SonicG » Mon Oct 12, 2015 9:19 am wrote:Sorry, I forgot my <sarcasm> tags...Totally agree with you. Fetishistic consumption functions to separate us from our true desires...
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SonicG » Mon Oct 12, 2015 9:19 am wrote:Sorry, I forgot my <sarcasm> tags...Totally agree with you. Fetishistic consumption functions to separate us from our true desires...
SonicG » Mon Oct 12, 2015 2:52 am wrote:Well, it is isn't going to happen tomorrow so why bother trying...I'll just sit here with my guns loaded so no one takes my stuff until I'm dead...I would never just argue for the legalization of heroin and cocaine as some miracle measure but there obviously had to be some major reworking of (illegal) drug policy together with an effort to truly eradicate the causes as opposed to trying to wage war on the cartels...Trying to say that they would still exist without drugs, just avocados, is a pretty absurd reduction of the whole situation.
Harvey wrote,
The drug problem is a crime problem. Therefore the drug problem is a prohibition effect.
Harvey wrote,
Maybe then, stuff is the real problem.
Iamwhomiam » Mon Oct 12, 2015 4:39 pm wrote:Harvey wrote,
The drug problem is a crime problem. Therefore the drug problem is a prohibition effect.
I would disagree. Yes, crime is secondary in effect to addiction, but addiction, "the drug problem," is primarily a public health problem.Harvey wrote,
Maybe then, stuff is the real problem.
No, stuff isn't the problem. The problem is with people who value their stuff more than they do another's life.
There's ample research which points to the negative health effects of drugs which are a direct result of prohibition and the positive effects of reliable purity, informed use and quality control.
Harvey » Mon Oct 12, 2015 11:01 am wrote:It's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that the American penal system is little more than a slave labour cartel, with fresh labour delivered through the successful century long 'mediated' panic of drugs. The black market money pumped into the economy through the drug trade is virtually untraceable, it can go anywhere and it can fund anything.
Harvey » Fri Oct 02, 2015 12:08 am wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Something isn't working, is it?
Leaving aside whether that phrase meant 'the army' as such, or at least 'an army,'
a reasonable question might be to ask how much tyranny the second amendment has prevented in the last hundred years or so?
There are countries with high numbers of guns in circulation which do not suffer with mass shootings so the argument isn't simple, but I would hazard the notion that there is no other nation on earth which fetishises the gun, gun use and killing with quite the same degree of relish, and certainly no other country which produces such a high volume of popular media creations centred around the use of lethal machinery, as far as I am aware. The mythos of using variants of this machine go back a long way in the America's. A totem of power, it has a binary symbolic logic as the ultimate symbol of powerlessness. In a civilian setting the gun is rarely used when all other discourse has failed but precisely when that discourse has never begun, when there appears no other means of expression.
General Patton » Mon Oct 12, 2015 9:42 pm wrote:SonicG » Mon Oct 12, 2015 2:52 am wrote:Well, it is isn't going to happen tomorrow so why bother trying...I'll just sit here with my guns loaded so no one takes my stuff until I'm dead...I would never just argue for the legalization of heroin and cocaine as some miracle measure but there obviously had to be some major reworking of (illegal) drug policy together with an effort to truly eradicate the causes as opposed to trying to wage war on the cartels...Trying to say that they would still exist without drugs, just avocados, is a pretty absurd reduction of the whole situation.
But what actually happens to the drug cartels? They've found one crop that is more profitable than drugs and is legal. They'll just go away when there aren't anymore drugs to sell? They can't find more crops? Are those Mexican villagers who arm themselves to fight back just foolish and need just wait on Americans to legalize and fix things then everything gets fixed? Same thing for the other side of the border?
SonicG » Tue Oct 13, 2015 1:08 am wrote:Show me the villagers who have become armed enough to take on the cartels, federales, etc. The wholesale slaughter of mass amounts of poor caught up in the "drug war" is well known...It's not foolishness, but certainly desperation that, in the long-run, is doomed to failure without larger systemic changes.
JackRiddler » Tue Oct 13, 2015 5:32 am wrote:
Without a doubt the issue in framing the Second Amendment was that...
The gun fetishists therefore rely on totally ahistorical examples like Russia and China. Places where first many factions were armed, civil wars happened, one group won and disarmed the others, and then further massacres ensued. The pro-gun narrative kicks in at the last step.
IanEye » Tue Oct 06, 2015 9:26 pm wrote:Congress would be authorized to raise and support a national Army and Navy, and also to organize, arm, discipline, and provide for the calling forth of “the Militia.”
The President, at the same time, was empowered as the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”
But, with respect to the militia, a significant reservation was made to the States: Although Congress would have the power to call forth, organize, arm, and discipline the militia, as well as to govern “such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States,” the States respectively would retain the right to appoint the officers and to train the militia in accordance with the discipline prescribed by Congress.
But the original Constitution’s retention of the militia and its creation of divided authority over that body did not prove sufficient to allay fears about the dangers posed by a standing army.
For it was perceived by some that Article I contained a significant gap: While it empowered Congress to organize, arm, and discipline the militia, it did not prevent Congress from providing for the militia’s disarmament.
