Its a good thing the second amendment doesn’t just include a clause for hunting! People often forget it says
“A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
Too many people don’t understand that “militia” and “people” are synonymous as used in 2A.
Then why does the amendment refer to a Well Regulated Militia? If “People” were synonymous, the amendment doesn’t make sense. “Well regulated people”?
Go back to Article I, Section 8, and perform that same substitution. Replacing “Militia” with “People” does not change the meaning of Article I in the slightest.
The term “militia” was used in the second amendment specifically to reference the militia clauses in Article I. If Article I had referred to “Yeomanry” or “Snorglubben”, the Second Amendment would have used those terms instead.
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the
MilitiaPeople, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training theMilitiaPeople according to the discipline prescribed by CongressCan’t say I agree with your conclusion there, that’s a pretty significant change of meaning. The Militia is explicitly described as something that is organized, armed, disciplined, and trained by Officers.
Are you not a person?
Does Congress not have the authority to organize you, arm you, govern you, employ you? Do the states not have the authority to appoint officers over you, or train you according to the discipline prescribed by Congress?
Can you not be called forth to enforce law, suppress insurrection, or repel invasion?
You certainly can make some distinctions between “person” and “militiaman”. A 4-year-old child is a person and not a militiaman. The courts would certainly rule against the idea that Congress can organize a Children’s Brigade under the militia clauses. They would rule on constitutional grounds against paraplegics, or the mentally disabled being drafted. But we aren’t talking about these exceptional cases. We are talking about the general case, and the general case is that it is your status as a person that makes you a member of the militia.
Indeed, I think that Congress should establish a requirement that every American be trained on safe handling procedures, as well as on the laws governing the use of force in self defense and defense of others. They have that authority under the Militia clauses; I think they should exercise it.
Squares and rectangles, you can’t generalize a subset as synonymous with its superset.
Congress should establish a requirement that every American be trained on safe handling procedures, as well as on the laws governing the use of force in self defense and defense of others.
You won’t hear any argument from me on this point, I do believe the states should organize and train adults with some degree of competency, although this was written when Militias were the primary national defense in lieu of the standing Army we now maintain.
But the rest of your interpretation reads more like you’re working backwards from the conclusion you want to prove.
Do the states not have the authority to appoint officers over you, or train you according to the discipline prescribed by Congress?
Can you not be called forth to enforce law, suppress insurrection, or repel invasion?
Broadly speaking, no I would not say that’s the case .
The founders did not make a habit of codifying lazy verbage, if they meant People in general they would have written People in general. They chose the words they did to convey specific and distinct meanings. Militia refers particularly to that portion of a community trained for “martial exercise”. If you’re not trained, I’d argue specifically trained by the state, you’re not part of the Militia. A candidate for it perhaps, but not a member until you’ve been trained by the state for the purpose.
You won’t hear any argument from me on this point, I do believe the states should organize and train adults with some degree of competency
As you used it in that statement, the term “adults” is synonymous with “well regulated militia” as used in the constitution, and “people” as I have used the term.
It is because we are militia/people/adults that we can be compelled to attend the training you describe, or be otherwise drafted into service.
Squares and rectangles, you can’t generalize a subset as synonymous with its superset.
This is true, there is not a complete overlap, but I accounted for the non-squares in my last comment. My point is not that militia contains absolutely all members of “we the people”. My point is made when “equilateral rectangles” are the general rule, and “non square” is an exceptional case.
When you see a random person on the street and have no special information about them, It is unreasonable to presume they are not a member of the militia.
Indeed it doesn’t protect hunting or self defence at all. Only the collective defense.
Which arguably makes the AR-15 one of the most protected guns, if we’re using the wording of the second amendment as the only justification for firearms rights.
You can do a lot of damage with medium caliber rifles running internal clips. Such a limit would be more than enough for a militia unless everyone is practicing their tactical magazine changes and fireteam movement drills.
What? No it wouldn’t? They hand grunts 30 round magazines for a reason. They used to give them 20 round magazines for the same rifle. Minimizing administrative tasks is good for your soldier.
Soldiers are also trained in several different firing modalities that depend on teamwork. Those 30 rounds aren’t there just because “it’s easier”. I would sooner hand a militiaman a bolt action than a 30 round semi/burst capable weapon. They’d be less likely to blow through significant portions of their ammo load just because the wind made a tree creak. And before you say no, remember the cop that unloaded on his own car because of an acorn. We don’t arm units for their best person, we give them the gun that’s good enough for the lowest common denominator. The 2nd amendment doesn’t make everyone a line Infantryman.
