universal background checks are a common sense solution to gun violence - how is this not true?

[little2add]

 

 

 

 

Edited October 11, 2015 by little2add

[dairygirl4u2c]

[little2add]

 

 

[dairygirl4u2c]

nobody claims gun advocates are so violent that all anti gun advocates would be dead, so logic dictates that that first graph is illogical. 

i think it's fair to say that guns are worse than other tools and weopons, so id disagree with that second one. if you have a gun, you are more likely to kill someone, it's simple. if clubs caused people to be more likely to kill someone, a club would be worse. as it sits, the deadliest weapon is a gun. 

i dont know how people just ignore the opening post. that isn't even advocating taking away guns, it's advocating background checks, a common sense gun regulation. i dont know how people continue to think guns are so bad when i posted studies showing that they cause people to kill others moreso than they otherwise would. 

the more gun rights we have, the more people will die. logic dictates that the last poster and anomaly is okay with that. 

Edited October 20, 2015 by dairygirl4u2c

[StMichael]

1) You cannot purchase a gun in the US without a background check.

2) Any laws that prevent a US citizen from their RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS is unconstitutional.

3) The guns used in Chicago or LA are not coming from gun friendly states, but are purchased via the black market. Guns, as well as bullets, are traceable.

4) There is no law, no regulation, nothing that can stop a person from committing a crime. 

This is a tired conversation. It matters not what stats are provided that show where crime happens (illegal gun control) and where it doesn't. This is simply part of the checklist of the anti-American who needs to cross of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, etc. 

The Federal government does not provide rights, it is restricted by this very Constitution. Unfortunately, Democrats and progressive Republicans seem to ignore that.

You do not have a right to protection from the government.

The government cannot magically bring you or your loved ones back to life after you have been shot by a criminal.

The government does not protect your property.

The government does not do anything but take your money and your liberty, if you so choose.

[dairygirl4u2c]

yes it is a tired conversation, because you guys repeat the same lies and ignore reality. 

not all guns in the US require a background check. almost forty percent of gun sales in the US occur without a background check. 

gun restrictions are constitutional. the second amendment itself refers to a "well regulated milita", and almost every amendment is considered to have allowable common sense exceptions, even the first amendment. 

guns in chicago do come from gun friendly states. yes they also come from the general black market. 

you can't stop a person from committing a crime if they are intent on it, but you can prevent some crimes in general. if you dont have a gun, you aren't as likely to kill someone- crimes are prevented. 

it's somewhat irrelevant to this thread but the federal government does provide rights. free speech, the right to bear arms, ie the very right you are talking about, the right to vote, the right to not be a slave etc etc. 

bottomline, the more gun rights you have, the more people die. the more likely you are to own a gun, the more likely you are to kill someone. it'd increase my respect for the anti gun control crowd in this thread to just admit, explicitly admit so i can see it, they are willing to have more people die in order to protect guns. but as far as i see, they just ignore it, ignore reality and continue the tired lies i've been debunking. 

Edited October 20, 2015 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

you are over four times more likely to be shot by an intruder instead of actually defending yourself if you have a gun. 
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/mar/25/guns-protection-national-rifle-association

for every one person shot due to self defense, thirty are shot due to murder. 

it might be a right. but "gun rights" is not good news almost any way you look at it. 

Edited October 20, 2015 by dairygirl4u2c

[StMichael]

yes it is a tired conversation, because you guys repeat the same lies and ignore reality. 

not all guns in the US require a background check. almost forty percent of gun sales in the US occur without a background check. 

gun restrictions are constitutional. the second amendment itself refers to a "well regulated milita", and almost every amendment is considered to have allowable common sense exceptions, even the first amendment. 

guns in chicago do come from gun friendly states. yes they also come from the general black market. 

you can't stop a person from committing a crime if they are intent on it, but you can prevent some crimes in general. if you dont have a gun, you aren't as likely to kill someone- crimes are prevented. 

it's somewhat irrelevant to this thread but the federal government does provide rights. free speech, the right to bear arms, ie the very right you are talking about, the right to vote, the right to not be a slave etc etc. 

bottomline, the more gun rights you have, the more people die. the more likely you are to own a gun, the more likely you are to kill someone. it'd increase my respect for the anti gun control crowd in this thread to just admit, explicitly admit so i can see it, they are willing to have more people die in order to protect guns. but as far as i see, they just ignore it, ignore reality and continue the tired lies i've been debunking. 

Oh boy.

Please go read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers before you further put your foot in your mouth regarding the second amendment. The Founders were quite clear about this. 

The Federal Government CANNOT infringe on this right no more than they can create a national religion. The language could not be simpler:

"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."

(NOTICE THE COMMA, if you and your anti-American rhetoric were correct, there would be a period there. Besides, the arguments by the Founders are freely available for any communist, socialist or whatever to see that no, it means exactly what it means.)

What you and many do not understand is that this speaks to the state and the individual, separately.

