Isn't More Gun Control The Obvious Solution? Yes, Yes It Is.

[Winchester]

The fiction of the Supreme Court being the final arbiter will need to be defeated by the peaceful act of nullification.

[Fidei Defensor]

This is veering off-topic, but laws respecting an establishment of religion and laws concerning morality are not the same thing.

 

An "establishment of religion" in legal parlance referred specifically to an official national religion subsidized by tax dollars - such as the Church of England.  America was to have no such official state-sponsored  denomination.  The establishment clause of the first amendment means simply that Congress can make no laws that would set up a tax-funded "Church of America."

 

Despite the claims of hysterical leftists, there is nothing inherently unconstitutional about a law which takes into account moral principles.  All good law is concerned in some way with morality (what is right and wrong).  Laws against murder, theft, fraud, rape, slavery, and any number of things are based on moral principle - that these things are wrong and must not be legally tolerated.

 

There can be legitimate debate about whether some laws concerning morality are prudent - but that has nothing to do with whether they are constitutional.

 

The American founding fathers (not that you give a fig what they say) were unanimous regarding the importance of virtue and morality to law and good governance.

 

 

 

 

 

The words of the Constitution regarding arms are: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."  Pretty straightforward - the government can't take away right of the people to bear weapons.

 

And (while this is should be obvious), of course the intent of the authors of a law or anything else regarding their meaning is important to its proper interpretation.  If you wrote down something important, would you want others twisting it to mean something completely different?

 

Properly judging is completely different from changing the meaning of the words of the constitution to completely different than what the framer's intended.  Judging means doing one's best to correctly ascertain the meaning of the law, and apply it to particular situations - not (as too many judges do) playing Humpty Dumpty with the Constitution.  ("Words mean whatever I want them to mean!")

 

The problems you have aren't with "the government," it's with Congress. The Constitution invested them with the power to make laws, and they've made laws you don't like and say are unconstitutional. How do you remedy that? The courts. But you say they're just government puppets, so there's no help there. What is it you want, then? Your choices are to submit and attempt to change things the way everyone else does, by getting involved in politics, or to overthrow the government. I'll let you decide which is more plausible. 

[God the Father]

this stuff is not complicated. most gun violence occurs in domestic disputes, where if there was no gun to begin with, there'd have been no deaths etc. if we can reduce the number of guns out there, then, which we can with gun control, we'll reduce the number of deaths. most criminals aren't these black capes who run to get every illegal gun they can get.... most are regular folk who turn bad,which means they probably won't be as likely to get illegal guns cause they're usually pretty well law abiding to begin with, and obstacles will deter them from guns, at least mroe frequently.

 

I asked for a source on this a while ago, and received no response. The fourth paragraph of this essay contradicts it in rather blunt terms.  http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/gun-problem-or-fatherless-problem/

 

I still contend that most gun violence actually occurs in gangland dustups between individuals with criminal records and no respect for the law, and invite you to defy me.

 

Of course guns are designed for killing. There's "a time" for that, remember? I think The Byrds said that.

[Winchester]

The problems you have aren't with "the government," it's with Congress. The Constitution invested them with the power to make laws, and they've made laws you don't like and say are unconstitutional. How do you remedy that? The courts. But you say they're just government puppets, so there's no help there. What is it you want, then? Your choices are to submit and attempt to change things the way everyone else does, by getting involved in politics, or to overthrow the government. I'll let you decide which is more plausible. 

 

State legislatures are another, better, route to dealing with this crap.

[Fidei Defensor]

State legislatures are another, better, route to dealing with this crap.

 

I agree. And I am disappointed that the federal government feels the need to stick its nose in the business of the states.

[Winchester]

I agree. And I am disappointed that the federal government feels the need to stick its nose in the business of the states.

 

So we defy them. Make them be the thugs they are. Maybe that will show people exactly what Obama, Boehner, and all the rest of them are really like. Of course, blowing apart children, shooting unarmed women, and threatening terminal patients using medical marijuana with prison time haven't convinced them, so I'm not really holding my breath.

[StMichael]

Please already.

 

The Bill of rights, regardless of when, protect the people from the government. It is what the government CANNOT do to the people.

 

The government cannot stop you from worshipping or force you to worship. (freedom of religion)

The government cannot silence you. (freedom of speech)

The government cannot control the media. (freedom of the press)

The government cannot take your weapons to protect yourself away. (gun rights)

 

Real simple. 

 

Made complicated by those who want to find daylight to seize control.

 

As it stands today, the government can watch and keep what I write, right here on phatmass, they can track my whereabouts in a new 2014 car that is mandated to have a black box. They can listen to my phone calls without any due process or reason. And now they can tell me what medicine I can take or what doctor I can see. 

 

And we can go on into other areas, find me one appliance, one thing in your home currently that the US Federal government has not had their hands on?

 

Toliets, toasters, TVs, water, light bulbs, outlets, couches, tables, glasses, every single thing we touch or consume, someone in DC is "regulating."