The US military would one million percent prefer the population be trained and familiar on the standard issue rifle than on any other platform. (Arguments of the quality training put aside)
Then we better start giving everyone burst fire weapons.
No?
The military is just fine with its irregulars using something else. We worked alongside locals running AK platforms for 20 years.
They are good hunting rifles for feral hogs actually, 30 round mags included.
Plus, banning certain magazine sizes or particular models of rifle isn’t really going to fix anything, but things like universal background checks would probably help.
Truly “Universal” background checks are just a way of criminalizing the overwhelming majority of “transfers” between known and trusted parties. We don’t need this sort of “universal” background check. This approach is only intended to cast FUD on ownership.
The current law basically says it is illegal to “knowingly” transfer a gun to a prohibited person. The problem is that there is no reliable, publicly-accessible means for a private individual to “know” that an individual is prohibited. NICS checks are not available to the public; they are only available to FFL dealers. So long as the recipient doesn’t disclose their prohibited status, it is basically impossible to prove a private seller “knew” the buyer was prohibited.
The solution should be obvious: establish a means of publicly accessing NICS. Have the buyer perform a check in themselves, and provide the seller with a verification code to securely and confidentially access the results of that check.
With that access in place, a seller can know, and can legally be expected to know the status of a buyer. The “knowingly” criteria can now be presumed to have been met, and willful ignorance on the part of the seller is no longer a viable defense.
This approach makes it possible to prosecute 100% of private sellers who transfer to felons, without criminalizing any innocent transfers. It accomplishes every legitimate purpose of “universal” background checks, without any of the harmful, “unintended” FUD that truly universal checks would impose.
Nope. Because you can know and trust that felon white supremacist militia man all day. The rest of us would very much like to prevent them from getting a gun ever again. And the honesty system obviously isn’t working.
Hoping people just use the system isn’t any better either.
Requiring an FFL to be part of all transfers and keeping the records solves this. And black helicopter paranoia isn’t a good reason to not do it.
Nope. Because you can know and trust that felon white supremacist
If I handed a gun to that individual today, without knowing he was a felon, I would be exonerated: I didn’t know.
If I did it tomorrow, after NICS checks are made available to the public, I would be convicted: I should have known. My claim of ignorance no longer exonerates me. My claim of ignorance is now an admission of guilt: I could have known, I should have known, I was responsible for knowing, and I failed to perform my due diligence and duty.
Requiring an FFL to be part of all transfers and keeping the records solves th
Define “transfer”.
When my neighbor says he’s feeling low and needs me to take custody of his guns for awhile, does he need to conduct a background check to give them to me? Or can I walk over and take care of them? If I am injured in a car crash, can I hand my gun to my sister before the ambulance takes me to the hospital?
My brother and I both have Glock 17 handguns. We used them at the range. A few weeks later, I looked at the serial number on my gun and realized we had swapped them. Should we both be jailed?
The punishment for violating this “universal” background check requirement is going to have to be a simple fine at most; anything more is going to be an egregious miscarriage of justice in all of these cases and in virtually every scenario in which it could be applied. It will be treated about the same as failing to renew a driver’s license or vehicle registration; a purely administrative offense.
And how is the government going to know you handed them the gun?
The guns go to an FFL for storage. And if you can’t keep track of your guns then they should absolutely be removed from you. Get a paint marker if you need to. It’s what the Army does.
What public safety concern are you mitigating in any of the scenarios I described? What impediments to public safety are you creating when you impose your mandates?
How do the guns get to the FFL? If I take them, the transfer has already occurred. The only available method with a “universal” system is for my neighbor to take them himself.
Yes, that’s the idea. If your neighbor wants to give you guns, they take them to an FFL and then you pick them up after the FFL runs your background check. Or the FFL can just store them. At no point should guns transfer between people without a record that is permanently kept.
And the problem with what you’re suggesting is if you give your guns to Billy Bob the terrorist, and he never tells anyone where he got them from then you aren’t even getting a knock at the door. There’s not even a case for you to defend yourself in. If you happen to have a particularly new gun which still has records then you can just say you “lost it” which is another loophole we need to fix. Losing a gun needs to be a crime that results in forfeiting the right to own guns.
This blasé attitude about guns for the sake of preventing a hypothetical tyrannical crack down needs to die and never be brought back.
Do me a favor and run your little plan by a mental health professional, a social worker, a paramedic, a 14-year-old babysitter… The moment you left those guns in the hands of my emotionally distraught neighbor for even a second after he asked for help, you lost this particular argument.
