What won't be popular: the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal.
Not at all saying that this specific case is a matter of positional abuse ( definitely appears to be a tragic lone mental health case, which is a whole other problem in our society entirely ) - merely stating that the right to bear arms is intended to be a check against it.
I don't think that's quite right. I will absolutely defend that the Second Amendment was crafted so the citizens retain the power to take up arms against the state, but that is a very different thing from "extrajudicial reprisal."
The Second Amendment absolutely protects the ability of citizens to declare their government invalid, set up their own, and defend themselves. It does so because citizens already have that right - as argued in the Declaration of Independence ("it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"), and later codified in things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The task of the Second Amendment is not to codify that right; it is to codify a right to a mechanism by which the citizens may protect the right to self-determination of government, which is more fundamental but only theoretical if an unwanted government comes at you with guns.
There is no right to extrajudicial reprisals against individual members of the government. The Second Amendment does not recognize one, nor does anything else in the Constitution, nor does any other well-accepted document about rights. There is a right to invoke the structures of the government to redress grievances and to hold judges and other officials responsible for abuse of their office, and there is a right to oppose the government wholesale if they refuse. But that is still a defensive right. If a corrupt judge wants to take your land, and corrupt police try to make it happen, you need a means to defend yourself, sure.
But I cannot find any reason to believe that the authors of the Constitution would have said that an appropriate check on government power is the risk that members of the government would have their family members killed in reprisal - the risk that people would be deprived of life (or even liberty or property) without due process of law.
Ordinarily and historically, I'd fully agree, but the antigun refrain of "lol you're going to fire your AR-15s at drones and tanks and A-10 Warthogs?" does have some degree of merit. 2A was written when citizens were not robbed of ~7% of their earnings to fund a standing military machine.
In the modern era, any effective resistance to tyranny is - UNFORTUNATELY - going to be asymmetric, guerrilla, and dirty. Which - again, UNFORTUNATELY - is going to involve morally ambiguous activity.
That's fair, and we've seen in the last half-century or so that the US military can lose to asymmetric warfare when it can't lose to nuclear powers.
But, I don't think that e.g. the guerrillas of Vietnam were morally ambiguous simply because they engaged in asymmetric warfare against the US military. They were fighting against identified soldiers in a declared war; they had the right to engage by the international rules / norms of war. They killed people who had taken up arms against them. (Yes, most of their opponents were forced to take up arms; that doesn't make the opposing force morally ambiguous in its opposition.)
They're very different from various terrorists (domestic and foreign) who have attacked the US in recent years, who also reached the conclusion that only asymmetric warfare would work against the US, but chose to attack non-combatants - office workers, children, etc. And they weren't merely casualties of a morally-ambiguous operation; they were direct targets. (As it happens, these terrorists were not particularly effective, either.)
So even if we want to grant modern interpretation to the Second Amendment and read in the right to do whatever is effective against the government of the US (instead of talking about what it was crafted to do), it still seems to me like it should be about making sure you have the arms and the training to defend yourself against an illegitimate government and establish your own, perhaps through asymmetric warfare if needed - which is still very different from randomly attacking individual officials whom you have declared corrupt in an otherwise-legitimate government (let alone their family members).
>> the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal.
What makes you say that? I'm not disagreeing, necessarily, but is there any writing to support this reasoning? Who held this position?
The difference when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations. Any division is amplified then. All it takes is someone to lose it and it’s a cheap solution. And everyone knows it. The communities you speak of are a division.
I worked for a large defence contractor in the US for a number of years and got to see the contrast in professional and personal relations between their European and American employees. It’s scary when you see.
> when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations
100% disagree. The saying "armed society is polite society" is absolutely true, at least when it comes to the interaction between arms and western social ethics. Obviously your results may vary in the Congo or Chicago or whatever.
Even if we accept the (most likely contextually false) premise that reducing firearms access for non-criminals also meaningfully reduces firearms access for criminals, I do not have any preference (ceteris paribus) between getting shot, stabbed, or having my head bashed in. In fact, I might prefer getting shot.
In the more realistic case where criminal firearm attainability is less than perfectly correlated with non-criminal firearm attainability, it makes sense for non-criminals to be armed as well.
There's also the MAD dynamic; people are less likely to physically escalate if there is a possibility of a high-severity response.
> it’s a cheap solution
A murder charge for an unjustified shooting is hardly "cheap".
I love this feature. It's great knowledge. Some people want to censor the morons but that would remove the amount of morons you could readily identify.
