USA Politics

Just to address a few things.

1. The core law allowing Americans to own guns is the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution, as interpreted by today's judicial scholars. Changing that is not a matter of passing a law. It would require a significantly more robust process that needs a supermajority in Congress and the approval of 3/4ths of the States. A gun ban isn't going to happen. Cried, you keep calling this "a law". Constitutional statements are far more than a law - they are the Supreme Law of the Land.

There is a minority view that the 2nd Amendment only applies to militia organizational purposes. This is a very minority view and changing that would need a dedicated effort to alter the way a generation of legal scholars teach law. This level of fix is probably thirty to fifty years away, if we start the push today.

2. Any sort of weapons ban in the USA is essentially pointless today. There's so many guns there that you are not going to be removing a majority of weapons. Even assault-style weapons. A pipeline for illegal weapons will exist for a very long period of time. That makes gun laws very hard to enact politically because there's a good argument that gun laws won't change a thing.

3. All of this ignores the real problem with gun ownership in the USA anyway. Accidental shootings and deaths are way higher than any other country on the map. This guy would have found a way to kill, but I think the real focus should begin with responsible gun ownership. Most gun owners aren't.
 
I'd hoped you would address the questions I asked as well. The answers would make clear personal views on the situation, and (for me at least) it would be easier to discuss the matter, without only having to argue about constitutions or practical problems to change anything.

To everyone who reads this:
I want to know what touches you, the forum user, in this matter.
 
LooseCannon said:
I think the real focus should begin with responsible gun ownership. Most gun owners aren't.
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I agree with the rest of what you said, but would argue this most (especially if you define it as 50%+1) are responsible, but I think the number is well higher than 50%+1

Also the militia question is iffy if it will ever be read the way you suggest
 
bearfan said:
Also the militia question is iffy if it will ever be read the way you suggest
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Like I said, it would require a massive effort to educate a generation of lawyers in a particular way. I doubt it will happen, especially since the drive to read it opposite was done by the NRA over the past 50 years. Up until about 25-30 years ago this amendment was not one people really considered at all, then there was a huge push to have it incorporated and read to actually allow universal gun ownership in the USA.

bearfan said:
I agree with the rest of what you said, but would argue this most (especially if you define it as 50%+1) are responsible, but I think the number is well higher than 50%+1
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Even if it's 99%+1 that's not good enough. Mandatory gun safety classes should be introduced into public schools. Make it illegal to have loaded weapons in the house. Mandate trigger locks and safe storage devices. Force people who apply for concealed carry permits to take high-level gun safety courses and to re-up them every couple years. Make it a class C felony to not practice trigger discipline.

Stuff like this can be done and will make America's guns safe. If banning guns is impractical or unconstitutional, then the only real way to do it is to make what guns exist more safe.
 
LooseCannon said:
Like I said, it would require a massive effort to educate a generation of lawyers in a particular way. I doubt it will happen, especially since the drive to read it opposite was done by the NRA over the past 50 years. Up until about 25-30 years ago this amendment was not one people really considered at all, then there was a huge push to have it incorporated and read to actually allow universal gun ownership in the USA.
Click to expand...

That all assumes that is the way it should be read

LooseCannon said:
Even if it's 99%+1 that's not good enough. Mandatory gun safety classes should be introduced into public schools. Make it illegal to have loaded weapons in the house. Mandate trigger locks and safe storage devices. Force people who apply for concealed carry permits to take high-level gun safety courses and to re-up them every couple years. Make it a class C felony to not practice trigger discipline.

Stuff like this can be done and will make America's guns safe. If banning guns is impractical or unconstitutional, then the only real way to do it is to make what guns exist more safe.
Click to expand...
[/QUOTE]
You already need to take a course for concealed weapons permits (pretty sure that is the case in all states, it is in Texas for sure).. I see ads for them all over the place. I doubt you will see it in public schools any time soon, the anti gun folks will use the stupid argument that was used against teaching sex ed. "If they learn about guns, they will want to use guns"

Making it illegal to have a loaded weapon in a house would get tossed out in a second by the courts

But certainly increased gun safety is a good thing.
 
bearfan said:
Making it illegal to have a loaded weapon in a house would get tossed out in a second by the courts
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Why? We can make all sorts of things illegal in private homes. You'd need exceptions for times of distress (ie, a robber), preparation for legal use (hunting, shooting in private lands/designated space). Either that or mandate trigger guards or (eventually, once the technology is afforable) biometric trigger locks. Basically something so your kid can't find your loaded handgun and shoot his sister.
 
