten the dickweeds in control is almost meaningless. A background check is basically like do we think you would be inclined to use it. Selling guns only to people who don’t want to use them defeats the purpose or at least what I see as the purpose: Mao’s barrel of a gun thing.

Just like getting a drivers license, there should be some form of aptitude test as well as psychometrics. If you're not intelligent enough to pass the test, and/or you're deemed psychologically unfit you don't get a gun, and as Mindy said, annual renewal of your registration. I've really never given it any thought and I don't have all the variables in front of me, but that would be an improvement. It's always been just a bit insane as it stands with just background checks for felons.

I never thought I’d say this but thank god I live in Florida

Me too.

Okay, I suppose as an ignorant Irishman I couldn't comment without knowing what exactly the checks are? I mean, I assume there isn't a box for you to tick that says "I intend to use this in a mass shooting" or "I will kill my neighbour when I get home" or whatever. So what questions/checks are in place?

In Florida they ask your name, you show your ID, and come back three days later and buy whatever you can afford. The only ones they deny are felons. You can be crazier than a bag of angel dust. If you got a name and an ID and money you can buy enough guns to arm Uganda.

What have they got against cats having guns? Oh. OH! FELONS....

I know it's not possible but I voted to ban all guns.

Americans simply cannot be trusted to behave so it's the best option.

Yeah. If they don't play nice take away their toys. They can have them back when they learn there's a world outside of their borders. :D

Wuddya mean? We've been destabilizing everything outside of our borders for years, y'all are literally on the radar.

let's just do a magic potion to make people less violent while we're at it

You're playing in a purity politics contest while "other gun control advocates" are actually trying to get something done.

So you can have your purity. It means nothing. The fact of the matter is yes while obliviously we would be better off without citizens owning guns, that's not in the cards because of the constitution and the political realities of america. And while we might even be better off without any governments or militaries existing in a hypothetical paradise where humans can be trusted not to rape and pillage... We live in the real world where that is once again a non starter.

So in the meantime we have one issue which we could look at which is that the homicide rate in the US is much higher than other western countries because of the prevalence of guns and because of how easy it is to leak guns onto the black market through straw purchases.

A true way to do gun control in an effective manner is like mindy said, maintaining a proper registry/database of legal guns and making it harder for said legal guns to change hands without setting off a red flag. That could at least make it not as easy to get illegal guns with the serial numbers scratched of sold for the expressed purpose of committing gang murders that can't be traced through ballistic forensics.

But of course instead of that we will debate the hypothetical possibility that we need our guns to fight off a tyrannical govt and how said database is just the first step of the govt systematically disarming the populace so they can freely trample on our rights. So, in short, we deserve every shooting that happens because we **** our selves over with these pointless culture wars instead of trying to pragmatically solve a very real and obvious problem.

That's a hell of a well-thought-out and effectively presented post, jwb, and it does serve to illustrate the dichotomy of a country that professes itself the guardian of global democracy and yet is the only one (so far as I know; could be wrong but certainly one of the few) where people can happily roam the streets with guns (concealed or otherwise) and not be approached by the police for carrying what could be a potential murder weapon.

Change is hard tho

Do you live in a hypothetical world where governments don’t rape and pillage?

Maybe the internet reaches parallel universes and I didn’t realize.

It doesn't matter. They aren't going anywhere.

I guess you don't consider Switzerland a country? :rolleyes:
You Irish are weird you don't think about continental Europe. It's all about Ireland and the land of the leprechauns -- wherever they live.

Like I said, as far as I know. Which often isn't far. I'm happy to be set straight, but I don't make it a point of checking to see how many countries allow guns to be carried legally by civilians. If Switzerland allows that, well, I guess that's just how the Swiss roll, innit?

Times change so that guess you never know but I figure if Reagan taking a bullet didn’t do it, and Newtown didn’t do it - six year old gray matter splattered all over the classroom didn’t do it - it sure doesn’t seem likely. The human suffering that was endured by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was meticulously documented. But still, I think it’s true that crime kills way more people than war.

Final analysis: People just love things that can destroy people.

If people were cockroaches we’d be jacking off to giant spray cans of raid.

Nice to know they only have guns because they’re fascist.

Or is conscription not fascist?

automatic guns are also banned here. Unless you have a specific permit which very few people have.

But the real difference is Switzerland probably doesn't have the kind of gang violence we do. There are plenty of rural gun toting states where the murder rate also isn't an issue.

You’re an outlier that actually supports full nuclear disarmament. So everyone but you, I guess. I’d like to see them off the planet but I’m hard af for guns. If it happens I guess I’ll have to start jacking off to knives.

They won’t keep firing if you hold the trigger down but they’ll fire as fast as you can pull it and with a real light trigger that’s really really really ****ing fast

Just to be clear. The kids on the playground don’t stand a chance.

automatic literally means you can just hold the trigger down

but as far as mass shootings go.... just about any semi auto gun will do. you don't need an AR-15... a standard issue 9 mm glock pistol with a few spare clips is more than sufficient to murder a couple dozen unarmed civilians.

Good reason to carry, to prevent "rape and pillage." Plus one for the Second Amendment.

Also a good reason to carry and promote "rape and pillage"

Plus one for team satan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overvi...laws_by_nation

Basically, it looks like in most of the world it is allowed for private citizens to own a weapon, but only in the US and Yemen can you own a weapon without any license whatsoever. :laughing: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/c.../radosnice.gif

I think the difference is that people in Europe just don't have the same culture of owning weapons.

It's also a point of note that most, perhaps all, police forces other than the US have only a special armed unit who carry weapons. Your average Guard, Bobby or Gendarme does not. So with police not being armed as a matter of course, certainly that shifts the balance of power against them but it also means your average criminal knows he can probably get away doing a robbery etc without a gun. From their point of view, I guess, the more chance you have of being shot at, the more reason to bring a gun to the party. Like you say, the rest of us just don't have that gun culture. I don't hear of gun clubs in Ireland (though they may exist) and there are certainly no gun shows, or shops.