There are decent arguments for a UBC; you’re not making them. You should be focusing on what few public safety benefits would actually arise. You should be drawing attention away from the myriad administrative clusterfuck issues where UBCs fail, and toward those few scenarios where UBCs would actually benefit public safety. You should be conceding that “Universal” is completely impractical. You should be pointing out that none of the proposed "U"BC plans have ever actually been truly “U”, and that all of them have included broad exceptions in a (piss-poor) attempt to avoid many of the problems I’ve described.
Your mentality of treating guns as “NBD” is the real issue here. Guns have been dumbed down and ingrained so heavily into our society, that you almost jokingly say how you “switched guns at one point”.
All of that absolutely should be illegal. And we shouldn’t be so careless with our weapons, as you make it sound so normal to have done.
You’re going to have to explain how my brother’s Glock 17 is somehow a significant threat to public safety in my hands, while my own Glock 17 is perfectly safe.
While you’re contemplating that, try this one on for size: under a “universal” system, a felon in possession of a gun cannot be charged for transferring to another felon. There is case law on this point, relating to felons failing to register firearms. The state cannot compel an individual to admit to or to commit a crime. Requiring FFL involvement constitutes either self incrimination or entrapment should the felon attempt to make the transfer through them, so he cannot be prosecuted for failing to use one.
Under my scheme, however, the seller’s status is entirely irrelevant. The state merely needs to prove the seller made the transfer and the buyer was prohibited. The seller could know, and should know the buyer’s status, and is criminally liable for not checking. A felon-seller can be charged both for simple possession and for transferring to another felon.
The danger is you being so non-chalant about your weapons that you do not realize you have just swapped them. There are a billion scenarios in which doing so gets you arrested even today with current laws.
You can act as tough and mighty as you’d like, but viewing guns in this way, and acting so non-chalant about them is how people get killed.
There are a billion scenarios in which doing so gets you arrested even today with current laws.
There probably are. But that wasn’t the question. The question was about the danger to the public in this specific scenario. The only difference is the serial number. What significantly greater danger is the public in from the differing inscriptions stamped into our receivers?
The correct and obvious answer is, of course, “none at all”, which is why I raised the point to begin with. The fact that I could be “arrested even today with current laws” demonstrates that such laws are not actually enhancing public safety, and should be adjusted so that they don’t criminalize completely inoffensive acts.
And they’re apparently good for hunting the elusive unarmed school children in the middle of class. 30 round mags included!
So would any number of other rifles, handguns, and/or shotguns. Focusing on a single rifle is pointless.
Assuming proper training and ammunition, they’re perfectly capable for hunting small to medium game such as rabbits, coyotes, tyrants, wild hogs, and whitetail deer.
I don’t think some people know how much damage a pack of wild hogs can cause to crops and farmland in short order. If it wasn’t going to be an AR-15 keeping them off the farm it would be another intermediate or higher caliber semi-automatic rifle that accepts standard magazines. Everyone want’s to laugh at that excuse until the farmer has a bad season and has to sell his land to Bill Gates or Chinese investors, they don’t exactly make large margins.
The magazine capacity is an issue though. The standard 30 round mag is far to large for any realistic hunting purposes (you can also get up to 100 round drum mags). While you can hunt with an AR-15, it’s not the best rifle for the task.
I live in Canada and the government is in the process of banning semi-automatic centre fire rifles capable of holding more than 5 rounds. Given that 3D printers exist, this pretty much bans all rifles with interchangeable mags. I’m a gun owner on a rural property and I think that’s a reasonable compromise. I can still own a decent bolt action hunting rifle and a semi-automatic rim fire rifle with no mag limit.
It does suck for people who’s rifles are getting banned though.While you can hunt with an AR-15, it’s not the best rifle for the task.
It’s not the best rifle for any task. But it’s a good enough rifle for most tasks, and between real AR-15s and the various clones they are cheap, in common calibers, and have accessories widely available.
Which is why it’s the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin.
It being the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin is in turn why it’s so often used in public mass shootings, as those are usually done with weapons of convenience rather than something bought for purpose. Likely also why the guy who shot Trump used one.
If a public mass shooter wanted the best gun for the job, they’d get something closer to a PS-90 (the civilian version of the P-90 which is a military rifle designed for urban combat).
If a public mass shooter wanted the best gun for the job, they’d get something closer to a PS-90 (the civilian version of the P-90 which is a military rifle designed for urban combat).