As George Mason argued during the debates in Virginia on the ratification of the original Constitution: “The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practiced in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless—by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has the exclusive right to arm them.”
- Justice Stevens’ dissent in “District of Columbia v. Heller"“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.”“The Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States , when called into the actual Service of the United States”
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Repeal the Second Amendment
Bret Stephens OCT. 5, 2017
I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.
From a law-and-order standpoint, more guns means more murder. “States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides,” noted one exhaustive 2013 study in the American Journal of Public Health.
From a personal-safety standpoint, more guns means less safety. The F.B.I. counted a total of 268 “justifiable homicides” by private citizens involving firearms in 2015; that is, felons killed in the course of committing a felony. Yet that same year, there were 489 “unintentional firearms deaths” in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Between 77 and 141 of those killed were children.
From a national-security standpoint, the Amendment’s suggestion that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State,” is quaint. The Minutemen that will deter Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are based in missile silos in Minot, N.D., not farmhouses in Lexington, Mass.
From a personal liberty standpoint, the idea that an armed citizenry is the ultimate check on the ambitions and encroachments of government power is curious. The Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the New York draft riots of 1863, the coal miners’ rebellion of 1921, the Brink’s robbery of 1981 — does any serious conservative think of these as great moments in Second Amendment activism?
And now we have the relatively new and now ubiquitous “active shooter” phenomenon, something that remains extremely rare in the rest of the world. Conservatives often say that the right response to these horrors is to do more on the mental-health front. Yet by all accounts Stephen Paddock would not have raised an eyebrow with a mental-health professional before he murdered 58 people in Las Vegas last week.
What might have raised a red flag? I’m not the first pundit to point out that if a “Mohammad Paddock” had purchased dozens of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition and then checked himself into a suite at the Mandalay Bay with direct views to a nearby music festival, somebody at the local F.B.I. field office would have noticed.
Given all of this, why do liberals keep losing the gun control debate?
Maybe it’s because they argue their case badly and — let’s face it — in bad faith. Democratic politicians routinely profess their fidelity to the Second Amendment — or rather, “a nuanced reading” of it — with all the conviction of Barack Obama’s support for traditional marriage, circa 2008. People recognize lip service for what it is.
Then there are the endless liberal errors of fact. There is no “gun-show loophole” per se; it’s a private-sale loophole, in other words the right to sell your own stuff. The civilian AR-15 is not a true “assault rifle,” and banning such rifles would have little effect on the overall murder rate, since most homicides are committed with handguns. It’s not true that 40 percent of gun owners buy without a background check; the real number is closer to one-fifth.
The National Rifle Association does not have Republican “balls in a money clip,” as Jimmy Kimmel put it the other night. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998, according to The Washington Post, equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.
Nor will it do to follow the “Australian model” of a gun buyback program, which has shown poor results in the United States and makes little sense in a country awash with hundreds of millions of weapons. Keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill people is a sensible goal, but due process is still owed to the potentially insane. Background checks for private gun sales are another fine idea, though its effects on homicides will be negligible: guns recovered by police are rarely in the hands of their legal owners, a 2016 study found.
In fact, the more closely one looks at what passes for “common sense” gun laws, the more feckless they appear. Americans who claim to be outraged by gun crimes should want to do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts. They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.
There is only one way to do this: Repeal the Second Amendment.
Repealing the Amendment may seem like political Mission Impossible today, but in the era of same-sex marriage it’s worth recalling that most great causes begin as improbable ones. Gun ownership should never be outlawed, just as it isn’t outlawed in Britain or Australia. But it doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either. The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn’t need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that “Red Dawn” is the fate that soon awaits us.
Donald Trump will likely get one more Supreme Court nomination, or two or three, before he leaves office, guaranteeing a pro-gun court for another generation. Expansive interpretations of the right to bear arms will be the law of the land — until the “right” itself ceases to be.
Some conservatives will insist that the Second Amendment is fundamental to the structure of American liberty. They will cite James Madison, who noted in the Federalist Papers that in Europe “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” America was supposed to be different, and better.
I wonder what Madison would have to say about that today, when more than twice as many Americans perished last year at the hands of their fellows as died in battle during the entire Revolutionary War. My guess: Take the guns—or at least the presumptive right to them—away. The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction.
(FAIRFAX, VA) - The National Rifle Association today issued the following statement:
"In the aftermath of the evil and senseless attack in Las Vegas, the American people are looking for answers as to how future tragedies can be prevented. Unfortunately, the first response from some politicians has been to call for more gun control. Banning guns from law-abiding Americans based on the criminal act of a madman will do nothing to prevent future attacks. This is a fact that has been proven time and again in countries across the world. In Las Vegas, reports indicate that certain devices were used to modify the firearms involved. Despite the fact that the Obama administration approved the sale of bump fire stocks on at least two occasions, the National Rifle Association is calling on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) to immediately review whether these devices comply with federal law. The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations. In an increasingly dangerous world, the NRA remains focused on our mission: strengthening Americans' Second Amendment freedom to defend themselves, their families and their communities. To that end, on behalf of our five million members across the country, we urge Congress to pass National Right-to-Carry reciprocity, which will allow law-abiding Americans to defend themselves and their families from acts of violence."
https://home.nra.org/joint-statement/
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