Can we please just admit that maybe gun control is a good idea finally?

Well now you show yourself to be an idiot once again, multiple people in this thread have called for the total banning of private gun ownership. Which is something you would know if you could actually comprehend what others write here. You should really quit here, you are digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole with every post you make in this thread.

No you learn to read because all the people who said that right in the wake of the Newtown killings later agreed that it makes more sense to work towards controlling and limiting gun ownership, because outright banning is implausible. That is what any rational person believes.

MrMolecule summed it up quite well:

I am exactly that kind of gun owner: I want it to be safe and responsible, because guns are deadly weapons that make killing easier. So much so that waving one around inside your own home will drive off criminals, isn't that right? Isn't that what you said? I'll get to that later, I have a list and I want to hit every item.

I am certainly not the type who freaks out and worries that the government is going to literally beat down my door and demand my guns in the wake of a sad tragedy like Newtown and the others, because I am not a self-centered ignorant poorly-educated chud whose first instinct in any moment of crisis is himself. Which kind are you, and don't bother answering now because you already have several times in this thread.

Inform me when I have reached even a fraction of the depth of the hole you dig over and over with every post. We can start with the post where you wrongly assumed I was referring to all gun owners because clearly I was not, not that it stopped you from bleating like a stuck goat. You can fall back on your usual mawkish retorts that I totally can't read English, meanwhile the list of instances where you clearly have no idea what is going on at any given time surmount without any signs of stopping.

Or we can discuss how big of a idiot you have to be to actually think the best use of a gun is waving it around at people. I grew up around guns and have owned/used them since childhood. The first rule I was taught was never pull out a gun unless you intend to use it. Everyone knows that. Except you. You'd probably shoot a hole in your own foot fumbling to bring the gun out of its holster if someone ever tried to invade your manchildish hovel, out of pure stark terror.

I look forward to your 10 word reply that fails to rebut, refute, or discuss anything of substance.

Google "Sandy Hook" and "cost of freedom". There are idiots arguing this position.

But, it serves none of us any use to point at what the extremists are doing or saying. Can we just accept that 27% of either side of the debate are idiots and discount their opinions before we begin a discussion?

Whoa whoa whoa, now hang on just a damn minute. Vanilla ice cream rules the roost, and there will be consequences and repercussions should any internet smart-guy come in here squawking otherwise!

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blo...addresses-215214269--abc-news-topstories.html

Things like this are what make some people nervous about everyone who owns a gun having to be registered with the government. What the paper did may be legal, but I just don't think was the best choice for them to make.

Where do dead children and 33 (give or take, I lose count) school shootings since Columbine rank in your threat matrix brett?
Somewhere below one-off stories of newspaper overreach apparently.

Also, by your logic shouldn't publicity just add to the safety accorded a home owner willing to wave a gun at home invaders?

Go enjoy your Christmas dinner. Open gifts, chug nog.
Life's good eh?

Meh. As a non US citizen, I just don't get it.

The argument that an armed citizenry is a bulwark against tyranny - any examples since 1776?

Maybe abolition of slavery, but that was a full blooded war.

Heck, even the tyranny of women not being allowed to vote, a pretty outrageously tyrannical thing for the government to deny, did that make US citizens take up arms? Sexual equality rights, racial equality rights, nope, both won via the ballot box & law courts, not the bullet as far as I can tell. And those tiny portions that did resort to violence (the Weathermen, Black Panthers) I guess the NRA are not particularly willing to use as poster children for armed insurrection keeping The Man in line.

Next time I want to ride a gun argument into crazy town, I'm using the example of the Black Panthers as a group who armed themselves to protect against the tyranny of the government. That should be interesting.

The second amendment was to defend against tyranny of another government, not our own. The infant United States didn't have any military of note, so if the British came on back someone needed to defend. What it's been twisted into today shows just how far the gunnut lobby has tried to bend reality.

I thought the Second Amendment was to create and codify the Colony's right to have their own army, thus the "militia" part? It wasn't until we were a formally recognized country that we could have a formal "army".

This view of the Black Panthers was what I was taught in college at UCBerkeley in the 1980s, although the professor didn't explicitly tie it to the Second Amendment. His position was that the MLK strategy of nonviolence was a great opener, but we wouldn't have gotten the Civil Rights Act without riots, the occasional terrorist act, and the menacing sight of armed, disciplined Black men in (basically) uniform.

Mind you, he was/is directly involved in the Black Power movement, (particularly in the sports world) so take that for what you will.

New York's The Journal News controversially decided to post a searchable, interactive map of all the legal pistol owners publicly registered in Westchester and Rockland counties.

FOIA isn't unlimited and I believe most states limit things like drivers license, SSN, and other stuff that can be used for ID theft.

No it was for both in the minds of the founding fathers, as they had just overthrown a government that they felt had oppressed them.

Source?

