Repeal and replace the second amendment with what exactly?

[Mountain Man]

The 2nd is fine just the way it is. Our only problem is the collapse of the moral society we once had.

As John Adams famously said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

[Starlight]

Our only problem is the collapse of the moral society we once had.

Funny, I would say our societies have gotten vastly more moral over the years.

[TheWall]

Starlight I know that I am most likely to never need to defend myself. I also know that one of the best ways to end a fight is to try to resolve things peacefully. I also know that violent crime is decreasing. I do not appreciate being called brainwashed. The truth is though that evil exist and I want to have a fighting chance if I have to fight and guns are an equalizer.

As I have said to both teal and Carpe deep down part of this debate centers on wanting to protect people and how that should be done.

[Terraceth]

I feel like the suggestion of repealing the second amendment is actually a bit of a decoy. It's not going to happen anytime soon, and the Second Amendment actually doesn't do anything to prohibit most of the gun control measures people suggest anyway. So instead of trying to go for winnable victories, gun control advocates are wasting time on something they're not going to win and wouldn't actually help them all that much.

[TheWall]

I feel like the suggestion of repealing the second amendment is actually a bit of a decoy. It's not going to happen anytime soon, and the Second Amendment actually doesn't do anything to prohibit most of the gun control measures people suggest anyway. So instead of trying to go for winnable victories, gun control advocates are wasting time on something they're not going to win and wouldn't actually help them all that much.

Please do say more.

[Littlejoe]

I feel like the suggestion of repealing the second amendment is actually a bit of a decoy. It's not going to happen anytime soon, and the Second Amendment actually doesn't do anything to prohibit most of the gun control measures people suggest anyway. So instead of trying to go for winnable victories, gun control advocates are wasting time on something they're not going to win and wouldn't actually help them all that much.

Yes, and we hope they keep chasing their tail because that leaves our rights intact!

[Starlight]

Starlight I know that I am most likely to never need to defend myself. I also know that one of the best ways to end a fight is to try to resolve things peacefully. I also know that violent crime is decreasing.

Okay then... so why the interest in the concept of defending yourself? Do you carry round a fire extinguisher in order that if the unlikely need to put out a fire occurs then you're prepared? The over-interest in self-defense appears to be illogical.

I do not appreciate being called brainwashed.

Brainwashed people never do. But I observe that the gun lobby in the US seems to pour money into media to scare people into buying guns and to perpetuate the myth that it's the 'duty' of the man to be ready to defend his family (by buying their guns). When I compare the average US conservative to the average conservative here, there seems to be a massive difference in how scared they are of being attacked and how much they think about the need to defend themselves, and at the end of the day I have to ascribe it to brainwashing as it is not (as far as I know) based on actual reality in terms of the actual levels of crime.

The truth is though that evil exist

Now you've got me imagining a giant black blob that sits out in the desert and has a sign titled "evil" sitting in front of it.

I want to have a fighting chance if I have to fight and guns are an equalizer.

Sure but it's such an improbable situation that planning for it seems a bit silly. It's like spending a lot of time picking out the exact house that you'll buy when you win the lottery, before you win the lottery. You're wasting time and effort planning and preparing for an event that isn't going to happen.

I mean if you plan to join the police or military, then by all means take all the self-defense, martial arts, and gun courses that you can, otherwise IMO you're wasting your time unless you're doing it for general fitness or enjoyment.

deep down part of this debate centers on wanting to protect people and how that should be done.

I want to protect people, so I look at what political policies lower crime and try to be an advocate for those in my small way. I don't waste time trying to physically defend people from attack because the chances of ever having to do that in my life are so close to zero that it's not worth discussing. I would be far better off taking more CPR and first-aid courses in terms of probable usefulness and life-saving utility than I would self-defense classes.

[Tassman]

Might I ask why self defense is an automatic rejection?

If no citizen carries guns (as per Australia) then no citizens need to defend themselves from guns.

[TheWall]

Starlight we could say the other is brainwashed all day, but it does nothing for the debate. No one here has proved the other is brainwashed and honestly appealing to psychology while usefull is not the same as adressing an arguement. I would like if possible for ypu to make an arguement as for why gun culture is a problem. I see some of what ypu are saying sort of but i do have confusions.

[Starlight]

Starlight we could say the other is brainwashed all day, but it does nothing for the debate.

I don't mean it as an insult. I am hoping it will lead to you being thoughtful about your cultural environment, and thinking about why you see it necessary to defend your family, when by your own statement this is not actually an event you expect to occur in your lifetime. I suggest that more useful general life skills would include a CPR and first aid course, a defensive driving course, and a fire-extinguisher course... those things are likely to be more useful in defense of your family than owning a gun.

