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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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You know, that's exactly what people said about Roe v. Wade and about banning abortion.
Turns out that you can keep losing on an issue for 50 years, yet winning only once will drastically change the trajectory of the entire issue.
That's the opposite situation. Pro-life voters and pro-gin voters are the 2 largest single-issue voting groups in the country.
Look at it this way. If you swapped Trump and Biden's positions on abortion but changed nothing else, how many pro-choice Democrats would have voted for Trump?
Basically zero, right. Meanwhile, millions of pro-life Republicans would have flipped because abortion is the singular issue upon which they base their vote.
Guns are in the same boat. Hundreds of thousands of voters vote strictly based on their love of guns. There's no political advantage in the general election for being anti-gun, and the Dems are sacrificing a whole lot of seats to fight this losing battle.
I thought we resolved that with the end of Prohibition?
No he misspelled pro-gyn voters
Yeah nevermind that the constitution says "shall not be infringed"' If abortion rights were in the constitution there would be no way of banning it, just as it is with firearms.
Actually it says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.* It says nothing about procuring them. Banning gun sales is totally on the table. Plus, "arms" is kinda a funny word. It doesn't mean just guns. Yet most people would agree that I shouldn't be allowed to build bombs in my basement. Isn't that a violation of the second amendment?
Not to mention that whole well regulated militia part.
A reasonable interpretation would at the very least take that to mean a requirement to be eligible for the national guard and to consistently pass training and inspection with each action class of weapon you want to buy.
Hence the asterix on my paraphrasing of the Second Amendment. Ultimately, I think the founding fathers laid out general principles of society that we should adhere to, but that they expected us to care more about the intent of the Constitution than the actual exact words.
The founding fathers were slave oligarchs, fuck their opinions on anything to do with our country today
Throw out the whole constitution then. Human history is rife with suffering and hypocrisy. My ancestors chased people off this land at the point of a sword. Right now, we're overlooking the horrible exploitation of other human beings in China, Africa, India and others, to make luxury goods. The lens of history should acknowledge the status quo at the time, but not excuse it, and celebrate those who worked to advance human rights and conditions before their time.
Man imagine going to bat for the opinions of slave oligarchs.
Imagine condemning nearly everyone who has ever existed because they didn't live up to modern society's current understanding of humanity.
Imagine being too scared to do that in spite of everyone they made suffer and everyone else who knew it was wrong even then, because you somehow want to make defending slave oligarchs your hill to die on.
Then stop wearing your clothes, eating the food you buy and enjoying the place you live in...go live in the woods, because you're a hypocrite.
"We should improve society somewhat"
"Yet you participate in it! Curious! I am very smart!"
No it's not, everything the founders wrote about was directly designed to keep people armed and under no situation shall they be disarmed. Go read some of their papers. This has been chewed a million times and the anti-2a crowd still thinks regulated is the same meaning today as it was back then.
The founders were slave oligarchs, the tyranny they were keeping the citizens armed to defend against was Haiti.
What the fuck are you talking about....do you just make shit up in your head? They wanted everyone armed because they just fought and defeated the world's strongest military at the time...
If that was genuinely the reason a significant faction of them wouldn't have been arguing in favor of trade deals with them instead of France, the country that basically won the war for us at sea.
The fuck does having trade with other countries have anything to do with gun ownership?
The well regulated part means functional and effective.
The reasonable interpretation is that the founders didn't want a federal standing army because of the temptation towards tyranny such federal power would create, and instead expected the states to draft their citizens into militias in response to threats. These citizens were expected to arrive self-armed, knowing how to use their gun, with ammunition, and with initial rations. Citing the militia acts for this, you can verify that the government saw everyone of able body as members of the militia. The militias could then slot into a temporary federal army when needed, and then sent home after the threat has passed. The "shall not be infringed" was to prevent the federal and state governments from disarming their citizens, and the temptation of tyranny over a helpless population.
We have since become the world's largest military power through constitutional amendment and stretching of interpretation, but there has been no update to the 2nd. It doesn't matter that a citizen militia can't match the US military today like everyone likes to argue, we shouldn't selectively enforce constitutional rights. Full stop. If you want to change it, get a constitutional amendment passed modifying the 2nd. If you can't pass that threshold, then you don't have the support you think you do. If you want to guarantee people trained, offer free training and make it attractive to do this training or include it in our compulsory education system so everyone gets it by default. By the way, everyone is already eligible for the national guard, it is essentially the current active volunteer militia. What you can't do is make people join the national guard to be able to keep and bear arms.
If you want to just scrap the country like your later comments on this thread indicate, go find uninhabited land and found your own country that doesn't have a constitution and can be completely redesigned at your will. Or steal some from any current inhabitants if you can, and if you find that palatable or find a group you don't think deserve their country.
The article says guns should be ownable because they're necessary in a militia. The language never implies that guns should only be owned by militia members. The militia line is a justification not a requirement.
You seemed to have missed the part where that's the generous interpretation, the real interpretation is that since a militia is no longer necessary for the defense of our free state, civilian firearms ownership can just be banned entirely and that's perfectly constitutional.
Unless you want to argue that the strongest military in human history is insufficient defense of this free state.
Militias are still necessary for free states, especially since the Army is federal in nature, not a state organization. Now the militia helps ensure the security of the states from federal forces that would otherwise be left unchecked without so much as a means to stop a military dictatorship, which is the reason they didn't form a standing army when they wrote the constitution. The only thing that changed was who the militia would be fighting against, and that's a common interpretation. It very much aligns with the spirit of the law, preventing military dictatorship, for it to continue to exist.
That why right now independent militias are one of the greatest threats of domestic terrorism in this country, like that time those militias defended the free state by forming the more organized portions of the J6 riots that explicitly set out to end our free state and replace it with a militia dictatorship?
So called 'lone wolf' shooters do more terrorism than militias they just don't call it terrorism because they paint it as a personal issue despite them listening to the same media personalities, having the same theories, and going to the same online spaces. There are more mass shootings that qualify as terrorism, weather they're called as such or not, than there is militia violence. Also idk what lessons you wanna pull from J6 considering to my knowledge none of the insurrectionists shot a firearm. You're trying to tell me how dangerous militias are with guns yet it seems the most dangerous thing they did, they did without guns.
Imagine just for a second, that they drop the issue and gain control of all 3 branches and then actually do something about it rather than constantly struggling to win because of single policy voters.
The only thing tougher to imagine than dems winning supermajorities and all three branches is the dems doing something with it. Hard to imagine the people who fund splinter dems like Manchin wont just do the same thing to a dozen dems instead of two.
Roe had good results, but it wasn't a good decision.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-offers-critique-roe-v-wade-during-law-school-visit
Yes, there's no way Roe would have been overturned by that Congress or that Supreme Court (50 years ago). Just like this Congress and Court will not allow significant gun control. Republicans gerrymandered districts and refused to seat a justice, thereby changing those things. Thank you for proving my point.
They kept pushing it as an issue they care about, and eventually they got through. If they didn't, they wouldn't.
Well, Democrats have been pushing the AWB in Congress for about 30 years now, the first 10 it was law, then it sunset, and they kept pushing....and they have lost a ton of ground in that fight, just like abortion. Because while they were introducing bills, Republicans were remaking Congress and the judiciary. But sure, let's propose more pointless legislation... it'll work this time.
That's how politics generally works, you push for the issue for decades and if you're relentless enough you either finally push through it or you die. You also can and probably need to do all other things but you never stop pushing.