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Gun Control discussion


Ser Scot A Ellison

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3 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

@Dr. Pepper could you maybe run for president in 2020 so I can vote for you?

Snort. I'd probably break US democracy faster than Trump.  I'd be a dictator for a few weeks, suspend the constitution, rewrite it, then fall into a depression and someone will have to run my twitter account.  

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

@Dr. Pepper It's power. Even without ammo, the promise, the potential is still there: the power to kill. Some people say it's about political power, specifically. Others say it's the power to protect yourself or your family. Or the power to hunt and be autonomous or whatever.
Whichever way it's formulated, it always comes back to power.
While I don't think it's necessarily the case of @S John (hey dude, I know nothing about you), I'm pretty damn certain this is what it's about for most gun owners. And why they will keep a gun somewhere in the house, just to feel a bit better.

As a boy in the US, I stil remember the fascination, the awe that I had for firearms. My dad would take me to shoot pellets at soda cans in our backyard. My mum disapproved, but I didn't care. I loved it. I yearned for one. Walking around with a gun at my belt would have been a dream come true.
And when it's legal, and it's in the Constitution, and it's American, why the heck not? And damn the consequences, you'll always find ways to rationalize it as you grow up.

This makes a lot of sense.  

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2 hours ago, TerraPrime said:

The irony is that statistically, people with guns in their households are much more likely to die from guns than those who are not.

That can't be escaped. One household has a gun, and the other doesn't. But as a gun owner I take that risk.

2 hours ago, TerraPrime said:

The argument that the presence of guns help safeguard households is rather unsupported, by its own nature, since we don't have ways of confirming the success rates of these deterrent effects in any statistically meaningful way. in other words, how would we monitor the absence of crimes, let alone the reasons behind the absence? Like, my household has never had a firearm in it, and we've never been harmed as a result of the absence of guns. So, does that add strength to the opposing argument that you need guns to protect yourself?

Only if you maintain the owning of a gun as a necessary condition for security. I haven't argued that I need a gun to secure myself. Only that I'd use it to secure myself in the event of an immediate threat. Referendums on ownership shouldn't depend on whether guns by necessity secure you. As you pointed out, you don't need a gun to be secure. The onus should lie with those who argue that in absence of regulations, there's a perceivable and meaningful threat with gun owners.

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2 minutes ago, Mother Cocanuts said:

That can't be escaped. One household has a gun, and the other doesn't. But as a gun owner I take that risk.

Cool, so you're kind of like hedging your bet. I would think you'd keep the gun at the household that was vulnerable to automotive assault though. Or are both of your houses immune to vehicular aggression?

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47 minutes ago, Mother Cocanuts said:

The onus should lie with those who argue that in absence of regulations, there's a perceivable and meaningful threat with gun owners.

Is that the bar you want to set? 

 

Because we have data showing that households with guns have over 5 fold increase in fatality of suicide attempts. 

 

Maybe you'd want to amend to say that the threat worthy of regulating is the threat to others? 

 

But even then, women who are victims of domestic abuse where the abuser owns firearms are significantly more likely to be killed on top of being abused. 

 

So, really, I urge you to think harder about justifying keeping guns at home. I think you're on much safer ground to say "just because I can," rather than tacking on these extraneous conditions that actually go against your wishes. Don't let the allure of appearing reasonable stymie your desire to keep firearms at home. Be unreasonable. Own it. I support your (and anyone else's) right to keep firearms at home. Any firearm. Any number thereof. You should feel liberated to own up to that desire. 

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21 minutes ago, TerraPrime said:

Is that the bar you want to set? 

 

Because we have data showing that households with guns have over 5 fold increase in fatality of suicide attempts. 

 

Maybe you'd want to amend to say that the threat worthy of regulating is the threat to others? 

 

But even then, women who are victims of domestic abuse where the abuser owns firearms are significantly more likely to be killed on top of being abused. 

 

So, really, I urge you to think harder about justifying keeping guns at home. I think you're on much safer ground to say "just because I can," rather than tacking on these extraneous conditions that actually go against your wishes. Don't let the allure of appearing reasonable stymie your desire to keep firearms at home. Be unreasonable. Own it. I support your (and anyone else's) right to keep firearms at home. Any firearm. Any number thereof. You should feel liberated to own up to that desire. 