I would like if possible for ypu to make an arguement as for why gun culture is a problem.

Okay, my thoughts:

1. Guns lead to a lot of deaths, both intentionally and accidentally.

2. A toddler in the US picks up a gun and shoots and hits someone with it slightly higher than once a week on average. If it kills a sibling or parent they'll be scarred for life. If it kills themselves, their parents will be devastated.

3. As a suicide weapon, guns are particularly dangerous, because a lot of people have dark thoughts from time to time and if there's an easily-lethal weapon to hand like a gun, then people will use it. Whereas if it is harder to commit suicide, such that people have to really try, really mean it, and have to take time to do it (and hence time to cool off and think about it), and have a much higher chance of failing to kill themselves when they try (and thus can get psychiatric intervention after they fail), then it's just better all around.

4. Having guns everywhere makes society a much more scary place. Anyone at any moment could pull out a gun and shoot you. Any criminal is reasonably likely to be carrying a gun, so confronting any criminal in the course of their crime is incredibly dangerous. When I walk down the street here in New Zealand, I have zero fear that someone might pull out a gun and shoot me, that is just not something that enters my mind. To the extent that I fear someone physically attacking me in public, I imagine it being hand-to-hand without weapons.

5. The proliferation of guns in the US allows for mass-killings on a scale not seen in other countries. The US has ~5% of the world population, yet has ~31% of mass shootings in the world. As I've noted, a couple of months ago here in New Zealand, a teenager who'd plotted a mass killing was prosecuted, and he'd spent months trying to work out how to kill as many people as possible. Because he was obviously unable to get a gun here, he settled on the plan of crashing a car into people and then stabbing them with a knife. But of course the more dangerous types of knives are banned here, and the average kitchen knife while it can kill someone if you try, it's not exactly the greatest weapon for a massacre. Part way through him carrying out the attack (I think after hurting some people by hitting them with his car, the details aren't clear in the article), he realized his weaponry just wasn't up to successfully massacring people and so he gave up. So the difference between zero people killed and a massacre came down to access to weaponry. I think in any society, however good the mental health system etc, there are always going to be some extremists / crazy people / radicals who if they have the ability to go on some sort of massacre would choose to do so... you can't alter human psychology for every single person... but if a person simply doesn't have the ability to perform a massacre (even if they wanted to) because they just can't access the kinds of deadly weapons they would need for a mass killing then mass killings wouldn't happen.

6. Guns are inherently an offensive and lethal weapon rather than a defensive one. They're not like a shield or body armor or even pepper spray or a taser. I guess you could choose to own a gun that was filled with rubber bullets, but people don't seem to make that choice. Guns don't make for a good defensive weapon because they're not defensive in nature. If your plan is to scare someone off by threatening them with a gun, then a toy gun that looks real would do just fine. If your plan is to actually shoot them, then the danger of killing them is pretty high, you would have to be psychologically prepared to kill someone and live with the thought that you'd killed someone for the rest of your life. So guns are poor at defense, they're just not well-suited to it. So the whole notion of "everyone needs a gun to defend themselves" doesn't really make much sense as they're not a defensive weapon.

7. Police get shot at, and so need to shoot first in a gun-culture. Police in the US end up killing innocents and unarmed criminals at a massive rate because they're afraid that the (potential) criminal might have a gun and might pull it out and shoot them. The job of being a police officer is much more dangerous in a gun-filled country, so anyone who cares about the lives of police officers should want to see guns gone. Police here in New Zealand, or in the UK, don't carry guns when they're at work, because criminals don't have guns. In the rare case that a criminal is using a gun, specially trained officers are called in with body armor and guns to contain and deal with the situation. The UK releases yearly statistics on the number of bullets fired by police per year. In 2014 they fired twice and in 2016 they had a record high of 7 times in the entire country in a year. On average UK police shoot and kill 2 people a year. Here it is 0.4 people a year (a much higher rate actually due to our lower population). But those numbers are worlds apart from the US police kill-rate where at least 1000 people get killed by police a year but the numbers are hugely undercounted because the government doesn't even gather nationwide statistics.

8. Guns aren't necessary. There aren't any downsides to having a gun-free society. The choice being made is really between a wild-west be-scared-of-everyone-they-might-kill-you we-have-shootouts-regularly type gun-culture society, and a safe and happy society where no one is scared of getting shot. It's not a hard choice because there's no downsides to the second option.

