Summations Only

But a government that won't use the hydrogen bomb is indistinguishable from one that doesn't have one.

Says who? The vast majority of firearms owners train and practice with their firearms, recognizing that untrained use of a weapon is as much a danger to themselves as to other. I've had that training and I don't even own a gun.But rather than recognize that as responsible gun ownership, I suspect you view that practice as militaristic, further evidence that they're a "neighbor with an arsenal", some kind of "gun nut." It's a nice trick for having it both ways: when people don't get the training to use guns, that proves that guns are dangerous. When people do, that proves they're just the kind of soldier wanna-be's who are the most dangerous. Then I'd better make sure who they are and why they're there. And if I think it's my wife but it's actually a murderer, having the gun is going to make that mistake a lot less risky for me. I'll be sure to bring a pair of ketamine steaks.

Sure. But fighting a state to surrender isn't at all the same thing as pacifying a people. Our country was born that way.

But, yet, disarming did not make those nations safer:

quote:

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The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world...

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From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England’s inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England’s rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America’s, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July, England and Wales led the Western world’s crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.

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http://www.wmsa.net/pubs/reason/reason_nov02_crime_in_uk.htmThat's from 2002. The UK's gun ban had an almost immediate effect on gun homicides, it's true:But that effect was to increase the number of UK's citizens killed by firearms. On the other hand, in the US where the assault weapons ban has expired:The notion that the US is experiencing some kind of incredible murder rate just isn't true.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I think you're overestimating how much training we're talking about. Believe it or not, police and military officers in training aren't studying gunplay 24-7. It's not actually that hard to use a firearm and the principles of its safe operation are not complicated. My wife holds the rank of Captain in the US Army, and her firearm training was two days out of two and a half months.We're actually thinking of getting a gun, just so she can practice - she's got zero gun background, so qualifying has been an issue for her. She needs a lot more practice than the Army is able to afford her. Well, that's good.I'd rather promote norms of proper gun ownership, than have weapons be viewed as something that it is inherently illegitimate to own and therefore, like the UK, have their possession relegated only to criminals. Particularly since we can't have gun bans here due to the Second Amendment.You'll get no argument from me that owning a gun should come with a requirement that one be trained with it. I've already put forward a proposal for a magazine ban, which I believe doesn't infringe on Second Amendment rights. I think there's very reasonable gun control steps that could be, and need to be, taken. And I certainly find much fault with organizations like the NRA that do much to feed "gun-nut" paranoia and obstruct reasonable efforts to regulate gun ownership. I'm sorry if it feels like I've taken their side - that's unintentional, it's just nobody's staked out the NRA's position in these threads for me to argue with. I'm sure from where you are on the spectrum, it looks like I'm over on the NRA's side. But I'm not. As I said I don't even own a gun. Oni, there's no "training" for that. The training that police and military personnel get is how to shoot what you're aiming at, how to keep the gun clean, under what circumstances you can be armed etc. That's all the training my wife received that had to do with firearms. There's no point in the training where they say "ok, these are the guys you need to shoot; these are the guys who look like they need to be shot but shouldn't be." There's no training for that - you have to use your own inherent judgement. There's no training in the world that will tell you whether the unfamiliar shadow in your living room is your son or an armed robber - that's something you have to determine yourself in that situation.

So it's not just an armed citizenry you oppose, it's an armed police and an armed military.Except Marines. Those guys can have guns, but only while they're at work, I guess.I don't understand how that's supposed to work, Oni. There aren't enough Marines to go around to keep civil order. If a guy breaks into my house to rob and maybe kill me, and my only option is to wait for the Marines to show up (how do they even know to come?) in what possible sense am I "in control"? Even if I called the police, what use would that be except to put more unarmed people into harm's way? But Marines kill innocent people all the time. There goes your "training", I guess. Who cares? My rights under the Second Amendment aren't subject to your "trust". I appreciate that you have a radically different vision for our society, but as I said, the Second Amendment is a pretty serious obstacle to you being able to disarm the civilian population.

It's a common misconception, I guess, that the military fights wars by spraying a million bullets all over the place with no regard for accuracy. This is the misconception that causes you to think that "according to your reasoning everyone citizen in the country should be able to strap on an uzi or carry around an M-16". Well, I guess you should write a letter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and tell them that they're fighting wars all wrong, and that we should be sending our boys and girls shotguns and hacksaws instead of M4's (which, incidentally, has replaced the M16 nearly universally in the Army, and has no fully-automatic firing mode.) That's inaccurate, and again, the Second Amendment isn't a protection of your right to hunt or shoot trap, it's a protection of your right to pose a credible threat to an invading military or a despotic government. Or as Ice-T puts it:

What about places that don't have SWAT, Oni? You know - most of the country? You seem to have this notion, maybe from movies or something, that SWAT is always waiting in the wings to deal with the really hairy situations. But what about the towns and even cities that don't have SWAT? Do you think Aurora, CO has its own SWAT team? Don't you think those guys have to come in from Denver? How does that help me when I'm frantically calling 911 because there's a potentially armed intruder in my home? No, Oni. I'm just someone who can think things through. You don't seem to be.

Because there's a public safety interest in doing so, and merely differentiating between different types of weapons does not infringe the Second Amendment. Why would it? I never said that it wasn't. In all honesty, DA, I don't see why you even bothered to post. What do you think you actually contradicted me about?