Biometric trigger locks are doable (legally at least) for guns going forward, not sure what that looks like retrofitting existing guns. I just do not know enough about how they work

As for loaded guns, you are really just making it a penalty if an incident happens ... and you would have to prove that the gun was not loaded at the time of use (say a robber). You would probably need a ton more exceptions to that, people with a carry permit for example.

There is no way to enforce that otherwise. You cannot have cops barging into houses checking to see if registered guns are loaded or not.

While you can have certain things illegal in private homes, most of those things are not called out specifically in the Constitution.
 
bearfan said:
While you can have certain things illegal in private homes, most of those things are not called out specifically in the Constitution.
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There are limits on things within the Constitution, such as limits on freedoms of speech. Guns are certainly a thing that can (and should) have limits.

I'm just very happy I live in a country that doesn't consider owning a firearm to be a constitutional right. And I am also very happy I live in a country where assault weapons are not so easily obtained by terrorists. For the USA, it will be very difficult to rectify the two standpoints, and things are unlikely to change.
 
CriedWhenBrucieLeft said:
Not in the UK.

But you'd accept it for the greater public good, yes?

So it's about money? This isn't reading very well...

I accept that's not practical, but have we not already covered this? It's going to be difficult.
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Well good for UK but there's no big difference between an AKS and standard hunting carbine. Regardless of AKS, Mosin Nagant is being sold in UK and that's a heavy duty anti personnel sniper rifle.
Me? FFS I don't like weapon ownership at all. If I had my way I would be able to check in to the range and just lend a rifle for target practice. But in Croatia that access requires a weapon permit, which requires weapon, which really screws my scheme up.
My personal opinion is that USA has millions of gun nuts and that's really bad. My personal opinion is irrelevant because I'm not American and I try to place myself in the context. That's why I drag money in. I think that's an important factor to them.

This gun thing is B.S from 18th century and has no place in modern life. Also, I'm not fond of the theory 'people kill people' and 'I can kill you with a piece of paper' because a piece of paper wasn't produced as a technology to assist people in inflicting physical damage, it's a fucking paper.

Edit : once, in my town, there was a time when it was normal to put a AK47 and a hand granade on a coffee shop table while sitting and being served, and things like RPGs and anti tank shells were more of a normal household objects than something you saw on TV. This was a culmination of a paranoid militarized society imploding itself. Weapons are not cool. Once you experience war on your home soil you realize they're not cool. Weapon 'culture' is really an oxymoron, Swiss are also all armed and ready for home protection yet that part of the society is not up front and people aren't really that enthusiastic about their big guns, compared to the States.
 
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Zare said:
This gun thing is B.S from 18th century and has no place in modern life. Also, I'm not fond of the theory 'people kill people' and 'I can kill you with a piece of paper' because a piece of paper wasn't produced as a technology to assist people in inflicting physical damage, it's a fucking paper.
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Exactly. Guns are weapons.
 
Zare said:
This gun thing is B.S from 18th century and has no place in modern life.
Click to expand...
I agree. Rules that were written for black powder muskets shouldn't apply to AKMs or AR 15s. Problem is convincing Americans of that.
 
LooseCannon said:
Just to address a few things.

1. The core law allowing Americans to own guns is the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution, as interpreted by today's judicial scholars. Changing that is not a matter of passing a law. It would require a significantly more robust process that needs a supermajority in Congress and the approval of 3/4ths of the States. A gun ban isn't going to happen. Cried, you keep calling this "a law". Constitutional statements are far more than a law - they are the Supreme Law of the Land.