I'm not attempting to justify keeping guns at home. I haven't tacked on any extraneous condition to sound reasonable. As I've conceded, guns aren't necessary for security. I personally use it to secure myself, but have no problem with the justification being "because I can." And it's as you said, measuring the intended safeguard of guns is abstract. I believe that my guns will act as safeguards in the event of an immediate threat, and that's all the justification I need. That's my owning it. (And if you remember, my response also included collecting, target shooting, and using as a paper weight.)

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12 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

As much as this conversation needs to be had, I always wonder what's the point.  It's black and white to me.  Either people are ok with tens of thousands dying from guns every year, or they aren't.  Either they are ok with gunmen mowing down kindergartners, or they aren't.  Those on the side of being ok with this will almost never be capable of having a logical gun control discussion.  

I have a similar disposition on this issue - and I have not read most of the thread.  This is one of those things I grew tired of arguing about around a decade ago, so I'll be brief.  The research is clear.  Further, the Second Amendment is not a crutch to stand on.  I do not accept the new interpretation of the court in Heller because last time I checked this country wasn't run by the Federalist Society.  You can have very stringent gun control without changing any amendments.  Conservatives, or "originalists" want to overturn or rollback a ton of precedent?  Fine, then, first of all, they're not really originalists if you read Federalist 78, and two, so do I in this case.

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5 hours ago, TerraPrime said:

The irony is that statistically, people with guns in their households are much more likely to die from guns than those who are not.

This is only true because 2/3 of all firearms fatalities in the USA are suicides, suicides predominantly done in the home.  The other largest group of firearms deaths is young men, particularly those involved in gang culture,  in cities like Chicago, 1/4 to 1/5 of the fatalities. Remove these two statistics, and the number of firearms deaths and incidents plummets, and certainly IMO shows that average joe gun owner certainly isn't contributing to the violence and deaths nationwide in any meaningful way.

Regarding the second ammendment:  Originally, the writers of the 2A around 1790 didn't write it for small arms.  The British before and during the revolutionary war coulnd't have given a tinkers damn about small arms or restricting them with laws.  In fact there were times and places then where the Crown demanded that colonists be armed with flintlock rifles and pistols, in order to aid in the common defense of towns and settlements.  The King/Parliament just did NOT care about gun law legislation then.  What they DID care about was proven at Concord - seizing powder, shot, and artillery.  THAT is what the second was written for, to protect the rights of the people and the militas they could form, the rights to possess artillery and ammunition for it.  Artillery was responsible for 2/3 or more of the casualties in the war which formed America, as well as 2/3 or more in every major conflict since, be it WW1, WW2, Vietnam, or the Gulf wars.  That is what the writers of the 2A wanted to ensure, that the people would have equal firepower to any invading power, or any standing army raised by their own American government.  I guess the question is, is that sentiment compatible with American life and culture today?  Do the people still need, and do they benefit from having equal firepower that their military has?  They only generally do in terms of small arms now, something again that wasn't a concern or the purpose of the second originally in the first place.

 

 

 

Interesting article in the Washington Post today below.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.a706ca272ba4

 

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Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site. She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”

 

 

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn't even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?

However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.

By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.

Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.

Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.

Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.

 

 

 

 

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@SerHaHa Why should we make it easier for people to kill themselves impulsively? More than 1% of gun owners die in such suicide attempts, and they'd be safer without guns. 

Disclaimer: I'm not against people deciding that they want to go, but I want it to be a well-considered decision. Just going down that path because of  short-term desperation is not something that we should make easier.

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Also, I firmly believe nothing short of a complete ban on all firearms will have ANY effect on stopping these types of recent attacks.  The lunatic in Vegas chose a specific caliber and type of firearm, to fit the method and MO he was going for - to spray down a large crowd with inaccurate but high rate of fire medium caliber rounds.  This is why there were 10x as many wounded, the 556 round isn't necessarily all that lethal, and often causes wounds instead of fatalities.  He wanted a mass casualty spectacle.  Had he chosen a different weapon and method, any common 30 caliber or larger deer rifle with a decent optic on it, at that close range of 600 feet every single shot could have been a lethal hit.  In 15 minutes of sustained shooting (which he did), with any common deer rifle, there could, and would have been several times as many fatalities, with much fewer wounded.