All firearms were registered with the RCMP run gun registry until this past April when the Conservative government killed the Long Gun Registry, which means all Non-Restricted firearms no longer have to be registered (except in Quebec). As far as I know the registration information is not public record and is for police use only. I would have a problem if the records of gun owners and their guns were published publicly -- the last thing I would want is for my neighbours or criminals to know that there are firearms in my premises and fear of break-ins to steal those guns.

Well that is exactly what happened here, the records of who owns a gun and their addresses were published in the newspaper. So now the criminals know what houses have weapons for them to try and steal when the homeowners are not there.

I have to hand it to you Brett... I don't know if you actually realize you just did this, and it's a 99.9% chance that it was a complete accident but you are a special 0.1% kind of guy, but for once you protected your own ass. It's like your brain had the faintest hint in it that someone was going to go "Wait, Brett, don't you WANT criminals with government subsidized cellphones to come to your apartment and try to steal your Cheetos so you can shoot them down and get your name mentioned in local newspapers and on right-wing conservative blogs as a heroic example of how to properly use your gun?", so it put in a modifying clause of some sort to protect itself from the evil liberals who conspire against it here.

Basically, yeah. That's always been my misunderstanding.

The founding fathers sure as hell weren't thinking "Gee, let's make it easy for us to be overthrown and (likely) shot by our fellow citizens the first time they tire of paying taxes!" Regardless of what Brett may think.

Edit: ho ho ho Merry Christmas.

I think you're attributing too much malice & mischief-making to the pro-gun folks. I seriously doubt anyone on that side of the argument is actively "trying to bend reality". Guns often give feeling a sense of powerfulness. Hell... they *are* powerful. You really can instantly kill a man from a long ways away if you know what you're doing with them. I strongly suspect that the pro-gun folks that make mistakenly inflate the power that guns give them on a small scale to the belief that it gives them power in a larger context. And they sorta can... if you couple them with military training and heavy weaponry. That's what an army is. But these people either haven't thought it through all the way or the visceral sense of power genuinely impedes their understanding of the power dynamics involved.

So basically, it's stupidity, not deception.

I've heard that too, and it sounds very plausible to me. Gandhi's non-violence movement worked in India because the British like to believe that they're civilized people rather than savages. Sure, they've done some pretty awful things, but many of those things were either excusable as "we were provoked & fighting for our lives" or they were one-off things that the British didn't systematically condone. What Gandhi did was to appeal to the civilized part of their self-image.

The South, on the other hand, didn't have a problem acknowledging their brutal side. Hell, they were proud when they put a nigger in his place. True, Northern whites got pretty antsy when they saw the brutality inflicted upon the protesters during the Civil Rights Era, so there's a chance non-violence might have worked there. (Or maybe not, I don't know. The North was plenty racist in its own right.) But I'm pretty sure the only thing that continual non-violence would have accomplished in the South would have been a lot of dead protesters.

And now for something completely different: heartwarming news from Newtown:

http://www.newser.com/story/159847/entire-newtown-police-force-gets-christmas-day-off.html

It's a small thing, but it made me smile.

I agree, but I was thinking more along the lines of the lobbyists and professional astroturfers trying to inflame the masses. For the rank and file gun owner I think it's definitely like you said- a feeling of power and security.

The gun lobby and their buddies in Congress have basically ended any government research on the effects of guns in our society. Threats of funding cuts have a tendency to create a chilling effect. They bend reality on this issue just as they do with others. Promote and actively ensure ignorance on the issue in favor of gut feel emotional "knowledge" that benefits them and those who keep their gravy train rolling.

That is the main thing. We don't have a clear idea of the variables that can be most effectively targeted to mitigate different kinds of harm, which forces the political debate into the realm of a pitched battle between political extremes where the gun lobby holds most of the legislative precedent cards and can still tap into a lot of race etc issues to spice it up.

Source? How well do you think Gandhi's efforts would have gone without the Kaiser and the Fuehrer accelerating the structural decline of empire? I don't know the answer to that question, and neither do you. But the British concern for being civilized is about as selective as anybody else's, which is to say they consider their interests and capabilities first and foremost and it's really hard to isolate cultural variables or speak about them definitively outside of propaganda.

Yes, that's what it looks like when the structural factors are still plausibly in the favor of the oppressors.It's really hard to measure the effect that the subtler (ie not big legislative gestures like pre-Civil War) great compromises post-Reconstruction America had by placating the South in return for cementing the racially-oriented tensions into nearly permanent fixtures in our history. The death penalty, (white conservative) gun ownership, the incarceration industry, the drug war, and so on are all symptoms of this bigger concession.

I think there's a complex and difficult argument to be made across insurgency history for why some forms of resistance are more successful than others in different times and places, and it's something I love talking about. But to take out-of-ass summaries of them in order to refute a purely hypothetical American gun owner resistance to government is to play exactly the kind of game that people are failing at above when they try to out-Scalia Scalia in his reading of scripture the Constitution.

