Thoughts on gun control

Drugs laws: which amendment says, Americans are not allowed to take drugs?

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Foxfyre wrote:

oralloy wrote:
Foxfyre wrote:
And should there be any restrictions on the fire power that an individual should be able to have?

Not if those restrictions violate the Second Amendment.

One thing that the second amendment did not do was to define arms.

That is because the word already came with a definition.

There are a few classes of weapons that should be considered with the Second Amendment:

a) those weapons that are essential for any militia, and thus militiamen would definitely have the right to have

b) those weapons that are can be used by a militia, but are not essential to it, and thus it would be up to Congress to decide whether these weapons fell under the right

c) those weapons that are not of use to militiamen, and thus militiamen don't have the right to have

In modern times, automatic rifles are essential to the functioning of a militia, so militiamen definitely have the right to have such weapons.

Foxfyre wrote:

So my question remains: would you be comfortable with your drunken neighbor who flunked anger management having access to a Bradley tank or 105 Recoilless rifle in his back yard?

Yes.

Foxfyre wrote:

Or is it reasonable to regulate this kind of weaponry?

That weaponry would fall under "b" in my above classification.

It would be reasonable for states to regulate it so long as those regulations did not conflict with Congress' desires regarding the arming of the militia.

Foxfyre wrote:

Is it reasonable to forbid firearms in bars, court houses, and/or public schools? Does this kind of regulation violate the spirit or letter of the Second Amendment?

I'd say unreasonable, but such regulations would not violate the Second Amendment.

Foxfyre wrote:

So what regulation, if any, is acceptable when it comes to guns?

Centralized registration might be useful to the police, but since the primary use of it is to help in seizing the guns of law abiding citizens, it isn't acceptable.

The only point of waiting periods is to make it difficult for people to buy guns, so that is not acceptable.

Instant background checks are acceptable so long as there are no records kept of the transaction.

Reasonable gun safety training requirements are acceptable.

Secure storage requirements, so long as they are not absurdly expensive compared to the guns in question, are acceptable.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

Drugs laws: which amendment says, Americans are not allowed to take drugs?

That's a good point. Why did it take an amendment to ban alcohol, but not to ban drugs?

The answer is, it does take an amendment for the feds to ban drugs, and thus federal drug laws are unconstitutional (as well as being just as ill-advised as the federal alcohol ban was).

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why even bother about this subject-its too late for America to do anything about gun control, its too way out of hand in the country, too far gone and too late too consider the pro's and cons now.....just my opinion of cousre.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

Drugs laws: which amendment says, Americans are not allowed to take drugs?

You WOULD be better off, actually vastly better off, to simply legalize it all, than to go on doing what we're doing now.

Nonetheless, ideally at least, I'd rather keep the lid on outright Jeckyl/Hyde formulae like PCP. The problem with legalizing that stuff is that your daughter could be the next Stephanie Roper.

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gungasnake wrote:

Walter Hinteler wrote:
Drugs laws: which amendment says, Americans are not allowed to take drugs?

You WOULD be better off, actually vastly better off, to simply legalize it all, than to go on doing what we're doing now.

Nonetheless, ideally at least, I'd rather keep the lid on outright Jeckyl/Hyde formulae like PCP. The problem with legalizing that stuff is that your daughter could be the next Stephanie Roper.

And THAT's why drug legalization is such a tough subject. Sure, it's easy to say that adults should be able to do whatever they want with their own bodies and lives. But do you want to make this stuff legal to kids too? And if you make it legal for adults and not kids, then the pushers step up targeting kids even more than they do now.

Nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, less dangerous drugs, are all legal now but at some point there is a cutoff point where drugs become illegal.

And if you legalize more of the less dangerous drugs like marijuana and not stuff like PCP, then you can bet that the pushers will be pushing the more dangerous drugs more than ever.

And extrapolating this problem to guns and how much say the government should have about them is at what point the government should have a say. Somewhere, perhaps between the kid's Red Ryder air rifle and an ICBM, there should probably be a cutoff point.

But there sure aren't any easy answers for either issue.