 

Even thought "Thou Shall Not Kill" was etched in stone thousands of years ago, time does not erase its relevancy.

 

 

The government is not the church, and politics is not theology. Politics is about finding the best ways to live in society, in world that changes.

 

I am not dismissing anything, but your interpretation of things is probably going to be different from mine. In which case, who decides?

 

To me, the guiding principle of politics is the here and now, not trying to construct an ideology out of a document written 250 years ago. The law was made for man, not man for the law.

 

That is not to say I am uninterested in the legal details of these debates. But that is not what motivates me. I do not want to disarm every last person in the country, because that's not going to solve the problem anymore than our prison system solves the problem of crime. But I also don't look at laissez-faire anarchy as a solution, either. There are ways to be creative with law to address problems that we have.

 

Ultimately, I don't take a worshipful attitude toward the law. I do not lose sleep because people have guns, but neither do I lose sleep because people immigrate illegally, or join gangs, or jaywalk. I do not believe in painting everything with a broad criminalizing brush...society is human, and I think the point of politics and law should be to accommodate humanity as much as possible.

 

Trying to live by a purist interpretation of a document from the 18th century is like trying to follow the Mosaic law the same way they did in ancient Israel. It doesn't work. Society did not begin or end in the 18th century.

 

 

[Fidei Defensor]

Please already.

 

The Bill of rights, regardless of when, protect the people from the government. It is what the government CANNOT do to the people.

 

The government cannot stop you from worshipping or force you to worship. (freedom of religion)

The government cannot silence you. (freedom of speech)

The government cannot control the media. (freedom of the press)

The government cannot take your weapons to protect yourself away. (gun rights)

 

Real simple. 

 

Made complicated by those who want to find daylight to seize control.

 

As it stands today, the government can watch and keep what I write, right here on phatmass, they can track my whereabouts in a new 2014 car that is mandated to have a black box. They can listen to my phone calls without any due process or reason. And now they can tell me what medicine I can take or what doctor I can see. 

 

And we can go on into other areas, find me one appliance, one thing in your home currently that the US Federal government has not had their hands on?

 

Toliets, toasters, TVs, water, light bulbs, outlets, couches, tables, glasses, every single thing we touch or consume, someone in DC is "regulating."

 

Even thought "Thou Shall Not Kill" was etched in stone thousands of years ago, time does not erase its relevancy.

 

Better pick up the brand name aluminum foil for your hat—can't risk it with that cheap stuff!

[Ice_nine]

I haven't read the thread through very carefully, forgive me in advance, but something really disturbing that keeps popping up in the rhetoric is this idea that an armed citizenry is no match for our government with its nukes and other goodies in its arsenal, and that this idea behind the second amendment is now really irrelevant and frankly, laughable.

 

And I do lol a bit at the idea some ragtag gang of rednecks with machine guns taking on even the most limited warfare that the US forces are capable of, Iament that the world has gotten to this point. The government has way too much power. That's just the reality of the situation, and I think we're cemented into this system until if and when something cataclysmic happens. Then again I tend to be a chicken little sometimes but, I don't know, I'm not a fan of increasingly centralized power. And all I can do is whine on the internet. There are certainly worse injustices in the world, but that doesn't make our losses of liberty OK.

 

blurgh. I'm really tired so that probably was a useless rant.

 

my bizad

[God the Father]

I haven't read the thread through very carefully, forgive me in advance, but something really disturbing that keeps popping up in the rhetoric is this idea that an armed citizenry is no match for our government with its nukes and other goodies in its arsenal, and that this idea behind the second amendment is now really irrelevant and frankly, laughable.

 

And I do lol a bit at the idea some ragtag gang of rednecks with machine guns taking on even the most limited warfare that the US forces are capable of, Iament that the world has gotten to this point. The government has way too much power. That's just the reality of the situation, and I think we're cemented into this system until if and when something cataclysmic happens. Then again I tend to be a chicken little sometimes but, I don't know, I'm not a fan of increasingly centralized power. And all I can do is whine on the internet. There are certainly worse injustices in the world, but that doesn't make our losses of liberty OK.

 

A sturdy insurgent force equipped with small arms and improvised weaponry is more than capable of resisting aggressive forces with much higher technological capability for warfare. See: US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. Motivated citizens with firearms are extremely dangerous, to a degree only partially dependent on the level of compassion with which the aggressor seeks to suppress the insurgency.

 

I say that as a participant in both "US forces" and the legally armed American populace.

 

edit: I agree with you though, didn't mean to sound bratty

Edited January 19, 2013 by God the Father

[Socrates]

Ad hominem. Unnecessary.

 

No.  I didn't call Era a moron or a jerk.  Simply pointing out to eagle_eye that he regards the constitution and the thoughts of the founding fathers as being outdated and irrelevant to modern times - so it's probably not worth his time to go out of his way to convince him of the framer's intention in writing the constitution.  You yourself said you "don't give a flying fig" about what the founding fathers said, so I'm not sure why pointing this out is an issue for you.