Well we can just tone down the rhetoric and marvel at this:

So most gun owners feel guns laws are fine the way they are or too strict. Why on Earth would anyone think that?

Those specific laws have been targeted successful by gun advocacy groups over the last few decades, so it gets to the point where mentioning assault weapons means you get the "what is an assault weapon lecture" or abstract arguments about optimal strategy relative to magazine size. Essentially, the gun groups have successfully convinced people that incremental modifications in gun ownership rights are concessions towards a broader removal or control of guns. So things that many gun owning conservative people could actually see the point of in their own right have been framed in the broader culture war between the right of white Americans who have stuff to defend it from those who don't have stuff.

So while I'm saying don't try to play Scalia's or insurgency fetishists' game by using their same flawed criteria for right and wrong to argue against them, I'm by no means trying to ignore the framing of particular restrictions. Right now, the NRA and ALEC have provided a huge set of idiotically reasoned tools in the legislative arena for targeting any form of gun law as an infringement on some flavor of constitutional right (like those laughable right to hunt state constitution amendments and of course stand your ground). I think that's a really tough front to engage on directly because knees are going to jerk all over the place when you mention assault weapons.
In contrast, the NRA war on science is a much subtler affair that I think can only really happen in the dark. People who oppose the status quo with guns have yielded that ground without seeing how hard it is to defend it, and I think a concerted effort in that direction could reframe 2nd amendment issues around "here are limited interventions we can make that will mitigate the harm of spree shootings" and you can people with strong conservative credentials to make the argument for you.That is, the issue doesn't need another liberal with impassioned hand-wringing about the immorality of gun owners, but rather the equivalent of what Richard Nixon had to offer with communism.

Long term, it is about culture and economics and race. The 2nd amendment isn't going anywhere as an article of faith without a really broad demographic being out of the picture, but it can be reformed in its most pernicious effects by targeting the social safety net and the rampant inequality and the racial/cultural issues underlying both of them in a manner that defuses the gun-clinging. I'm not sure Obama can do any of that and target guns directly without blowing up the rest of his term, but I guess we'll see; I'm not reassured that only media wonks are talking about the epidemiological question which should be a slam dunk.

Just brainstorming here, but what if we get a complete idiot to combine bits and pieces of good ideas and sound criticisms into a monstrous argument for inaction? Yeah, that's what we need. Now the second thing we need is something like the tracking system used on wildlife to see how far these things wander afield before they resurface in another guise.

Sorry, tracking systems are unacceptable infringements on freedom when it comes to gun owners.

The mentally challenged however...

It's not like Grenadier 7 provided one for his/her interpretation either, so that's pretty selective.

Brett's take is idealistic, but if there's any time to attribute/expect some degree of idealism from political leaders rather than pure self-interest, establishing rules for a new 'country of freedom'* would perhaps be it. If nothing else, the alternative interpretation overlooks surprising lack of a clause to the effect of "until we have some actual, organized army in place, capable of taking that duty over". Something you could expect from people both intelligent and supposedly interested only in protecting their freshly gained control from further revolts of unwashed masses.

*) "freedom" as understood in that era, obv.

The whole thing is a distraction. People (outside of historically sourced, contained, and anchored arguments) refer back to the intentions of Founding Fathers when their argument favors faith rather than evidence. If you can't substantiate what you believe with what is shown to work, then you just bang the belief drum harder and get all hot and bothered about calling into question the authority of dead people. At that level, the sort of "idealism" you describe is more properly considered a desire to neutralize the scientific method in the discussion.

I don't know how we can't look at any part of the Constitution and question its veracity or usefulness as time change, considering how much of it we have already amended to date.

We absolutely can but it doesn't really help much. When the US is at the point where rewriting the 2nd amendment is politically viable, then the battle is already won. Until then, we have to live with the historic interpretations of it. I guess that a particularly energised SCOTUS might reinterpret it in some non-crazy way that allows for much stronger restrictions and regulation than currently but that's not much more likely and will still need the States to follow their lead.

The Founding Fathers were barely a few generations removed from banging rocks together and painting on cave walls. Their intentions are about as relevant as mine or yours or Brett's.

If any of them wish to challenge the assertion, they're welcome to.

Stop. The entire forum rolls its collective eyes when you do this. Pretending that you are privileged, enlightened, and unquestionably far beyond the savages of yesteryear is exactly the kind of kneejerk arrogance that weakens your own case.

In a sufficiently contrived scenario, you are barely hours removed from banging rocks together and painting on cave walls.

In a non-contrived scenario, Sir Francis Bacon - who is approximately a few generations before the Founding Fathers, natch - was smarter, more intelligent, more reasoned, and probably a better human being than you, me, anyone on this forum, and almost anyone you or I have ever met or will meet in our lives.