The British army from the early 1900s to World War 2 used a 10 shot 303 bolt action rifle - pretty much the lowest common denominator when it comes to "lethality" in firearms owned by Americans these days.  They did a competition throughout the army and empire called "the mad minute".  Every decent rifleman could shoot 20 shots in a minute, and hit a 15 inch target at 300 yards, every time.  The best riflemen could do 30 and even 40 hits per minute.  See what I'm getting at?  With even some basic training, or even little or no training, average nutcase joe can get himself a basic and common bolt action rifle, and if he chooses his location thinking of cover and concealment, near a crowded event....point is even with the most "acceptable" form of 'sporting" firearm, anyone who snaps and goes on a rampage has the firepower to create mass casualty events.

Only solution is a complete ban, or this will never stop.  That's it IMO, either it'll happen, or it won't, and this sort of thing will never stop.

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@SerHaHa Why should we make it easier for people to kill themselves impulsively? More than 1% of gun owners die in such suicide attempts, and they'd be safer without guns. 

 

See above, I agree, nothing short of a complete ban will accomplish anything.  We either accept as a society that we don't need firearms, and ban them all and have door to door confiscation, or we don't, and accept that the future holds nothing but more slaughter of our own people.  The middle ground of "restrictions" such as Canada or Australia still leaves plenty of firepower in the hands of civilians.  We either grow up and leave firearms behind culturally, or we don't.  If we don't, more and more of these things will happen.  I'm sick of them. 

 

I also believe that until people like myself, who worked in the firearms/training/military industry and are very familiar with the capabilities, functionality, and legal framework around firearms, start speaking out against guns, that the Democrats/left will continue to get picked apart due to incorrect information, terminology, and so forth.  Being able to argue these points and facts with 2A supporters toe to toe, and say some things as I posted above, is the one of the critical things that needs to start happening if America is ever going to get off this course IMO.  A few of us have already began, even some of the entertainers at that concert that were huge 2A supporters are starting to come around.

I know the standard defense will be what about hunting? - Muzzle loaders and archery I feel would suffice, but nothing more.  If we don't start moving in that direction, more and more incidents will happen.

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I disagree, for two reasons. Empirically, restrictions obviously worked in Australia. I see no reason why they shouldn't in the US. And theoretically, while restrictions may not immediately lead to a change in American gun culture away from the current fetishization, in the long term they will.

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You're using a negative to try and prove a positive regarding Australia.  Mass shootings were already an incredibly rare event there, and as I've explained, with the weapons Australians are still allowed - even the legal ones (illegal ones are easy to obtain there, check the dark web for some laughs regarding that, and it isn't very funny IMO) - are enough firepower that one individual could very easily cause 50+ deaths at will at crowded events or areas.  I can set up cardboard targets and prove that to you with a video on my 2000 meter range if you wish.

Restrictions in Australia and Canada are nothing more than feel good lip service laws designed to strike a middle ground that won't push the right into civil war, yet allow politicians to fool those on the left that these rules actually make some kind of difference in terms of public safety.  They only give an illusion of more safety, again, using a variety of weapons allowed in both those countries still, I or anyone even remotely competent can demonstrate and prove that in a range simulation. 

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One thing to bear in mind when having this discussion is that the US could soon be spending as much as 700 billion $ a year on its military.

