Guns: how much longer will it take ....

Can anyone explain to me how in the US an 18 year old is too young to buy beer - but can buy a military assault rifle?

Wilso wrote:

Can anyone explain to me how in the US an 18 year old is too young to buy beer - but can buy a military assault rifle?

The laws governing the purchase of alcohol have a different history from those governing the purchase of firearms, and because much of the laws in the country are relegated to the individual states making up the nation, they're been varied throughout the years. Ultimately, the laws on the federal level governing the sale of firearms are codified under Title 18, Crimes and Criminal Procedure, Chapter 44 - Firearms, § 922 - Unlawful acts, of the United States Code. 18 is the minimum age for rifles and shotguns, 21 is the minimum for handguns. In regard to the purchase of alcohol, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 set the national minimum drinking age to 21.

A Supreme Court justice’s solution to gun violence: Repeal Second Amendment

Four years ago, when — as now — the nation was reeling from the horror of a mass school shooting, a retired Supreme Court justice suggested a radical solution: getting rid of the Second Amendment.

John Paul Stevens issued the call after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018. The attack prompted hundreds of thousands to demand action the next month to end gun violence at the March for Our Lives.

In a March 27, 2018, New York Times op-ed, Stevens praised the protesters and their call for stricter gun control laws. “But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform,” he wrote, about a year before his death at 99. “They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.”

Stevens said the amendment was adopted out of concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the states. “Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century,” he wrote.

He called repeal a “simple but dramatic action [that] would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform” and would make schoolchildren safer.

But Stevens didn’t acknowledge the herculean challenge that his proposal entailed, as there was (and remains) zero chance that gun control advocates would get anywhere close to the two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states needed for repeal.

Stevens’s proposal didn’t generate a lot of momentum, but it did get pushback from some fellow liberals.

“I admire Justice Stevens but his supposedly ‘simple but dramatic’ step of repealing the 2d Am is AWFUL advice,” tweeted Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor. “The obstacle to strong gun laws is political, not legal. Urging a politically impossible effort just strengthens opponents of achievable reform.”

Tribe expanded on his argument in a Washington Post op-ed, headlined “The Second Amendment isn’t the problem.” “The NRA’s strongest rallying cry has been: ‘They’re coming for our beloved Second Amendment,’” he wrote. “Enter Stevens, stage left, boldly calling for the amendment’s demise, thereby giving aid and comfort to the gun lobby’s favorite argument.”

In his op-ed, Stevens wrote that repeal was necessary to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling that Americans had an individual right to bear arms. He was one of four dissenters in that case.

They were killers with powerful guns. The president went after their weapons.

“For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation,” Stevens wrote in the op-ed.

Republican President Gerald Ford nominated Stevens to the court in 1975, at a time when Supreme Court nominations were not as politicized as they are today. Stevens eventually became one of its most liberal members. Although his 2018 proposal didn’t go anywhere, calls for repeal continue today.

“Who will say on this network or any other network in the next few days, ‘It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment?’” liberal filmmaker Michael Moore challenged during a feisty appearance on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” this week.

“Look, I support all gun control legislation,” Moore said. “Not sensible gun control. We don’t need the sensible stuff. We need the hardcore stuff that’s going to protect ourselves and our children.”

Writing in the New Republic on Thursday, Walter Shapiro, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and a lecturer in political science at Yale University, said that “the hard truth is that the core problem is the Second Amendment itself. And America is going to reel from one mass murder to another unless the Second Amendment is repealed or the Supreme Court drastically reduces its scope.”

“As a starting point,” he added, “Democrats should drop the mealy-mouthed formulation, ‘Nobody supports the Second Amendment more than I do, but still. … ’ Claiming fidelity to the Second Amendment has never convinced a single NRA supporter of a candidate’s sincerity, but it has stopped bold thinking about lasting solutions to America’s gun crisis.”

The first U.S. school shooting was in 1853. Its victim was a teacher.

But repeal hasn’t been a mainstream cause. Just last month, President Biden declared, “I support the Second Amendment,” although he said that didn’t mean people could get any gun they wanted. In the wake of this week’s Texas elementary school massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers, the president said the Second Amendment is not absolute, and that common-sense gun control would not “negatively affect” it.

Stevens’s op-ed came just a few years after he issued a proposal to amend the Second Amendment, in his book “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” which was excerpted in a 2014 Washington Post opinion piece. Stevens suggested adding five words (in italics below) to the amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

Canada vows to ‘freeze’ handgun sales, buy back assault-style weapons

TORONTO — Canada on Monday introduced new gun-control legislation that, if passed, would implement a “national freeze” on buying, importing, transferring and selling handguns, effectively capping the number of such weapons already in the country.

