13 Dead, 20 Wounded...

[Cow Poke]

And in seriousness your statement concerning the "quite modern interpretation of the 2nd Amendment" is absolute garbage...

Yeah, I meant to address that, but...

[rogue06]

Changing or removing one amendment out of ten is not "ripping up the bill of rights".

You used to be better than this rogue.

What makes you think for a moment that it would stop at one once we started?

[Cow Poke]

What makes you think for a moment that it would stop at one once we started?

They're already ignoring the "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" clause of the 1st amendment regarding religious liberty.

[rogue06]

I think you're underestimating the degree to which Americans believe it is a fundamental right to own guns. I believe there would, indeed, be a black market.

All we have to do is look at the prison system as an example. Despite expecting frequent random searches of both their persons and possessions both drugs and weapons are rampant. And not just knives but firearms as well.

[Cow Poke]

All we have to do is look at the prison system as an example. Despite expecting frequent random searches of both their persons and possessions both drugs and weapons are rampant. And not just knives but firearms as well.

The "Walls Unit" in Huntsville, Texas has a prison museum, part of which is a large collection of various shivs, knives, zip guns, actual guns, etc that were confiscated from prisoners, including those on death row.

[Cow Poke]

...The goal is to showcase how irrational and even depraved their reasoning can be. The hearts and minds gun control advocates need to win are not those of the staunch gun-freedom-at-any-cost crowd....

How big do you think that "crowd" is, Sam?

[rogue06]

I think it would really help if the liberals didn't just knee jerk to their "go to" gun control issue, and honestly tried to work the whole problem. It's like the climate change scaremongering - they really screw up getting the message across, partly because they have a huge trust issue.

What does have a proven track record are laws aimed at the criminal misuse of firearms. States that adopted such measures experienced sharp reductions in the rates of violent crime. For instance, in the 15 years after adopting a mandatory penalty for using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime, New Hampshire, Virginia and South Carolina all experienced sharp drops (the homicide rate fell 50%, 23% and 24% respectively). Similar impressive declines were recorded in other states that employed mandatory penalties, such as Delaware (homicide rate dropped 33% over 19 years), Florida (homicide rate dropped 33% over 17 years) and Montana (homicide rate dropped 42% over 16 years) and New Hampshire.

But some around here have expressed disdain for such results. They don't care about what works they just want to ban guns -- even though the evidence has clearly shown that banning firearms has not worked here in the U.S. as seen in the jurisdictions that have done so (Chicago and Washington D.C. being just two examples).

[Roy]

What makes you think for a moment that it would stop at one once we started?

Historical precedent.

You've sidestepped the issue though - Sam isn't calling for changes to any other amendment, and there is no reason to think further changes would occur. You're building a strawman argument on an unwarranted assumption.

[rogue06]

If the modern interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (and we are talking about a very modern interpretation)...

Time to terminally rebut this "very modern interpretation" codswallop again I see.

Another example of ignorance based historical revisionism that is in the words of the famous theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch! ("That is not only not right, it is not even wrong"). Or as put in what is sometimes called "Asimov's axiom": "Not even wrong."

In his 400-page The Bill of Rights: Creation & ReconstructionwasCommentaries became nearly universally regarded as being the leading American authority on both Blackstone and American law.

Tucker addressed the Second Amendment at several points, clearly stating that it protected the individual, natural right of self-defense. After quoting the amendment he wrote:
View of the Constitution of the United States of AmericaCommentaries on the Constitution of the United States by Supreme Court Justice and law professor Joseph Story, as well as in his later Familiar Exposition of the Constitutionnot of States or members of a militia -- Story left no doubt that he meant the right to belong to individuals. He unequivocally stated that "the right of the citizens to keep, and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic."

Story was even more direct in his [i]Familiar Exposition[/u]purchased by state or local legislatures, or supplied by the King^[1]1.

The concept of an individual right to own and bear firearms is anything but a modern idea. Those on the left are seeking to rewrite history.

Most of the Founding Fathers were none too found of slavery but didn't resist permitting it since they thought it was more important to unite the country first and deal with slavery in the future. They sure didn't say that owning slaves was a right and placed it in the Bill of Rights. Many worked very hard at banning slavery in their states and to keep it from spreading into the new Midwestern states and territories. Trying to compare slavery and the Second Amendment falls flat on its face after even the most cursory of examinations.

[Roy]

They're already ignoring the "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" clause of the 1st amendment regarding religious liberty.