The States, when they ratified the Constitution, did not want to cede power to a central government, therefore, if this central government got out of hand the State (which means an actual state) could defend itself with their own army. Nowhere in that sentence does it say a President or congressman or local yokel civil servant can do squat to prevent the individual from this right. 

The Bill of Rights are not rights granted to us by the government, these are negative rights, which means the government CAN NOT do these things.

No where is there more gun rights and more violence. There is violence where there are no morals, poor economy and other crimes. We don't see gun fights raging in Texas or Colorado (well now everyone is stoned there), but we do see it where gun law are at there most restrictive (NYC, Chicago, LA). 

For me, this is a complete non-issue. It is my right as outlined in the Constitution and the ONLY way to change this is to go through the amendment process, not some bozo in the white house with a pen and a phone who should have been impeached years ago.

Mother jones, please...

Here you can see how they cooked this graph up:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/no-states-with-higher-gun-ownership-dont-have-more-gun-murders/article/2573353

Edited October 21, 2015 by StMichael

[little2add]

words can do as much damage as guns, any day of the week.   you all should not be so mean. 

If ya can't be civil when expressing a point then just be  quiet 

if yous don't mind  

Edited October 21, 2015 by little2add

[dairygirl4u2c]

yeah that was an interesting case against the mother jones article. i still see my harvard article comparing nations and states though. and ive seen tons of other studies that verify that. so at best i will say i dont know what to make of it all, and at worst id question the that article that is against mine. 

here is another example. 

more guns, more homicide. 
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/09/13/2617131/largest-gun-study-guns-murder/

at any rate, i would be reluctant to take away guns anyway. the real point is background checks should be universal and they are not. no one is giving any good reasons to be against that (aside from weak interpretations of the second amendment, and note i think the comma in the second amendment emphasizes my point more, when there's all kinds of other arguments against such a limited reading), most just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist or something. 

Edited October 21, 2015 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

im actually somewhat conservative on this point. when the supreme court ruled recently that we do in fact have a right to a gun, i would have joined the conservatives. there was a formidable and i think respectable minority that said there was no right, just a right to a militia. they argued that the phrase "bear arms" is a military term, and taken altogether, the second amendment protects militia rights, not individual rights. i would disagree with that only because the common joe's understanding for as long as i'm aware, has been that there is an individual right to guns, and the militia must i suppose come from the people. 

perhaps i should look into the historical understanding. from the first paragraph in an article i'm reading...

"A fraud on the American public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum"

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856#ixzz3pDs7PLdx

"Though state militias eventually dissolved, for two centuries we had guns (plenty!) and we had gun laws in towns and states, governing everything from where gunpowder could be stored to who could carry a weapon—and courts overwhelmingly upheld these restrictions. Gun rights and gun control were seen as going hand in hand. Four times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership outside the context of a militia. As the Tennessee Supreme Court put it in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

"The NRA was founded by a group of Union officers after the Civil War who, perturbed by their troops’ poor marksmanship, wanted a way to sponsor shooting training and competitions. The group testified in support of the first federal gun law in 1934, which cracked down on the machine guns beloved by Bonnie and Clyde and other bank robbers."

Edited October 21, 2015 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

"For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “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 courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon."

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/so-you-think-you-know-the-second-amendment

i know someone who said it wasn't till the eighties that an individual right was pushed so much. i know plenty of older people who have said they always thought of it as a right to a gun so i questioned why the person i know said that. but here is something to give him credit...

"Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

"But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)"

Edited October 21, 2015 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

"Until recently, the judiciary treated the Second Amendment almost as a dead letter. Many courts concluded that citizens have no constitutionally protected right to arms at all, and the federal courts never invalidated a single gun control law"

"As America grapples with a relentless tide of gun violence, pro-gun activists have come to rely on the Second Amendment as their trusty shield when faced with mass-shooting-induced criticism. In their interpretation, the amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms—a reading that was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 2008 ruling in District of Columbia. v. Heller. Yet most judges and scholars who debated the clause's awkwardly worded and oddly punctuated 27 words in the decades before Heller almost always arrived at the opposite conclusion, finding that the amendment protects gun ownership for purposes of military duty and collective security. "

i think my friend who said it wasn't till the eighties that an individual right developed, could only be talking about courts and academia. per lay understanding, there was a right to have a gun, as far as i can see. 

Edited October 21, 2015 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

as i think about it, i'm moving more to the left on this. i would have joined the minority in the 2008 decision that said there's an individual right to bear arms. because of the military connotations of the phrase "bear arms" connotes a militia, and looking at the clauses of the amendment holistically. now, i dont think the federal government can ban guns, as they have no direct authority to, just to regulate as implied in the "well regulated" passive voice amendment and indirectly through the commerce clause. a federal ban would also potentially infringe on militia rights, were the state to have the militia. 

[Winchester]

Even without the second amendment, the feds wouldn't have the power to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, since there's no such enumerated power.

Not that legality/constitutionality really matters. If it did, there would be no ATF or NFA.