How big a massacre would it take before a gun control law would be carried by a majority in the US?
Or is it not a matter of sheer numbers, but who gets killed? (For instance: what if some moron decided to go after a convention of one of the two large parties?)
To many people in the US, gun ownership is an as equally essential right as freedom of speech.
Assuming you can just introduce "gun control laws" and solve "the gun problem" is a very European centric way of thinking. It will not translate well into actual US policy.
Look, a normal, mental healthy person can get a gun almost everywhere in the world. He/She is checked, screened and if the reasons are not outwordly, the lethal weapon can be owned.
But I don't get how can a FBI suspect, or with a histoy of mental issues, can just simply walk to a weapon store and buy an assault riffle?! Just like that!
USA scares the shit out of me.
EDIT: to make things clear: histoy of mental issues=medical records of mentall illness.
And regarding the idea that the laws are by men and I have to protect myself from the abuse of the law: have you heard of democracy? Next time you vote, choose the ones that can revert/improve that law. I much prefer to oblige the law , bad or good, than to be "protected" by random shooters.
What you said sounds perfectly reasonable, if you have a normal functioning government that executes the law in a normal and reasonable way. The US was founded, however, partly on the idea that laws are executed by humans, and humans are fallible, and if the laws of our country were ever abused, they couldn't unjustly damage or harm the lives of the citizens subject to those laws. With the current proposal regarding terror watch lists, Donald Trump wants to put all Muslims on a terror watch list just because of their religion. Does that sound fair to you? Should those Muslims have their right to self defense taken away because of their religion? This is what our Constitution was designed to protect.
Any legislation relating to mental illness does nothing but create a subclass with less rights. You can either be honest and argue for full restriction of firearms or nothing. I had problems with depression in my early 20s, am I too mentally ill? All a law like this would do is incentivize people to never get help, never see a doctor, and never get medication. The mentally ill don't commit most gun violence. Most mass shooters are not mentally ill, that is a comfortable lie repeated mindlessly by scared people. They're just murderers.
People who just want to take rights away from the sick because they demonize them are literally going to make things worse.
Mental health legislation is a mess. Decades of Freudians spreading misinformation doesn't help, but we also do a horrible job of educating children. We're worse at that than we are at educating children about sex, which if you think about it is no wonder why we have these bizarre nonsense national discussions about how we need to treat all mentally ill people as potential criminals.
Legislation relating to mental illness already creates a subclass with no rights. Apparently Americans are fine with that so long as it doesn't specifically target their right to buy guns (so stripping them of all freedom is a-OK).
A FBI suspect shouldn't have their rights infringed. If there is actual evidence, the FBI should make an arrest. Due process and all. Also, "assault rifle" is misleading anti-gun propaganda. A semi-automatic rifle that's called an "assault rifle" is only cosmetically different but generally functionally identical.
> To many people in the US, gun ownership is an as equally essential right as freedom of speech.
But that's a relatively recent phenomenon, though. The US has had a strong military history, but the 'citizens need guns to fend off our government' thing has only been frothy for the past little while.
It's not going to go away either, until the US kicks the societal idea that problems are best solved by men with guns. It's going to take a long time for that to ebb away, even if public opinion were going in that direction.
Gun control laws won't work even if they're brought in, because handguns will never be a part of them, and it's handguns that do three-quarters of the firearm murders in the US. So there'll be some pissweak restrictions eventually brought in about really fringe longarms, and they'll do nothing to solve the problem.
> But that's a relatively recent phenomenon, though. The US has had a strong military history, but the 'citizens need guns to fend off our government' thing has only been frothy for the past little while.
That idea seemed pretty popular as far back as April 17th, 1775...
Just as freedom of speech, there's no freedom of speech in Europe as it is in the US. You can get arrested in Europe for writing unpopular opinions on Twitter or Facebook ("hate speech").
I don't think anyone has been arrested for writing in 'unpopular opinion'. They've been arrested for writing highly racist content or directing abuse at others.
In some European countries, there are special laws for insulting the monarch. In others, there are laws for insulting foreign heads of state. These laws are sometimes enforced.