[Roy]

I want no bickering or name calling. I want to know what people have in mind for this. What laws do you propose? What will the new amendment say? What of existing laws and programs like Eddie eagle? I want to know.

Nothing. Just remove it and don't replace it with anything. Make no new laws.

[Mountain Man]

If no citizen carries guns (as per Australia) then no citizens need to defend themselves from guns.

Source: Australians own more guns than ever

(April 2015) The number of firearm licence holders in New South Wales has increased by more than 20 per cent in the last five years.

Currently, a total of 215,462 licences exist compared to the 177,675 owned in 2010, according to figures obtained by News Corp.

[...] [T]here did not appear to have been an increase in gun related crime that related to the increase in licences.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ure-blame.html

© Copyright Original Source

Source: The Australian Gun Ban Conceit

(Sept 2015) ...at the same time Australia was banning guns and experiencing a decline in gun homicides, America was more than doubling how many firearms it manufactured and seeing a nearly identical drop in gun homicides. That throws a bit of a wrench into the idea that Australia’s gun ban must be the reason for its decline in gun crime.

However, what’s more important is the fact that overall suicides and murder have not “plummeted” in the years after the gun ban. Yes, as with the gun-happy United States, the murder rate is down in Australia. It’s dropped 31 percent from a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people in 1994 to 1.1 per 100,000 in 2012.But it’s the only serious crime that saw a consistent decline post-ban.

In fact, according to the Australian government’s own statistics, a number of serious crimes peaked in the years after the ban. Manslaughter, sexual assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and unarmed robbery all saw peaks in the years following the ban, and most remain near or above pre-ban rates. The effects of the 1996 ban on violent crime are, frankly, unimpressive at best.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/09/03/...n-ban-conceit/

© Copyright Original Source

[Terraceth]

Please do say more.

Well, I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but if you're referring to the mention of "the Second Amendment actually doesn't do anything to prohibit most of the gun control measures people suggest anyway" then one need only look at the Heller decision, the one viewed by many as being an expansion of gun rights:

"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons."

The bolded list is basically a list of the measures usually suggested for gun control, and according to the Heller decision (and again, remember, this is the one regarded as being an expansion of gun rights), all of those are okay under the Second Amendment.

[TheWall]

Well, I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but if you're referring to the mention of "the Second Amendment actually doesn't do anything to prohibit most of the gun control measures people suggest anyway" then one need only look at the Heller decision, the one viewed by many as being an expansion of gun rights:

"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons."

The bolded list is basically a list of the measures usually suggested for gun control, and according to the Heller decision (and again, remember, this is the one regarded as being an expansion of gun rights), all of those are okay under the Second Amendment.

Thank you.

[Tassman]

Source: Australians own more guns than ever

(April 2015) The number of firearm licence holders in New South Wales has increased by more than 20 per cent in the last five years.

Currently, a total of 215,462 licences exist compared to the 177,675 owned in 2010, according to figures obtained by News Corp.

[...] [T]here did not appear to have been an increase in gun related crime that related to the increase in licences.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ure-blame.html

© Copyright Original Source

Source: The Australian Gun Ban Conceit

(Sept 2015) ...at the same time Australia was banning guns and experiencing a decline in gun homicides, America was more than doubling how many firearms it manufactured and seeing a nearly identical drop in gun homicides. That throws a bit of a wrench into the idea that Australia’s gun ban must be the reason for its decline in gun crime.

However, what’s more important is the fact that overall suicides and murder have not “plummeted” in the years after the gun ban. Yes, as with the gun-happy United States, the murder rate is down in Australia. It’s dropped 31 percent from a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people in 1994 to 1.1 per 100,000 in 2012.But it’s the only serious crime that saw a consistent decline post-ban.

In fact, according to the Australian government’s own statistics, a number of serious crimes peaked in the years after the ban. Manslaughter, sexual assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and unarmed robbery all saw peaks in the years following the ban, and most remain near or above pre-ban rates. The effects of the 1996 ban on violent crime are, frankly, unimpressive at best.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/09/03/...n-ban-conceit/

© Copyright Original Source

“The Federalist”!!!

You sure choose your sources. Couldn’t you find a Breitbart one?

The fact is that “The most recent government report on crime trends in Australia says, “Homicide in Australia has declined over the last 25 years. The current homicide incidence rate is the lowest on record in the past 25 years.”

“The number of homicide incidents involving a firearm decreased by 57 percent between 1989-90 and 2013-14,”

https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/gu...ralia-updated/