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Random 2A Thoughts
1. There was a distinct moral basis for the entire Bill of Rights. The First Amendment is a declaration that the greatest abuse of government authority is to make one violate his own conscience. There is a fundamental right to live one’s beliefs, nor be compelled to conform to contrary moral/theological notions, nor be silenced when things need to be said. The Second Amendment is about discharging the moral obligation to defend one’s family and community. For the founding generation, compulsory disarmament was not just tyranny but directly infringed on a matter of conscience. That this right was second only to express protections for deeply held beliefs illustrates its centrality in the moral calculus that shaped the Constitution.
2. There are few legislative solutions if a criminal is suicidal. It is already illegal (with stiff penalties) for hijacking and crashing airplanes or shooting children. The threat of sanction only functions as a deterrent in the risk-benefit calculus for criminals who prefer and plan not to be caught.
So we must know the enemy. Can we identify and anticipate? Should we expand rather than restrict weapons possession to harden the target that is normal life? Bureaucratic harassment of arms-owning normals is clearly never the answer. Maybe if the Deep State is going to spy on us anyway, perhaps focus on express social media declarations of violent intent instead of school board protests and vaccination opposition.
3. Currently, our enlightened thinkers believe that self-defense should be entirely delegated to the police. This opens up a form of government abuse pioneered by Hugo Chavez. He dispatched his cadre of Cuban thugs against dissidents and then withheld police protection. Disarming citizens, fostering chaos, and then making protection conditional on compliance is tyranny. (Will the Ferguson Effect give big city regimes ideas along these lines?) Ben Franklin saw this kind of policy firsthand when the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania discovered that the Royal Governor had promised native tribes that the militia and British regulars would not defend settlers west of the agreed line even though such settlements were entirely legal under the charter and law of the commonwealth.
4. Given the moral underpinning of 2A, it is perverse or at least ironic that a kneejerk hatred of guns and their owners is supposed to confer moral superiority and self-gratulations.
5. We need perspective borne of better math skills. Based on a half-century of data, the chances of a mass shooting in your kid’s school in any given year is one in 550,000. The extent of the very real horror of a statistically freak event does not make it a trend or our biggest legislative challenge. Resisting the temptation to Do Something when there is no solution at hand is hard but necessary.
Published in General
According to World Population Review on gun ownership by country, the US owns 1.2 guns per person which is the highest rate and well above the 2nd highest which has 0.6 guns per person. The US ranks 72nd among the countries listed by homicide rate on the same website. Comparing the two rates, there does not seem to be any correlation.
Now, many people do not own a single gun. Some people own many guns. I would wager that a person with many guns is less likely to commit a crime with a gun than a person with few or no guns. I imagine this partly to the idea that the average law-abiding citizen who owns many guns has to be fairly productive in society to afford to own many guns.
My hypothesis which could probably be studied and developed is that the more guns a person owns the less likely they are to use them in criminal activities.* The proper way to do this is to work on raising the standard of living in a natural way, so every person on their own can afford to buy the guns or something else if they choose to do so.
*I immediately imagine there would be some that if they became convinced of this would decide to purchase and give 5 guns to every man, woman, and child in the US. But this kind of thinking is partially why people can’t afford to buy more guns, milk bread, etc.
Agree on all points. Re point #1, I am reminded of Kevin D. Williamson’s observation that the Bill of Rights should have been called the Bill of Things Too Basic for You to be Allowed to Vote On.
KDW has had a lot of excellent stuff on 2A in the past week or so over on NRO.
It is pointless to compare US gun ownership to other countries like the left does. First, the assumption of such charts is the lower the number, the better. Second, the average number is driven lower by tyrannical regimes that disarm and oppress the people. Finally, no number is accurate. No country has accurate records of gen ownership, not even the US.
Infringing on gun rights is the red line they dare not cross. Every Republican who goes squishy on this must be defeated. Every red state must declare crossing that redline will not be tolerated and considered a violation of the pact made by ratifying the Constitution.
Republicans spread many lies about guns. Republicans in Congress don’t know enough to dispel those lies.