For example, two Spanish cartoonists were fined for depicting the Spanish king having sex with his wife captioned with the "unpopular opinion" that getting his wife pregnant was "the closest thing [the king has] done to work in [his] whole life": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7092866.stm
Interesting. I'm surprised that happened, thanks for pointing it out. I've been trying to find more information on the case (to see if the ruling was appealed) but I can't.
Thanks for spurring me into looking up more about it. As a correction, while the person depicted is in fact the present Spanish king (Felipe VI), following his father's abdication, he was at the time prince.
I'd be interested in seeing some sources on this. My guess is that it's not criticising government policy that's a problem but abusive behaviour towards immigrants or criticism backed up with hatred.
In the current Swedish political climate, all you need is not being positive enough towards mass immigration and you're counted as part of the "hate crowd". You really need to watch your mouth if you're in any sort of public position.
While legally not criminal, in practice you will find your right to free speech severely challenged.
I think all such "hate speech" laws are deliberately vague opinion policing and unrightfully limits freedom of speech. They all need to go.
The death of my entire family at the hands of a gunman, while incredibly tragic, would not make me any less pro-gun. As other commenters have stated, the right to own guns is fundamental to the identity of many Americans. If the government could take away our guns, what else could they do?
Perhaps you should look to other western democracies to see how they deal with it?
Seriously, the whole 'guns protect our rights from the government' argument is nonsense. There's been all sorts of assaults on the Bill of Rights in the past couple of decades, and there's been next to zero organised, armed resistance against the government. And those who do engage in armed resistance against the government get nowhere with it. You can keep government agents at bay for a short while with your weapon, but they're going to win.
Imagine if instead of "we need our guns to protect us from the government", there was as much passion in "we need to engage ourselves in our communities, to engage ourselves in politics". You'd have stronger community bonds, less fear, and more traction. The government would stop being seen as "those people over there", and start being seen as "that thing that we are part of".
Other western democracies did not struggled through what America struggled through to free itself from the British monarchy in order to establish democracy.
Because of that, these western democracies do not value the importance of arms the way Americans value it.
Arms of the American people is the basis for which democracy in America was built on.
Right. Most of those countries in Europe have never been threatened by invasion or fought off invaders. Oh. Wait. They have. This notion of an antagonistic relationship to the world around us is childish and has to end. The small-minded fears of a minority of this country are inflicting greater fear and damage on the rest of us.
They see things differently than Americans. Unlike Americans, Europeans countries do not see the value and importance of guns, even after they got conquered or have to fight off invaders.
>The small-minded fears of a minority of this country are inflicting greater fear and damage on the rest of us.
The same thing could be said about anti-gun people. These people fear guns, and because of that irrational fear, they're trying to infringe other people's fundemental right to self-defense.
You don't want a gun. Cool. But I want a gun. I am not forcing you to own a gun, so why are you forcing me to not own a gun?
How about we let each person decides what he wants to do instead? You don't buy a gun. And I buy a gun. It's call Freedom.
> Unlike Americans, Europeans countries do not see the value and importance of guns, even after they got conquered or have to fight off invaders.
Sure we do. We just have an actual system for managing this, making sure weapons that are actually useful for defense are quickly available to those actually trained to use them in resistance fighting.
Compared to the American system of wild-west-style anarchy, where people with little to no training in resistance tacticts buy a wide variety of weapons more or less suitable for resistance fighting and with a huge variety of mutually-incompatible ammo, who do you think is better prepared?
Here in Norway, for instance, people who serve a year in the National Guard get issued a service weapon (currently HK416, used to be AG3) and a decent amount of ammo when they are finished. In the olden days, these were stored at home, but today we have many decentralised storage facilities around the country which spring into action if the Russians come.
No where did I mention armed resistance. This discussion is framed the wrong way. It isn't about plastic/wooden/metal sticks that eject lead, it is about whether citizens should give up their rights.
It's one of fundamental rights of an American. It's one of the power granted to the people by the Constitution.
Asking the people to give up this power is as idiotic as asking Congress to give up its power.
Also of note, the Constitution specifically DENIED the government the power to outright ban guns. The government can regulate it, but the government can not outright ban it.