[Socrates]

I am reminded of a quote that gets bandied about: "Well behaved women seldom make history."

 

This entire discussion is quite funny considering we're talking about a constitution written by men who began their enterprise claiming that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

 

I don't even want to abolish our government, simply make it work for us rather than slavishly trying to enshrine some fixed ideology around it.

 

The framers of the constitution were very careful to craft a rule of law in which the powers of the federal government were strictly limited and checked in the hopes of preventing it from growing tyrannical.

 

I never claimed you want to abolish our government - on the contrary you seem all too eager to do away with any restraints and limits on ever-growing centralized government power.

When we don't "slavishly" adhere to principles of limited government, we end up as slaves of the State.

[Socrates]

The problems you have aren't with "the government," it's with Congress. The Constitution invested them with the power to make laws, and they've made laws you don't like and say are unconstitutional. How do you remedy that? The courts. But you say they're just government puppets, so there's no help there. What is it you want, then? Your choices are to submit and attempt to change things the way everyone else does, by getting involved in politics, or to overthrow the government. I'll let you decide which is more plausible. 

 

While it's popular to blame Congress for all that ails us, the problems with government abuse of power are hardly limited to Congress.  In constitutional terms, more harm is done by both federal courts and presidents (neither of which, unlike Congress, have the job of making law).  This is done both by Supreme Court justices, rather than honestly interpreting existing law, radically changing the meaning of the written law to advance their own political agendas--effectively "legislating from the bench--" and by presidents bypassing the legislative process altogether with unconstitutional abuses of war powers and "executive orders."

 

If you want more historical details on some of the bigger cases, you might want to check out the book Who Killed the Constitution?: The Federal Government vs. American Liberty from World War I to Barack Obama, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and Kevin Gutzman.

 

Our current Dear Leader, er, I mean, "president," seems to grant himself new "executive" powers every day.  That's not a republic, but dictatorship.

 

I never said I oppose courts on principle.  The problem is federal courts abusing their power by Humpty Dumpty "interpretation" of the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean, as opposed to legitimate interpretation of words actually say.  

 

I think we should all do what we can to restore government to constitutional principles and limits, though this will require a major change of direction.

 

". . . we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, • would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." ~ John Adams, 1798

[Socrates]

I haven't read the thread through very carefully, forgive me in advance, but something really disturbing that keeps popping up in the rhetoric is this idea that an armed citizenry is no match for our government with its nukes and other goodies in its arsenal, and that this idea behind the second amendment is now really irrelevant and frankly, laughable.

 

And I do lol a bit at the idea some ragtag gang of rednecks with machine guns taking on even the most limited warfare that the US forces are capable of, Iament that the world has gotten to this point. The government has way too much power. That's just the reality of the situation, and I think we're cemented into this system until if and when something cataclysmic happens. Then again I tend to be a chicken little sometimes but, I don't know, I'm not a fan of increasingly centralized power. And all I can do is whine on the internet. There are certainly worse injustices in the world, but that doesn't make our losses of liberty OK.

 

blurgh. I'm really tired so that probably was a useless rant.

 

my bizad

 

The original idea of the state militias (long-since abandoned) wasn't a ragtag gang of rednecks with machine guns, but the entire able-bodied male population, armed, trained, and ready.

 

 

 

But I dig your style.

 

 

 

Especially the hair.

[Era Might]

Simply pointing out to eagle_eye that he regards the constitution and the thoughts of the founding fathers as being outdated and irrelevant to modern times - so it's probably not worth his time to go out of his way to convince him of the framer's intention in writing the constitution.

 

I've said no such thing. I have, in fact, said the opposite. We simply disagree about the relationship between things like like law, history, philosophy, society, and politics. The law does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in a human context. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln stood on the spirit of the country, while Douglas stood on "popular sovereignty" legalism. Whatever one thinks of either man, the point is that they just approached things in a different way. I don't consider the founding fathers irrelevant to modern times, but neither do I consider modern times irrelevant to the founding fathers.

 

 

Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and, to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he “cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up,”—that it is a sacred right of self-government—he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people. And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own views; when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentiments; when they shall come to repeat his views and to avow his principles, and to say all that he says on these mighty questions,—then it needs only the formality of the second Dred Scott decision, which he indorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the States—old as well as new, North as well as South.

 

--Abraham Lincoln, First Joint Debate at Ottawa

 

 

Even thought "Thou Shall Not Kill" was etched in stone thousands of years ago, time does not erase its relevancy.

 

 

No, it doesn't erase its relevancy, but neither does it make it any less complex. We do not interprete "Thou Shall Not Kill" in the context that they did in ancient Israel. We no longer stone blasphemers to death, and even conservatives are aghast when people in a Muslim society today resorts to that kind of socioreligious justice. The practical, social context in which we understand "Thou Shall Not Kill" has changed a LOT over the last 4,000 years (or however long it's been).

Edited January 19, 2013 by Era Might