There's that "they" again. To whom does it refer this time?

[rogue06]

Historical precedent.

You've sidestepped the issue though - Sam isn't calling for changes to any other amendment, and there is no reason to think further changes would occur. You're building a strawman argument on an unwarranted assumption.

I'm not saying that Sam would be the one. There have always been various groups both on the left and right that have found various rights "inconvenient" for how they want to run things and once you start declaring one part of the Constitution to be "an entirely anachronistic element, unnecessary and counterproductive to modern advanced democracies" then there really is nothing to stop them from demanding the same and having a good chance of getting it since the precedent will be established.

As Benjamin Franklin once famously stated, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

[rogue06]

And yet the evidence repeatedly shows that mass shootings are not a new phenomena or suddenly increasing

As I noted earlier

And mass shootings have not really increased in spite of the image that Obama tried to portray after the Oregon shooting or even worse after Sandy Hook when Bill Clinton blatantly lied when he proclaimed that "Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005. Half of all of them in the history of the country."

[ATTACH=CONFIG]10280[/ATTACH]

Over half since 2005?

Grant Duwe, the Director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Dept. of Corrections wrote a book called Mass Murder in the United States A History back in 2007 where he documented 954 mass shootings during the first half of the 20th century when the population was a fraction of what it is today and 94 in the second half. During the 1990s -- when Clinton was president -- there were 42. From 2000 to 2013 there were 42.

954 in the first half of the 20th Century and 136 since then.

Also, as previously noted, James Alan Fox, Lipman Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University wrote a column for USA Today called Umpqua shooting - a tragedy, not a trend noting that

countless news outlets flooding the airwaves and the Internet with questionable statistics on the incidence of mass shootings along with sidebar listings of the deadliest shooting sprees in U.S. history. In the usual rush to offer up some breaking information, news reports were embellished with unconfirmed details about the massacre and the assailant that did little but fuel a contagion of fear.

Fox ends with the following observations



We have a news media fanning the flames and unscrupulous politicians seeking to exploit these events to push their own agendas.

[Sam]

Time to terminally rebut this "very modern interpretation" codswallop again I see.
The concept of an individual right to own and bear firearms is anything but a modern idea. Those on the left are seeking to rewrite history.

Most of the Founding Fathers were none too found of slavery but didn't resist permitting it since they thought it was more important to unite the country first and deal with slavery in the future. They sure didn't say that owning slaves was a right and placed it in the Bill of Rights. Many worked very hard at banning slavery in their states and to keep it from spreading into the new Midwestern states and territories. Trying to compare slavery and the Second Amendment falls flat on its face after even the most cursory of examinations.

The concept of an individual's right to own firearms is indeed very old. The individual's right to carry firearms around in public, however, was not considered a fundamental right until quite recently:



Now stricter carry laws aren't going to stem the tide of gun violence. But there's no question that the interpretation of DC vs Heller set entirely new precedent with regards to the limits of gun ownership itself. Whether one wants to argue the more general case of "the right to bear arms", which includes everything from private ownership to insurgent militias, is another matter.

[Sam]

And yet the evidence repeatedly shows that mass shootings are not a new phenomena or suddenly increasing

As I noted earlier

954 in the first half of the 20th Century and 136 since then.

Also, as previously noted, James Alan Fox, Lipman Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University wrote a column for USA Today called Umpqua shooting - a tragedy, not a trend noting that

countless news outlets flooding the airwaves and the Internet with questionable statistics on the incidence of mass shootings along with sidebar listings of the deadliest shooting sprees in U.S. history. In the usual rush to offer up some breaking information, news reports were embellished with unconfirmed details about the massacre and the assailant that did little but fuel a contagion of fear.

Fox ends with the following observations



We have a news media fanning the flames and unscrupulous politicians seeking to exploit these events to push their own agendas.

When people discuss mass shootings, they're usually talking about perpetrators like Mercer, Roof, Rogers, etc. Fox is lumping in gang violence and armed robbery:



Now one can argue that we should be including gang violence and armed robbery in mass shooting statistics but I'd argue that's pretty clearly a case of needed disambiguation, especially when we're talking about incidents that are taking place outside of normal criminal elements. A reduction in gang violence is necessary but it's not going to affect the kinds of mass shootings we're talking about.

[Sam]

What makes you think for a moment that it would stop at one once we started?

This is the same argument some YECs use on this board when they argue for a historical, YEC Genesis 1-11 to preserve the historicity of Christ: basic, run-of-the-mill slippery slope argument.