Recently, after studying Ike's "military-industrial complex" speech once more, I've been starting to see the US as a highly militarized society. And just as I was thinking about pointing that out, SerHaHa actually beat me to making the connexion.
The US spends an insane amount of its resources on its geopolitical power. And while there was once an argument that its military budget was meant to contain or rollback communism, it is now clear that the point is, quite simply, to dominate the world.
The thing is, this has been done at the expense of other things. It's now well-known that the Soviet Union somehow sacrificed the wellbeing of its citizens to be a world power ; the irony is that the US has kept on doing just that, albeit perhaps less intensively -so far.
The question then becomes: what if this was the main factor behind the individual lust for arms as well? Can a country devote so much of its resources to its military without its society becoming dedicated to the same vision?
When a country decides that the education and healthcare of its citizens are lower priorities than its power on the world stage, its society might mechanically be affected by the same logic. With that in mind, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 2nd amendment in Heller could be seen as a by-product of its foreign policies. After all, it would be odd to have so much taxpayer money be devoted to producing weapons without allowing individuals to obtain some of that power themselves. The Soviet Union, as a totalitarian state, could conceivably deny its citizens a share of its power ; the US, as a representative democracy, might struggle to do the same.
To make one detailed argument: without the right to bear arms, people working in the armaments industry or war veterans might start questioning what is truly driving US military spending. After all, if you're producing or using weapons on a daily basis, the contrast with normal civilian life might become incredibly stark. On the other hand, if civilian society means you are surrounded by armed individuals, the militarization of your country becomes perfectly coherent and rational. After all, the fear of other nations threatening to dominate the world, the fear of your government turning into a dictatorship, and the fear of your neighbors being blood-thirsty killers, essentially have the same roots. At the heart of it all is the idea that you cannot trust your fellow humans and that you should thus have a right to acquire the power to defend yourself.
 

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3 hours ago, SerHaHa said:

This is only true because 2/3 of all firearms fatalities in the USA are suicides, suicides predominantly done in the home.  The other largest group of firearms deaths is young men, particularly those involved in gang culture,  in cities like Chicago, 1/4 to 1/5 of the fatalities. Remove these two statistics, and the number of firearms deaths and incidents plummets, and certainly IMO shows that average joe gun owner certainly isn't contributing to the violence and deaths nationwide in any meaningful way.

You're right about the first assertion - a lot of people with guns kill themselves.  Isn't that an argument against guns in the first place?  Fuck man, there's plenty of people I know - including myself - that may have acted differently if they knew they could blow their brains out in a moments notice.  As for the second aspect, of course most gun violence takes place in big cities.  Where have you been?  A Tarantino movie in which you can kill a bunch of people in desolation?  Yeah, that doesn't happen in the real world.

3 hours ago, SerHaHa said:

Regarding the second ammendment:  Originally, the writers of the 2A around 1790 didn't write it for small arms.  The British before and during the revolutionary war coulnd't have given a tinkers damn about small arms or restricting them with laws.  In fact there were times and places then where the Crown demanded that colonists be armed with flintlock rifles and pistols, in order to aid in the common defense of towns and settlements.  The King/Parliament just did NOT care about gun law legislation then.  What they DID care about was proven at Concord - seizing powder, shot, and artillery.  THAT is what the second was written for, to protect the rights of the people and the militas they could form, the rights to possess artillery and ammunition for it.  Artillery was responsible for 2/3 or more of the casualties in the war which formed America, as well as 2/3 or more in every major conflict since, be it WW1, WW2, Vietnam, or the Gulf wars.  That is what the writers of the 2A wanted to ensure, that the people would have equal firepower to any invading power, or any standing army raised by their own American government.  I guess the question is, is that sentiment compatible with American life and culture today?  Do the people still need, and do they benefit from having equal firepower that their military has?  They only generally do in terms of small arms now, something again that wasn't a concern or the purpose of the second originally in the first place.

Took you a painfully long time to get to the bolded.  Please cite.  Disregarding the fact the American public is never, ever going to have anything resembling equal firepower to the military, your original assertion in the bolded needs to be supported by evidence you need to provide.  Because I've read a lot on the Constitutional Convention as well as the subsequent ratification battle, and I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.

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13 hours ago, S John said:

I wouldn't call myself pro-gun, I believe in a lot stricter limitations than we currently have.  I think it's fine for most people to own certain types of guns, but that it should be at least a little bit difficult for a private citizen to get any gun and we should ban certain accessories.  

Anyway I am technically a gun owner and I have a lever action Winchester 30/30 because my dad gave it to me several years ago.  He sent it to me because I was going to northern Alaska and I was going to be out on the tundra and it was a precaution against becoming a bear snack.  I ended up not even bringing it after reading that bear spray is at least effective, if not more, at thwarting a bear mauling given that it might take multiple rounds to drop an angry bear and you'll be shitting your pants as you try to aim and fire and therefore stand a pretty good chance of missing altogether and getting eaten anyway.  

Now I use it for taking up space in it's case at the back of my bedroom closet, buried underneath a few boxes of various junk.  In any case it's a gun much more suited to killing game than preventing government tyranny and is something that would fit in the category of a reasonable thing to own, imo.  