The bill, which officials here cast as “the most significant action on gun violence in a generation,” also includes “red flag” laws that would allow judges to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others and stiffer penalties for gun smuggling and trafficking.

“We recognize that the vast majority of gun owners in this country are responsible and follow all necessary laws,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa. “We are, however, facing a level of gun violence in our communities that is unacceptable.”

The proposed legislation came after mass shootings in Texas and across the U.S.-Canada border in Buffalo in recent weeks have revived a long-simmering debate in the United States about whether Congress might act to curb gun violence.

“Unfortunately, the reality is in our country [gun violence] is getting worse and has been getting worse over the past years,” Trudeau said. “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.”

How countries around the world have responded to mass shootings

Many provisions of the proposed legislation were featured in a gun-control bill that was introduced last year but that did not pass before a federal election was called in August. Gun-control advocates criticized its buyback program for banned guns, which was voluntary. The Liberals pledged stricter gun-control measures if reelected.

Such measures enjoy broad public support here, particularly in urban centers. The Liberal Party typically employs guns as a wedge issue during federal election campaigns, painting their Conservative counterparts as supportive of easing gun-control measures to gain an edge.

Gun-control advocates have long called for a national ban on handguns. But some provincial and municipal officials have opposed one.

The “freeze” envisioned by the proposed legislation is not a ban because people who already own them could continue to possess and use them. But they could only transfer them to businesses, and chief firearms officers would be barred from approving the transfer of handguns to individuals.

The bill is likely to pass with the support of the New Democratic Party. The Conservatives on Monday criticized Liberal gun-control efforts, charging that they unfairly target law-abiding gun owners and fail to adequately stamp out the smuggling of illegal weapons across borders.

“Today’s announcement fails to focus on the root cause of gun violence in our cities: illegal guns smuggled into Canada by criminal gangs,” Raquel Dancho, the Conservative public safety critic, said in a tweet. “The PM has had 7 years to fix this serious issue yet he continues to chase headlines and bury his head in the sand.”

The measures unveiled Monday come after the government banned 1,500 makes and models of “military-style assault weapons” in 2020, after a gunman posing as a police officer charged across rural Nova Scotia, killing 22 people, including a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, in the country’s deadliest mass shooting.

The government said Monday that it plans to introduce a mandatory buyback program that would offer compensation to owners of the banned firearms. Details on the program are expected this summer, and the government hopes to begin buying back the guns, including AR-15s, the kind used in the school attack in Texas, by the end of the year.

“It’s going to be hard,” said Marco Mendicino, Canada’s public safety minister. “But we’re going to get it done.”

Trudeau promises gun-control legislation after deadliest shooting in Canadian history

Some measures announced Monday would not require parliamentary approval, but a change to regulations.

While mass shootings are relatively rare here compared to the United States, the rate of firearm-related homicides has increased since 2013, according to data from Statistics Canada. It said that the percentage of homicides involving a firearm jumped from 26 percent in 2013 to 37 percent in 2020.

Nearly 60 percent of firearm-related violent crimes involve handguns, according to the national statistics agency. But it said that there are “many gaps” in the data, including on the “source of firearms used in crime” and “whether a gun used in a crime was stolen, illegally purchased or smuggled into the country.”

During hearings in a public inquiry this year on the “causes, context and circumstances” of the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, evidence was presented on the provenance of the large cache of weapons that the attacker, Gabriel Wortman, had on hand during the hours-long assault.

Wortman, a denturist, did not possess a firearms license and obtained his weapons illegally. The commission heard that there were “two, and potentially three,” instances when police received information about his access to firearms. Little, if anything, was done, according to testimony.

Several of the guns were traced and sourced to gun stores in nearby Maine. A friend there told police that Wortman took one or more of the guns without his knowledge or permission, while he gave the shooter a Ruger P89 “as a sign of gratitude” for his help with “tree removals and other odd jobs at his residence.”

An AR-15 came from a gun shop in California, but Wortman first saw it at a gun show in Maine and someone else bought it for him. Witnesses told the RCMP after the shooting that Wortman would disassemble the firearms and roll them up in his truck’s tonneau cover to smuggle them across the border.

“They all say that Wayne LaPierre isn’t doing enough to stop these mass shootings, and even implying that Wayne LaPierre has played a part in making it easier for these shooters to get guns, to weapons,” Selvig said, referring to the NRA leader’s opposition to gun reform.
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“You kept hearing [after each] that Wayne LaPierre isn’t doing enough, and frankly that’s not true,” Selvig continued.

“The NRA under Wayne LaPierre’s leadership has provided thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families and maybe these mass shootings would stop happening if we all thought a little bit more and we prayed a little bit more.

“We give enough of these thoughts and these prayers, these mass shootings will stop.”

Selvig wrapped up his remarks with: “I want to thank you, Wayne LaPierre, for all your thoughts and all your prayers.”