That's fair, and I have the same concern - I'm not reflexively "pro-gun", I'm pro-"constitutional rights" - but the role of our government is not to determine what type of arms we need; it's to determine what the minimum level of regulation of arms is necessary to serve the public interest without infringing constitutional rights.If the government put itself in the position of saying "well, how many printing presses does the American public actually need? How many newspapers, max, do there even need to be? How many reporters should they be allowed to have?" I think everybody would recognize the terrible precedent of allowing the government to circumscribe the maximum permissible rights of the people, instead of the way it's supposed to work, where the people circumscribe the maximum permissible encroachment of the government on universal rights. Everybody would understand that even if the government wasn't controlling the content of those presses, simply the act of construing the freedom of the press as something that the government gets to draw a limit around is an incredibly dangerous infringement on our First Amendment rights.The Second Amendment is no less important than the first. Thanks for serving in the Navy, DA, but have a little faith that we, the American people, can handle the rights and freedoms that you defended for us. Why should I be concerned if someone is carrying a concealed submachine gun in a movie theater if they have no intent to use it? If they intend to use it there, that's already against the law. How is the public safety served by restricting the rights of gun owners who won't ever commit mass murder with their firearms?

Frankly, I don't see that the continuum of guns ranges all that much in danger or deadliness. Even the meager .22 LR is a widely-known go-to caliber for Mafia hitmen (they say) since the round, if it penetrates the skull, typically bounces around within the cranium instead of exiting, resulting in a nearly-certain fatal injury.There's not any sort of gun that it's "safe" to be shot with, with the possible exception of:But aside from the triple-candy gun, I just don't see an obvious disparity where we say this gun is fine for widespread ownership, but this other gun is out of bounds. If you can own a gun, if you've met the requirements for legal gun ownership, then I can't see that it matters which guns or what kind of guns you can own. The potential to kill of all firearms is comparable - if a gun (loaded or not) is pointed at any part of someone's body, you should always assume that the likely outcome of firing that gun is a death. (That's why responsible gun owners don't point guns at things they don't intend to kill.)Now, that said, I'm totally down with magazine restrictions. I don't see that an AR-15 loaded with only seven rounds at a time is more dangerous than any other weapon loaded with only seven rounds at a time. I can't see a personal defense, hunting, or target-shooting scenario where you need to fire more than seven rounds, unless it's your profession to be in protracted gun shootouts. I'm completely down with mandatory ballistics fingerprints and firing-pin microengraving, even though those haven't actually demonstrated any usefulness in solving gun crimes. In my ideal world, the government would have a record of every single instance where a round was fired from your weapon, where it was fired, and where that round ended up. Sawed-offs is what I was talking about, and that was just my cheeky way of saying that the US Armed Forces doesn't seem to have much use for cut-down Remingtons or whatever. That was the finding of the Supreme Court in US vs. Miller, and I think it upholds my interpretation of the Second Amendment - that it's about private citizens being able to muster into an orderly, effective militia if need be. I hear you. Of course, the SEAL's get a lot of press, don't they? SEAL Team 6, Bin Laden, those Somalian pirates a year back? That was a hell of a coordinated shot, wasn't it? Three pirates at, like, 400 yards or something, from the deck of one pitching ship into another? Damnedest shooting I ever heard about.

No, of course not, but having specified that the weapon is being carried by someone who doesn't intend to fire it, I don't see how the right to life of anyone else in the theater is being infringed. And if someone does intend to kill a theater full of people then the means by which he's chosen to do that is largely immaterial.I think what a lot of people want to do is chase down a rabbit hole where we equate capability with intent, but I think that's a mistake, and that's what leads us to the absurdity that even a completely naked human being has the capability to kill, by the use of nothing more than one's hands or feet, and therefore if capability is the same as intent, all human beings have the intent to kill at all times.

I didn't mean you, specifically. Sorry, I guess I could have been more clear. Is there? Stipulate that both weapons are loaded to the same capacity - you need at least one round per person you wish to harm - and I don't see that either weapon is much more dangerous than the other. Jared Lee Loughner killed six in Arizona with nothing but a Glock handgun - loaded with 33 rounds. They took him down as he reloaded, so forcing mass murderers to reload more often seems like a winning legal strategy. And I don't think the Second Amendment protects high-capacity magazines, as I've said.I don't see how seven rounds in a submachine gun is inherently more dangerous than seven rounds in a handgun. A "hundred rounds per minute" is a rate, not a capacity, and if your weapon holds only seven rounds by law, it's an entirely theoretical one.All of this is, again, mostly to agree with you.

Loaded with 33 rounds? I don't see how he would have posed any more of a danger than with the Glock 19. I don't see how even the most powerful automatic weapon would have allowed him to shoot 50 people with 33 rounds. I don't follow your math on that. Shootings of this type, when they're stopped by intervention, usually stop when the shooter is vulnerable due to reloading, not mid-barrage. So the theoretical rate of fire of the weapon doesn't seem relevant. It's the length of the sustained barrage that seems to matter, and reducing rounds carried per magazine is a way to make sure those barrages are of a very minimum length. Since it takes at least one round per person hurt, clearly "actual round capacity of the gun" is synonymous with the capacity to hurt more people.

People, I guess, can amend the Constitution as they see fit, but until then the Second Amendment and its textual justification are the highest law of the land. There's no way to construe the Second Amendment as an amendment about owning guns for hunting and target shooting. The scope and purpose of the Amendment is completely explicit - "a well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state." "Well-regulated" means "orderly", as in "organized and effective."I don't see how the Civil War changed that, since it was the side defending the US constitution and its amendments that won.