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In the case of gun rights there is a problem which you may not have considered. The second ammendment is there for the specific purpose of providing citizens with a final bulwark against a government which might go out of control and become tyrannical. That clearly cannot work if the government itself can prescribe what kinds of weapons citizens are allowed to own.

Nonetheless there has to be some sort of a limit and I would set it as follows:

Whatever AlQuaeda can have without provoking Uncle Sam to action, you and I should be able to have. For instance, AlQuaeda can buy all the rifles, semiauto rifles, machineguns, rpks, mortars, silencers and the like which their hearts desire, and Uncle Sam would never give a rat's ass. For that reason, you and I should be able to own such things.

Nonetheless, the first time AlQuaeda begins acquiring shoulder-fired rocket launchers, sarin gas, weaponized anthrax, or nuclear weaponry, Uncle Sam goes after them; likewise, you and I should not be able to own such things, which are basically useless other than for terrorism.

The litmus test should be whether or not AlQuaeda could own something without provoking Uncle Sam to action.

In the case of drugs, some of them are non-recoverable. Nobody really ever recovers from using crack cocaine, PCP, or LSD.

Nonetheless, the real problem is economic. The drugs one of these idiots would use in a day under rational circumstances would cost a dollar; that would simply present no scope for crime or criminals. Under present circumstances that dollar's worth of drugs is costing the user $300 a day and since that guy is dealing with a 10% fence, he's having to commit $3000 worth of crime to buy that dollar's worth of drugs. In other words, a dollar's worth of chemicals has been converted into $3000 worth of crime, times the number of those idiots out there, times 365 days per year, all through the magic of stupid and evil laws. No nation on Earth could afford that forever.

A rational set of drug laws would:

Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.
Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.
Provide a lifetime in prison for selling LSD, PCP, and other Jeckyl/Hyde
formulas.
Same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.

Do all of that, and the drug problem and 70% of all urban crime will vanish
within two years.

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gungasnake wrote:

In the case of gun rights there is a problem which you may not have considered. The second ammendment is there for the specific purpose of providing citizens with a final bulwark against a government which might go out of control and become tyrannical. That clearly cannot work if the government itself can prescribe what kinds of weapons citizens are allowed to own.

Nonetheless there has to be some sort of a limit and I would set it as follows:

Whatever AlQuaeda can have without provoking Uncle Sam to action, you and I should be able to have. For instance, AlQuaeda can buy all the rifles, semiauto rifles, machineguns, rpks, mortars, silencers and the like which their hearts desire, and Uncle Sam would never give a rat's ass. For that reason, you and I should be able to own such things.

Nonetheless, the first time AlQuaeda begins acquiring shoulder-fired rocket launchers, sarin gas, weaponized anthrax, or nuclear weaponry, Uncle Sam goes after them; likewise, you and I should not be able to own such things, which are basically useless other than for terrorism.

The litmus test should be whether or not AlQuaeda could own something without provoking Uncle Sam to action.

In the case of drugs, some of them are non-recoverable. Nobody really ever recovers from using crack cocaine, PCP, or LSD.

Nonetheless, the real problem is economic. The drugs one of these idiots would use in a day under rational circumstances would cost a dollar; that would simply present no scope for crime or criminals. Under present circumstances that dollar's worth of drugs is costing the user $300 a day and since that guy is dealing with a 10% fence, he's having to commit $3000 worth of crime to buy that dollar's worth of drugs. In other words, a dollar's worth of chemicals has been converted into $3000 worth of crime, times the number of those idiots out there, times 365 days per year, all through the magic of stupid and evil laws. No nation on Earth could afford that forever.

A rational set of drug laws would:

Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.

Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.

Provide a lifetime in prison for selling LSD, PCP, and other Jeckyl/Hyde
formulas.

Same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.

Do all of that, and the drug problem and 70% of all urban crime will vanish
within two years.