This is the point I was getting at - owning a gun does not make you skilled in its use.

People have these images of gunfights being like computer games, where you're just shooting some pixels on your screen and you can pause and have a moment to think about what to do next and load the game if you're not satisfied with the outcome.

10 hours ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

I personally don't own one anymore. I used to own a .38 Special but for a couple of reasons got rid of it: My ex husband was mentally unstable,  and I had young children in the house. I flatly refused to have them in the house and took everything to my in law's where they were locked up. My father in law took safety very seriously. 

Having guns in my family is as natural as breathing. We come from a rural background where hunting for food was and still is perfectly normal. In fact, my grandmother's sister was killed in a hunting accident in the 50s.

Keeping that in mind, I'm not in favor of a total ban, but there have to be restrictions on the types and number of weapons and ammo allowed, and a way to track and evaluate who has them.

This is the only reasonable way to handle this issue.

10 hours ago, Mother Cocanuts said:
  • Yes. Reason being that when I face an immediate threat, heading to my drawer is quicker and more efficient than waiting for the cops.
  • Security. Collecting. Pleasure. Sometimes it makes for a good paper weight. I regularly go to the range and fire off a few shots.

Do you think that regularly going to the range and firing off a few shots is enough of a preparation for you to act calmly and professionally if you "face an immediate threat"?

Do you have some police or military training and experiences that you haven't mentioned? Do you have some professional train you? Do you practice simulated situations? Hell, I don't know what it would take to get properly trained to use a gun for security or defense. It could just be me, but "regularly firing off a few shots at the range" just does not seem as enough of a preparation.

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15 hours ago, King Ned Stark said:

Nearly 70% of gun owners claim to own one for self defense/home protection, not to fight tyranny.

Nearly every single one of those 70% claim they are ready to kill another human being. To me this is the very scary bit about US culture, and the thing that I think has to change to decrease the level of violence in its society. The fact that it is acceptable that people kill to protect mere property, because they are scared, seems insane.

 

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As a separate cultural issue, why do Americans arm themselves against the possibility of government tyranny? For one thing it's not even close to a fair fight. If Lord Trump decides to eliminate the (majority) of voters who didn't vote for him, guess what? Thousands of predator drones will wipe out neighbourhoods in the space of hours. Your guns will not help you one iota.

The USA has a long history of militarised police who engage in civil forfeiture, a justice system based on plea-bargains rather than fair trials and a privatised prison system that forces elected officials to keep pumping in more prisoners. The USA has imprisoned a quarter of all of the world's prisoners. The super-rich 1% hold 40% of all of your assets and don't have to pay taxes due to loopholes. Your current Emperor, Lord Trump, revels and even boasts of how he dodges taxes saying, "That makes me smart," and he is just the one stupid enough to admit to it. Your government is already tyrannical. Your guns didn't save you.

Your "right" to bear arms was a mistake. Your founding fathers stuffed it up by giving it to you. They made lots of mistakes, either due to outright racism (like the 2/3 compromise), sexism (such as "men" to the exclusion of women) or just oversight (such as the Supreme Court not actually having the authority to declare laws unconstitutional).

They also made excellent foresights, especially the Ninth Amendment, which not nearly enough of you boast about.

I obviously know that the majority of Americans don't really believe the "fight against tyranny" idea... which begs the question - why are you arming yourselves against each other? What was the point of making a single Republic, if you're all at war with your own nation?

In short, your guns are either to fight the government, in which case, you'll lose, or to fight each other in which case... you might as well fragment your Union into hundreds of city-states, as what's the point of a national identity where your own citizens are a literal life-or-death threat - not as part of the transition into a nation-state, but as the finished product and as a fact of life.

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The fantasy of Red Dawn and other such things. That's it, really. And maybe, perversely, the experience of  a decade and more of counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq showing that standing up to modern military might is entirely possible.

I don't know that the 2nd Amendment was a mistake at that specific point in time, but it certainly is one of a number aspects of the Constitution that has not kept pace with developments that the creators of the Constitution could not even come close to imagining. American democracy is an imperfect model, which is why attempts to replicate it elsewhere have uniformly failed, and why there's a feeling among some scholars that it is in dire straits in the U.S. as well.

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