There's calls right here in this discussion to alter the constitution. It's not sacrosanct. So it's not impossible to regulate guns in a way that would not be allowed under today's constitution, just difficult.
edit: I see you've discussed this below. Interesting though that gun owners rising up to protect themselves from the government wouldn't be constitutional (it would be done under the authority of the gun, not under the authority of the Constitution).
I see where you're coming from, but I don't agree. The Constitution specifically protects the people's ability to maintain the force necessary to be a credible threat. If not to maintain the threat of armed rebellion, what purpose would it serve?
Obviously actually engaging in insurrection against a constitutional government would not be constitutional. Anyone taking arms against the government would presumably believe that that government was not operating within the confines the Constitution provides; the act of insurrection would be seen by them as a remedy to an unconstitutional government and therefore neither party would be subject to it.
Additionally, it seems to me like the gun control crowd advocate in the US is not going directly for the 2nd amendment, but instead trying to go for a route that will cause valid concern (5th and 6th amendment violation for the recent bill of "no gun if you're on no fly list", for example).
When I saw on Twitter today someone saying that (paraphrase mine) "it's acceptable for some people to lose their constitutional rights if we can prevent gun-related deaths", it's not hard to see how it might be a tough pill to swallow for the more right-leaning demographic, regardless of their stance on gun control.
This is entirely about who gets killed or who could be killed. It was legal to openly bear arms in in California until the Black Panthers exercised that right. Ronald Reagan quickly signed a bill into law making it illegal after protesters peacefully marched through the Capitol Building bearing arms [1]. There is currently a petition to allow open-carry at the GOP convention, which many Republicans have said will not be allowed no matter how many signatures it gets [2]. The CDC has been restricted from researching gun violence as a public health issue for 20 years [3]. Take a guess as to what party is enforcing this restriction.
> Or is it not a matter of sheer numbers, but who gets killed?
In the UK, it was the Dunblane incident that triggered this (you can google it). In the 1990s, some madman with gun just strode inside a high-school at Dunblane in Scotland and started indiscriminate firing. Many teachers and students were killed and after this event, the UK government just outlawed the guns in the hands of civilians.
Maybe, in USA such an extreme event hasn't happened yet, so they have not banned guns yet.
Yeah I remember almost exactly when it happened because it (and later Columbine) set off a lot of media hysteria about violence in video games. I think there might be consequences to playing violent games on some level (it's your
mission to shoot people) but the way they went about it was wrong-headed and sensational.
How big a massacre would it take before a gun control law would be carried by a majority in the US?
You know this is the same exact tactic the FBI is playing to advance their goal of warantless access to web history, right?
But it's different, one may say. One scenario uses the swelling of strong emotion after a news event to try and pass a law curbing constitutional rights. And the other scenario ___________________.
It's sometimes surprising how difficult it is for a death toll to force political action a sizable minority of the population strongly opposes.
How many people had to die from tobacco before even our currently very modest restrictions were put on its use and sale? Cigarettes can't be used as defense against wildlife, they can't be used for hunting, they can't be used in guerrilla defense during an invasion. But they're addictive and so even though they've played a part in killing millions and have been estimated to kill over 40,000 non-smokers a year, it's extremely difficult and time consuming to regulate them. And they aren't protected in the Bill of Rights, either.
We're probably going to see very slow change for gun control in the US, and with increasingly sharply divided opinions among voters.
> How big a massacre would it take before a gun control law would be carried by a majority in the US?
A majority already does but they don't really care, whereas the NRA has a relatively small numbers of highly motivated people to push against gun control bills (I believe John Oliver made that exact point recently).
The US have already got bigger massacres than the already mentioned Dunblane (18 deaths 15 injured, 1996), or Port Arthur (35 deaths 25 injured, 1996) which resulted in significant gun control increase in the UK[0] and Australia[1] respectively.
While I don't think it's just who gets killed, I think there are some groups which would trigger better response than others. Most likely groups:
Republican convention. NRA meeting. Gun shows.
Maybe even a different order... The argument that good people with guns stop bad people with guns would fall pretty quickly after the first real shooting at a gun show. (especially if it results in accidental deaths if someone reacts too quickly and there's loads of people with guns around)
We already have gun control laws, restricting guns and regulating them.