I actually don't have much problem with this IF you can get the bleeding heart liberal legislatures to pass mandatory sentencing for selling the dangerous drugs AND get bleeding heart liberal judges to impose them. Further there should be a massive national campaign to make use of such drugs socially unacceptable in much the same way as tobacco is being made socially unacceptable. That at least might discourage the smarter people from experimenting and getting hooked.

But in a culture more interested in being politically correct that sensible or reasonable, I am pessimistic that this would be possible now. And just to open it all up without such safeguards I honestly do think puts the kids and the stupid adults at much higher risk.

As for regulation on guns, I am still deciding what I think is acceptable regulation and what isn't. Your proposal for that is well thought out, however, and I'll sure add it into the mix as a reasonable possibility.

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oralloy wrote:

Walter Hinteler wrote:
Drugs laws: which amendment says, Americans are not allowed to take drugs?

That's a good point. Why did it take an amendment to ban alcohol, but not to ban drugs?

The answer is, it does take an amendment for the feds to ban drugs,
and thus federal drug laws are unconstitutional
(as well as being just as ill-advised as the federal alcohol ban was).

Well said, Oralloy !!!

U r a perfect practitioner of logic
and a good American citizen.

As I remember from law school
quite a few decades ago, the USSC
first held anti-drug laws to be unconstitutional,
but in later cases changed its mind.
David

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My understanding is that the present laws against marijuana in particular originated with Weyerhauser and Dupont, which did not want hemp competing with their lumber/paper interests.

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oralloy wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:
oralloy wrote:
Foxfyre wrote:
And should there be any restrictions on the fire power that an individual should be able to have?

Not if those restrictions violate the Second Amendment.

One thing that the second amendment did not do was to define arms.

That is because the word already came with a definition.

The definition is " arms ... are such as are usually
employed in civilized warfare and
that constituteordinary military equipment. "
Hence, today that means semi-automatic and fully automatic rifles,
pistols, revolvers, and submachineguns.

The US Supreme Court said in US v. MILLER (1939) 3O7 US 174
that they should be "ordinary military equipment...AYMETTE v. STATE
2 Hump. [21 Tenn] 154, 158." [emphasis added]

The AYMETTE case, which the Supreme Court approvingly adopted declares:
"the arms, the right to keep which is secured,
are such as are usually employed in civilized warfare,
and that constitute ordinary military equipment.
If the citizens have these arms in their hands,
they are prepared in the best possible manner to repel any
encroachments on their rights." [emphasis added]

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In the US, there are roughly 17,000 murders a year, of which about 15,000 are committed with firearms. By contrast, Britain, Australia and Canada combined see fewer than 350 gun-related murders each year. And it's not just about murder. The non-gun-related suicide rate in the US is consistent with the rest of the developed world. Factor in firearms, and the rate is suddenly twice as high as the rest of the developed world.

Children are affected particularly hard. An American youth is murdered with a firearm every four and a half hours on average. And an American youth commits suicide with a firearm every eight hours. It's worth remembering that many of the most spectacular mass murders of recent years were really suicides, with the perpetrators choosing to take a few other people with them while they were at it. Gun-control advocates argue they manage to carry out their murderous fantasies only because firearms give them the means to do so.

(from The Independent today)

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McTag wrote:

In the US, there are roughly 17,000 murders a year, of which about 15,000 are committed with firearms. By contrast, Britain, Australia and Canada combined see fewer than 350 gun-related murders each year. And it's not just about murder. The non-gun-related suicide rate in the US is consistent with the rest of the developed world. Factor in firearms, and the rate is suddenly twice as high as the rest of the developed world.

Children are affected particularly hard. An American youth is murdered with a firearm every four and a half hours on average. And an American youth commits suicide with a firearm every eight hours. It's worth remembering that many of the most spectacular mass murders of recent years were really suicides, with the perpetrators choosing to take a few other people with them while they were at it. Gun-control advocates argue they manage to carry out their murderous fantasies only because firearms give them the means to do so.

(from The Independent today)

You have introduced sanity to OSD's ravings.

Sadly, it won't help. He and the other gun nuts here are beyond reason.

Sadly, a few mad people are able to intimidate their government.

Oh well.