The funny part of this is that I want the option to have a gun to protect me and mine as I see fit in a moments notice. All these folk, these elite have that option already with their security teams. Many will keep these teams and most likely also carry. They just want to be sure me and mine can not.
Do you remember that time the guy at the flight school in Florida called the FBI, because he had a bunch of Middle Eastern students that wanted to learn to fly a jumbo jet, but not learn how to take-off or land? My takeaways: (1) there are often signs in the suicidal killers, if we keep our eyes open; (2) we have to have a process to react to the signs; (3) our government focuses on closing the barn door *after* the horse is out.
That means we need a process to identify and flag the nutters. We need a process to identify weakness and correct them *before* a disaster occurs. There is also the harder problem of fixing a culture of fatherlessness and destroying Marxism.
What we need is the will to do it, and to do it honestly — as opposed to politically.
I was thinking about this the other day and is what triggered my first comment. There was a story years ago about a community in Florida that made it mandatory to own a gun. Maybe someone here remembers where it was. Supposedly crime dropped dramatically.
There is a lot of good data if it is properly used. Like this stat you mention.
Youth violence in general does a lot more damage, but sadly, is too common to be newsworthy. The number of homicide deaths in 2020 for the age group 5-18 in the US was 2,198, an average of 6 per day. If we include the 2,177 suicides it was 12 per day. The leading cause of death is unintentional injury and the number was 4,712 in 2020. These numbers are from National Vital Statistics System.
Do you apply this to Satan worship? Do you apply it to the bloodthirsty religion of human sacrifice practiced by the Aztecs, among others?
There were 1,955 firearms-related homicides in 2020 in ages 5-18 in the US.*
1,786 of those were in the metro areas. The map tool only shows data points of 10 or more** and those account for 856 of the homicides and these occurred in only 42 counties.*
The census bureau has a count of 3,006 counties in the US which I think includes “statistically equivalent” entities like parishes.
42 / 3,006 = 1.4% of the country on a county basis.
4.8% of the 1,786 metro area homicides were in Cook County, IL.
* Data source: NCHS Vital Statistics System for numbers of deaths. Bureau of Census for population estimates.
** If I’m understanding the data suppression correctly. I think the data is considered still subject to change as it is reviewed.
It would be interesting to see the gun-related regulations if any in those 42 counties.
This is the type of confusion we have now that we have allowed the left to silence the narrative that we are a Judeo-Christian country that allows most other religions to prosper. We have no obligation to allow religions that break our laws like the extreme examples you mentioned. Ergo, an atheist is allowed to be an atheist but he has no right to demand he not be exposed to our our religious practices.
It is true that statistically speaking, the chances of a child being involved in a school shooting is extremely small.
However the Teachers’ Unions in every state of the nation are heavily influenced in peddling the idea that at any moment, the door may swing open and the children in some classroom will be slaughtered.
This reminds me of how the nuns in my 1950/60’s Catholic grammar school focused on how likely it was that on any given day, the US and the Soviet Union’s Mutually Assured Destruction pact might go awry and we might all be incinerated before we kids could even engage in “duck and cover.”
Anyway the Unions indoctrinate the teachers who then merrily indoctrinate the students. Additionally from time to time the Unions organize a “Take the Whole Day Off From School To March Around with Signs Demanding Gun Control” and you now have a system whereby kids — always eager to be freed from the classroom — hear various speakers and learn to applaud the correct speaking points and then go on to participate in parroting the correct thoughts.
After that fun fest, the rest of the week can be devoted to re-hashing what the students have learned.
Like so many other important points on Saul Alinsky’s path to destroy America, this one major method of brain washing our students has certainly been well designed.
Regrettably, I truly do not see any way for it to not meet with success.
I think yr statement that a person with many guns is less likely to use them in criminal activities should add the idea that this depends on whether or not the gun owner is in a gang in the inner cities (Sadly now gangs operate in our suburbs as well.)
Clearly the many gun owners in Chicago, Baltimore, LA, Detroit, San Francisco Bay area etc commit crimes including murder quite frequently.
The keyword is “own”. I have no facts, but I suspect a criminal who legally owns guns is rare and a criminal who has many guns for their own use is rare. If one does have many, they likely have them to sell and what they possess is not likely owned by them. It is just my guess that the many gun owners who actually legally own the guns in the cities you mention are probably not committing crimes frequently.