Do you mean gun banning laws? Because if you're talking about gun banning, that's never going to happen. The American citizens will not give them up without a bloody civil war. It is one of the fundamental rights of an American. It is at the core of American values, the root American identity.
What would it take? No murders. Just a carefully reasoned persuasive argument that the people are better off without the 2nd amendment, and a realistic path to getting rid of it in a way that won't trigger riots or another civil war.
1. A majority doesn't matter. We don't have a direct democracy, and for all the bad special interests do to corrupt democracy, sometimes there are special interest groups that understand narrow issues better than the average voter, and should have disproportionate influence on legislation.
2. What gun control law? [1]
3. Between the 2nd and 4th amendments, there's not much room for an enforceable gun control law that will prohibit would-be (but not-yet) jihadists and crazy people from obtaining guns.
The good news is that the majority of domestic gun violence (excepting suicides) is related to gangs and the drug war, so a lot could be done—if anyone wanted to do something about that rather than use gun crime rates as political ammunition—without bringing up gun control.
Good luck getting an amendment banning guns through Congress.
And even if it gets through Congress, there will be a bloody civil war afterward. Remember, the goal of banning guns is to prevent American deaths. If you ban guns, it will cause a bloody civil war that will result in the death of 50% of Americans. Congratuatlions, you have just failed in your original goal.
Passing a Constitutional amendment is a perfectly legal, valid process - the Second Amendment, like all amendments, is subject to debate and possible repeal.
That some segment of the US population is willing to commit murder over that shouldn't really be relevant to the debate - such people aren't acting in defense of the Constitution, they're just asking like thugs and vigilantes.
Congress still have to listen to the people. If Congress goes against the people, then that's exactly what the 2nd Amendment is there for (for when the government go against the people).
Presumably it would be difficult, if not impossible, to repeal the 2nd Amendment without popular support. If it were to happen then by definition, Congress was listening to the people. "The people" also includes people who support gun control.
If gun owners are a minority, it would be no problem because democracy is all about majority rules.
But gun owners are not a minority. And more importantly, they will never agree to give up their guns.
So banning guns is never going to happen. This issue of mass shootings will have to be tackle in other ways. You can call gun owners thugs all you want, but that doesn't solve the issue.
Where are you getting your numbers? Mine say ~26% of Americans own at least one gun. The trend in the US seems to be towards fewer gun owners, but more guns per owner, which would seem to put gun owners in a minority (albeit a heavily armed minority.)
Also, you seem to be implying that all gun owners would necessarily be willing to start a war to keep their guns, and that's not an assertion supported by evidence.
> You can call gun owners thugs all you want, but that doesn't solve the issue.
I'm not calling gun owners thugs, I'm calling gun owners willing to threaten violence over even legitimate political processes thugs. This is supposed to be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Everything is theoretically negotiable given enough support, even the Second Amendment and the Constitution itself. That's meant to be a feature, not a bug.
Passing an amendment to ban guns is different from, for example, passing an amendment to give women the right to vote.
Giving women the right to vote is giving a group a new right. Banning guns is taking away a right from a group.
Arms is one of the power granted to the people by the Constitution.
Asking the people to give up this power is as idiotic as asking Congress to give up its power. Just because some people prefer not to exercise this right (arms) does not mean they can take it away from those who prefer to exercise it. Just like you can not take men's right to vote without a civil war. Just because some men does not want to vote does not mean you can take away other men's right to vote. All men must agree first, or there will be civil war, because you're infringing on another men's right.
Also of note, the Constitution specifically DENIED the government the power to outright ban guns. The government can regulate it, but the government can not outright ban it.
>A well regulated militia...
Meaning the government can regulate arms.
>...arms shall not be infringed.
Meaning the government can not outright ban arms.
So again, can guns be banned? Yea, but only if everyone 99% of the population agrees. Which is never going to happen, because we all know the gun owners will never agree. And if the gun owners disagree, then the government and those who agrees are infringing on gun owner's rights. At which point, they will exercise their 2nd Amendment right and there will be civil war.
Again, guns will never be banned because guns owner will never agree to give up their fundamental rights.
Or is it not a matter of sheer numbers, but who gets killed? (For instance: what if some moron decided to go after a convention of one of the two large parties?)