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The following is not offered as a solution to the problem, but as rebuttal to a notion that confiscating guns will somehow make the public safer:

Article published Tuesday, June 29, 2004
at Investor's Business Daily.

Add Gun Control To Litany Of Misbegotten Gov't Plans

By John R. Lott Jr. and Eli Lehrer

The gun -control movement is in trouble internationally. From Britain to Australia to Canada, promises of lower crime rates from gun control have turned into historic increases in crime.

While the normal knee-jerk solutions are to press for even more controls, once guns are banned the explanation that the laws failed simply because they didn't go far enough becomes almost humorous.

All these experiments were adopted under what gun -control advocates would argue were ideal conditions. All three countries adopted laws that applied to the entire country. Australia and Britain are surrounded by water, and thus do not have the easy smuggling problem that Canada claims to exist with regard to the U.S.

Take the United Kingdom: With new data showing violent crime soaring, Britain's home secretary announced legislation this month that would impose an outright ban on many toy guns.

Britain has already banned just about every type of weapon that a criminal might want to use. Handguns were made illegal in 1997, and nearly every other firearm (even BB guns) is now subject to a complex regulatory regime.

Twice As Dangerous

The laws didn't do what was claimed. The government just reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the four years from 1998-99 to 2002-03. The serious violent crime rate soared by 64%, and overall violent crime by 118%. The violent crime rate in England and Wales now stands at twice the rate of that in the U.S.

Understandably, the government wants to "do something," but it is hard to believe that the new proposals will succeed where past efforts have failed.

With the exception of the U.S., other English-speaking countries have followed Britain's lead in limiting gun ownership. Like the British, they have nothing to show for it.

Australia saw its violent crime rates soar after its 1996 Port Arthur gun -control measures banned most firearms. Violent crime rates averaged 32% higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did the year before the law went into effect. Armed robbery rates increased 74%. Australia's violent crime rate is also now double America's.

Canada hasn't gone anywhere near as far as Australia and England, but even that country's limited restrictions have caused problems. Despite a gun registration system that has cost 500 times more than promised (the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. claims the overrun is 1,000 times greater), the overall crime rate is more than half again higher than in the U.S. and has risen as the American crime rate has fallen. Meanwhile, violent crime in the U.S. has fallen much faster than in Canada, and murders in Canada have gone up slightly, while falling in the U.S.

The Canadian government recently admitted it could not identify a single violent crime that had been solved through registration. Public confidence in the government's ability to fight crime has also eroded, with one recent survey showing only 17% of voters support the registration program.

Guns do not tell the whole story: Gangs, police and prisons also play a major role. Drug gangs can't simply call up the police when another gang encroaches on their turf, so they end up establishing their own armies and committing a great many murders. (Gang fights account for about 60% of all murders in urban areas in the U.S.)

The U.S. has long had a sophisticated and violent gang subculture that the nation's decentralized system of 16,500 police agencies had a difficult time handling. England's more centralized 45-agency police did a better job fighting gangs, but, over time, the gangs have become more violent, sophisticated and apt at acquiring guns. This has led to rising gun crime.

Police and prisons probably also account for some of the difference in crime, though it doesn't explain why the difference has grown so suddenly. The U.S. also has more police per capita than the U.K., particularly in its big cities:

New York and London are roughly the same size, but New York has about 40,000 police officers to London's 29,000.

Failed Schemes

The U.S. also locks up many more criminals: Nearly 500 out of 1 million Americans are serving time behind bars as compared to about 150 per 1 million in the other English-speaking countries. America, quite simply, keeps more bad guys behind bars where they can't commit crimes.

Repealing gun control laws might not solve the crime problems in the U.K. and Australia overnight, but the exploding crime rates (including gun crime) in countries that have banned all guns shows that we can add gun control to the list of government planning efforts that do not live up to their billing. Its failures have become too overwhelming to ignore.