Maybe this applies well enough to legal, law abiding gun owners. Maybe there’s another association. Maybe those who have illegal guns are more likely to shoot someone, the more guns they have.
This is a map related to the 1,786 firearm-related homicides in metro areas in 2020 ages 5-18. I think the counties shown are considered part of the metro areas, but not 100%. The colored-in counties would be the 42 counties with 10 or more which accounts for 856 of the homicides.
The non-metro map does not have any counties in color which I assume to mean all were less than 10. Non-metro areas accounted for 169 homicides.
Agreed.
I’ll go you one further. The Second is also there to preserve our ability to do what they had done when they saw fit.
And what of those torture-worshipping Christians, especially the Catholics with their ritual cannibalism?
Catholic and Christian is not the same thing. As I have been told many time in my life including this site.
All Catholics are Christian. All Christians are not Catholic. All Christians are members of the catholic church because catholic just means universal. I think the torture-worshipping groups would be CINO or CINO depending on which name they are using.
I’m not actually throwing stones, of course. And I’ll be happy to make my only point about your observation elsewhere.
The police have NO LEGAL OBLIGATION TO PROTECT AN INDIVIDUAL!
This issue has been raised to the Supreme Court any number of times. Police are not liable for failing to protect any person.
I do not say this to disparage the Uvalde police. My point is that total reliance on them is a recipe for disaster.
Despite it’s garish cover art, I recommend this book to everyone. Dial 911 and die.
One of the reviews summarizes quite well:
I’m really sad that they waited until after the convention for this. lol
I expect something like that in the US someday. Maybe a Executive Order backed up by Administrative Law. It is just a matter of time, they will get them. Then knives, eventually clubs….
Police are the only employment in lawful society that are actually paid to lie. Legally, they can use any verbal technique, make any claim, to get information or a confession. Police are legitimately allowed to lie. Lawyers can’t in the course of their duties. Used car salesmen commit fraud when they lie. Surgeons have to be truthful when the get informed consent. Only police are ever paid to lie.
In my world it would be illegal to make fists.
Gotcha there, you conservative retard! We’re already outlawing words!
The important right underlying the Second Amendment is that no one has the right to take my life away from me.
I’ve always found the wording of the Second Amendment interesting:
(a) The wording instantly recalls for the reader the context of the Revolutionary War. It’s really important to understand that the founding fathers knew better than anyone that a government can make war on their own citizens.
(b) Those pesky commas after “State” and “Arms”: Much ink has been spilled debating the meaning of that single sentence because of those commas. It would be a mistake to read too much into those commas, however. Back then, printers often supplied punctuation (and capitalization) arbitrarily, and they “punctuated by ear.” American printers back then consisted of typesetters and proofreaders in addition to the printers themselves. The printers would insert commas where they heard a pause, and those commas often substituted for the word “and” when the author had omitted the word “and.”
Making matters worse, the printers were working from handwritten copy. Given the wording of the rest of the sentence, I would read the first comma as a substitute for the word “and.” I would read it that way because these are two separate things: (1) the state-benefiting existence of a standing militia and (2) the right of the people to form such militias. Other modern editors read it differently, and that’s because of the lack of consistent rules for punctuation that existed at that time. Those editors read “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” as an appositive for “Militia.” Were that sentence written today, they would be correct.
But I believe my interpretation is most likely correct–that there are two separate items here, the militia and the people–because of the Revolutionary War context in which the Bill of Rights was written. Washington was somewhat fanatical about the danger of a country having and maintaining a “standing army.” He relented during the war, but he had a legitimate fear that an army could easily be used against a country’s own people. This practice was the biggest problem in Europe at that time. The royal families had a Davos-like social life wherein they related more to other royal families than they related to the common people within their own country. It was a matter of course for them to ask another country’s royal family to help them put down a “rebellion” or “insurrection” of their own people. In fact, this was the basis for Oliver Cromwell‘s calling for the execution of Charles I.
I am always grateful to the Americans who fight day and night to preserve this right for us.