There is a minority view that the 2nd Amendment only applies to militia organizational purposes. This is a very minority view and changing that would need a dedicated effort to alter the way a generation of legal scholars teach law. This level of fix is probably thirty to fifty years away, if we start the push today.

2. Any sort of weapons ban in the USA is essentially pointless today. There's so many guns there that you are not going to be removing a majority of weapons. Even assault-style weapons. A pipeline for illegal weapons will exist for a very long period of time. That makes gun laws very hard to enact politically because there's a good argument that gun laws won't change a thing.

3. All of this ignores the real problem with gun ownership in the USA anyway. Accidental shootings and deaths are way higher than any other country on the map. This guy would have found a way to kill, but I think the real focus should begin with responsible gun ownership. Most gun owners aren't.
Click to expand...
While I do see where you're coming from, this all comes down to "it's hard to do, so we're not even gonna start or try".
 
Night Prowler said:
While I do see where you're coming from, this all comes down to "it's hard to do, so we're not even gonna start or try".
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Yep. While I completely respect Bearfan's opinions and acknowledge his reasoning is likely correct, I just can't get around this point. It smacks of "it's not an important enough."
 
I'm merely pointing out that the amount of political capital required in the USA to run a program for more than six months, these days, is very difficult to accumulate.
 
LooseCannon said:
I'm merely pointing out that the amount of political capital required in the USA to run a program for more than six months, these days, is very difficult to accumulate.
Click to expand...


True, but I think I go to the point where if people are focused on gun violence, mass shootings are really the last thing to look at in terms of numbers. But they get in the headlines much more than anything else.

You have in greater numbers
1) Suicides ... not really sure how much can/should be done here. If someone wants to off themselves, it is really a matter of method
2) Accidents ... LC pointed out some safety devices that could be put on guns to reduce that
3) High crime area /gang/mob, general etc related ... probably the biggest number and I addressed that earlier.

Those three things, you can do something about and would have the most impact ... not on the news cycle, but in reality. Beyond requiring some safety devices on guns, none of those are really gun control, are all Constitutional and would actually save the most lives while protecting people's rights.

That is really my last comment on this as we are going in circles and after a 2 hour power outage yesterday, I have a bunch of work to catch up on today.
 
.. and a bizarre election gets odder

Russian government hackers broke into the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee and accessed information about Democratic candidates as well as a database on opposition research against Donald Trump, POLITICO has confirmed.

The Washington Post first reported on Tuesday that the DNC was aware of suspicious activity in April; within 24 hours of the first signals that something was amiss, cyber firm CrowdStrike was brought in to install monitoring software to analyze the details of who was responsible.

The hackers had access to the information for approximately one year but that access was wiped clean last weekend, the Post reported, noting that the DNC said that no personal, financial or donor information had been accessed or taken.

"The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the DNC chairwoman, in a statement. "When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network."

CrowdStrike designated two groups that gained access to the DNC's info. One, codenamed Cozy Bear, broke into the DNC last summer and had been monitoring the committee's emails and chats. The other group CrowdStrike dubbed Fancy Bear. It hacked into the DNC in April aiming to get opposition research files. The Fancy Bear breach is what tipped off DNC officials. Fancy Bear was able to gain access to all of the DNC's research staff computers.
Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, called it “meddling in our personal affairs.”

“I am sure they intended to do this without being caught,” he told POLITICO. “They wanted to obtain the information without it being detected. That’s a kind of target that would make sense -- in terms of them wanting to know things about what is going on here. Whether they were doing it to try to try to manipulate our political process, I’d have to think about that.”

He added: “Russia has tremendous capabilities, both the Russian government and their proxies and people somewhat affiliated with the government. We always underestimate their capabilities.”
There is as yet no evidence the two groups were coordinating. One group may be connected to Russia's GRU intelligence service and the other might be the Federal Security Service, Russia's influential security arm, CrowdStrike told the Post.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/russian-government-hackers-broke-into-dnc-servers-stole-trump-oppo-224315#ixzz4BZymRRoM
 
Some people believe that the Russians didn't take Trump's candidacy seriously either, so they had no files on him, so they figured, hey, just steal the Dems!
 
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