In the pre-internet days your ability to propagate stuff depended on your credentials. With appropriate credentials you could speak on radio, TV or publish a story in a newspaper. With the internet and social media your ability to propagate stuff (and go "viral") depends on your story (even if not truthful) not on your credentials. This is the reason why almost half the population now believes in and acts on conspiracy theories. We need to bring back the world where how far your story propagates (or how powerful the weapon you can own) depends on your credentials.
Surely there are many factors that would drive that. Widespread availability of inexpensive guns being only one. Punishments for unlawful possession being another that vary wildly across the globe.
In general, I don't disagree but isn't the second point ultimately a tautology? Certainly an otherwise law abiding citizen might arm themself with no intention of committing a further crime.
True. In general, the more laws there are, the fewer law-abiding people there are, since there are more laws to violate.
For example, I don't think the recent decriminalization of weed in various US states probably hasn't caused very many people to start using it. But in the same way, the laws against it didn't do much to limit its use.
implying gun-control would have prevented this crime?
maybe. the article describes the crime in a way that suggests stabbing would have worked as well, and the criminal was angry/motivated enough to kill by any means.
When citizens aren't armed, dumb criminals can't find guns. (Where would they get one?) Smart criminals understands that using a gun in a society without guns will make themselves feature prominently in national news, and the police will make it top priority to arrest them.
I mean, just visit any country where ordinary citizens don't carry guns.
According to Wikipedia, 0.20 out of 100,000 people died of guns in 2015, of which only 0.02 are homicides. As for the US - 12.21 out of 100,000 total, 4.46 homicides.
Seems like British criminals do have a really hard time finding guns.
In our country, less than 10% of murders are between people who do not know each other. And if you do not live in the specific bad neighborhoods that account for nearly all of our murders, then our crime statistics are literally the same. My town of 100,000 had 0 murders last year.
If you are able to solve the problems plaguing both East London and West Baltimore, I'm all ears, however it seems the war on murder will rage on
Criminals well into the crime world decided to commit a crime will find a gun regardless of the country they are in.
US is arming the average Joe with no gun training, or psychological evaluation, the guy that is selling weed at the corner of SF, Karen that is angry at the customer service and the full of hormones schoolchildren.
Now given that all of these people have access to highly lethal guns, law enforcement has to be more pro-active than other countries, thus all of the expenses to buy war machines for neighborhood police depts.
The "Everybody should be armed" narrative is spread by people who can't even properly justify their reasoning. They always throw a "they should have been armed and they wouldn't die" or something as dumb "all school staff should be armed". I learned to ignore them and their wild west fantasies.
Good idea. I've found the best way to engage (if you want to engage) is to just take the argument seriously, and ask what kind of society they envision, in detail. It gets awkward quickly.
There's a subreddit that lists news stories of self-defence situations with a firearm. They don't make the news because they are all local stories but it happens all the time.
The idea that the US can somehow turn back the clock with hundreds of millions of legal guns already purchased is laughable. Almost every attempt at the state or city level has completely backfired. That train passed long ago. And the denial of this has only ever worsened the problem. I'd go as far as saying it's an anti-science position in 2020.
An aggregator of stories on a given topic can make anything seem to happen frequently. This would, by design, ignore any stories that don't fit the narrative. It may be a good source for stories on that exact topic, but is by no means an accurate indicator of frequency, especially as a sole source.
Unless you correct for education, wealth distribution and Asher things like gang affiliations that's be selection bias too; there's just much more than "firearms deaths/firearms ownership" going on.
Or the moron goes to the hardware store and buys a bottle of acid instead. Or, in cases more typical than either of these, the moron is an ex-husband and uses his fists.
Although taking away arms would resolve the issue in the short term. But an alternative approach would be to provide better education and raise awareness around firearms, which would benefit the society in the long run.
"Providing better education" has been the progressive backstop for the last 100 years. Turns out that marginal returns on additional education are pretty close to zero. This is depressing, but pretty incontrovertible when you compare between A) returns on education in high-expenditure countries like the US vs low-expenditure EU countries (very similar) B) return on education in the same place across time, with the trend usually being that education expenditure goes up over time and educational returns don't change.
Above a certain minimal level of education, demographic outcomes like crime rate seem to be 70-80% predicted by entirely heritable characteristics, with very little environmental interaction.
> Above a certain minimal level of education, demographic outcomes like crime rate seem to be 70-80% predicted by entirely heritable characteristics, with very little environmental interaction.
This is just racism in a language that's palatable to HN.
In this specific case, I think her son could of been stabbed to death too with a sharp object. There are many way to violently kill someone, gun bans or not.