You’re neglecting the fact that mass shooters are murderers, so close combat isn’t their thing - and the best gun for the job has already been shown - ar15-style rifles - 14!! - with drum mags and bump stocks:
On October 1, 2017, a mass shooting occurred when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada from his 32nd-floor suites in the Mandalay Bay hotel. He fired more than 1,000 rounds, killing 60 people[a] and wounding at least 413. The ensuing panic brought the total number of injured to approximately 867. About an hour later, he was found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
That’s a lie. Anyone familiar with guns knows he had a machine gun up there.
That’s a lie. Anyone familiar with guns knows he had a machine gun up there.
roflwhat?
this is such a silly response I can’t even.
he purchased 24 firearms over the course of years. Most were AR types - 14 .223 ar15 patterns but also AR-10s and a .308 bolt action.
you could argue he made them machine-gun like with the c-mags and bump stocks; as the shooting went on his firing came in longer and longer bursts, 90+ rounds - but there were no ‘machine guns’ in the ATF tax stamp sense.
Just stupid american laws crafted by idiot politicians owned by the gun lobby allowing civilians to approximate a half ass version that’s basically only effective for murdering unarmed civilians. A real machine gun is belt or box fed, has changeable barrels, a tripod or bipod with T&E, an AG…
Yeah I watched the video. That weren’t what they said.
Honestly external magazines need to just be banned. That way it’s immediately clear a rifle is legal or not. It’s also great for hunting still, and okay for self/collective defense. But not great as a mass casualty producer.
hunting human rifles.
let’s be honest, it was designed as a lightweight emergency carbine made of space aged materials. 60 years later we’re arguing if the founding fathers meant bump stocks and cmags when they said well regulated militia.
lightweight emergency carbine
Huh, was it? So the platform wasn’t designed as a main infantry weapon?
Not initially. went through tons of growth after the AR-10 was designed.
Thanks
Y’know, this is in this weird spot where it’s right between canon and as seen (which, by the way, can be explained even with canonical things). If it was truly as seen, the shots would have gone way wide. If it was truly canon, the Reps would be scrambling for a new candidate now.
The explanation for Stormtroopers’ shoddy marksmanship on screen in A New Hope is because Vader wanted Leia & company to escape, but by the skin of their teeth, so that they would basically drop their guard the instant The Falcon took off from the Death Star and not realise there was a tracker bug installed. If Vader just let them fly off unopposed, that would probably be hella sus, and they’d probably pull over at the first asteroid to find and chuck said tracker bug. So the Stormtroopers were specifically instructed to shoot to thrill, not to kill.
When faced with opposition without plot armour and reasons to keep them alive, Stormtroopers are fucking brutal, as seen in The Empire Strikes Back - Hoth was somewhere between a decisive Imperial victory and an Imperial Curb Stomp
When faced with opposition without plot armour and reasons to keep them alive, Stormtroopers are fucking brutal, as seen in The Empire Strikes Back - Hoth was somewhere between a decisive Imperial victory and an Imperial Curb Stomp
Their shooting was also terrible on Endor. Maybe those were the flunky storm troopers that got put on the imperial guard due to nepotism or corruption?
I suspect that any modern force ambushed in a jungle, or any type of complex, unfamiliar terrain, by primitive fighters who know the place like the back of their hands will suffer.
There are stories of UK soldiers in the sixties being ambushed by a man with a scimitar, and it took them a while and several fairly serious injuries before they could line up a shot with their FALs.
Not to forget the Vietnam war which, despite the advanced force being a coalition led by the US, and said coalition resorting to torching the jungle and other war crimes, still ended being up a North Vietnamese victory.The Endor force, while not outgunned, was maybe outnumbered and definitely outwitted.
People joke about the shooter “missing”, but at a few hundred feet away, a 2" miss is clearly within the influence of wind.
Trump got extremely lucky. I don’t think this was the result of a poor shot.
He fired 8 shots. It was poor shooting.
I mean I think I’d say it was more the result of poor preparation than anything. I think most places are saying he had like, 3 shots or somewhere around there, and apparently his rifle had no optic on it at all, which is kind of an insane idea at that distance. Which I think also maybe lends credence to the idea that this was just some impulse decision rather than a prepared kind of thing. I don’t think it’s that hard of a shot to make in general, even given the single opportunity that you’re going to be working with, I’ve hit soda cans with .22s at similar ranges. You barely have to take into account windage or holdover and I haven’t seen any evidence of heavy wind on the day of, really.
So, I dunno, I think it’s probably just an idiot kid killing himself in like, some elaborate suicide by cop or something. or just a dumb groyper, jury’s still out.