John Lott Jr, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is author of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and "The Bias Against Guns" (Regnery, 2003).
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/IBDGunConFailure.html

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From the leader in today's The Guardian I mentioned some hours on the other gun-thread as well:

Quote:

Advocates of tighter gun controls are right to argue that it is too easy for young people, convicted felons or those with a record of domestic abuse to buy a firearm, legally or illegally. Opponents of controls, especially the famously powerful National Rifle Association, are permanently mobilised against any calls for new restrictions on the basis of the constitutional right to bear arms - a case of "one kind of freedom trumping all others", as critics say.

It is a tragic truth that the killer of the Amish girls had no criminal record and was described by his wife as a good husband and father, so on the face of it there would have been no bar to him buying his shotgun, semi-automatic pistol, rifle and ammunition. It is doubtless also true that most US gun owners are respectable, law-abiding citizens. But it is hard to see the sense of opposing at least criminal background checks on every gun purchase and limits on the number of firearms an individual can purchase at any one time or in a given period. The ban on handguns introduced after Dunblane in 1996 has not ended all gun crime in Britain but it has helped keep it mostly in the underworld.

Amazingly to many non-Americans, gun control remains a taboo in US politics. Gun ownership and hunting are the norm in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The Brady law, requiring background checks, though not for unlicensed dealers, was resisted tooth and nail. Bill Clinton tried but failed to ban the sale of all automatic weapons. Opponents of control are even against statutes banning guns on school premises, and expressed concern yesterday that "emotion would now carry the day". But after this latest terrible atrocity, emotion might be a very good basis on which to proceed.

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The article itself said this guy had no criminal background so a criminal background check would have been unhelpful. Limiting the number of firearms one can own is also unhelpful as anybody can only carry so many anyway and can only fire one or two at a time.

And would everybody feel better if he had gone in with a knife or dynamite or some other horrible method to commit mayhem? Dead is dead no matter how it is accomplished. Would you rather be shot or hacked to death with a knife or blown up? Is the method really more significant than the kind of evil that prompts evil acts?

Having said that, there is also an issue of immigration policies and population when comparing statistics:

Factoring in the mix are immigration policies of which the USA has the most lax and a hefty portion of the violent crime in the USA is via illegals in gangs and other settings. Couple with this the variance in populations approximated as:

Canada - 33 million
Australia - 21 million?
Britain - 58 million
USA - 300 million

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I find it disturbing that outsiders find gun ownership and hunting so sinister.

Don't forget, that steak you just ate came from the replicator behind the counter of your local grocer.

If you want to talk really taboo, how many of those murders were black on black crime? Hmmm?

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cjhsa wrote:

I find it disturbing that outsiders find gun ownership and hunting so sinister.

Don't forget, that steak you just ate came from the replicator behind the counter of your local grocer.

If you want to talk really taboo, how many of those murders were black on black crime? Hmmm?

Maybe we could look for statistics on that, CJ, but I suspect that though there is a disproportionate black on black crime rate per capita, we'll find that most gun crime is not substantially black on black but factors in a lot of other stuff.

This link is from a distinctively pro-Second Amendment rights group and is naturally biased in favor of gun ownership. But it does cite a lot of additional statistics comparing the effect of gun ownership to the populations of the USA, Australia, Britain, and (I think) Canada and various other countries:

http://www.gunowners.org/fs0404.htm

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The fact is that so many people have been isolated from their food source for so long that they have forgotten the gun as a tool and treat it as a criminal, often citing "gun crime". No gun has ever committed a crime.

I have tried to inspire people to hunt and fish on this board and get nothing but **** from the antis - you know the ones - they hate everything, even McDonalds, while they snarf down their Big Mac.

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McTag wrote:

In the US, there are roughly 17,000 murders a year, of which about 15,000 are committed with firearms. By contrast, Britain, Australia and Canada combined see fewer than 350 gun-related murders each year. And it's not just about murder. The non-gun-related suicide rate in the US is consistent with the rest of the developed world. Factor in firearms, and the rate is suddenly twice as high as the rest of the developed world.

How many Britains, Australians, and Canadians kill themselves and others by other means instead? It would seem to me that a person first decides to commit suicide or murder, then chooses the best tool for the job.

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