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After some of my recent rethinking about violent crime, I have realized that while before, I leant towards a pro-2nd Amendment position, I am now leaning against the 2nd Amendment, at least theoretically (I will explain more about what I mean by this further below). I could be into a more narrow version of the 2nd Amendment that restricts gun ownership to only certain highly vetted groups. However, I think that too much of American public is simply too stupid, impulsive, and/or antisocial to be trusted with guns. For a similar reason as to why I would not give children in general guns even though a certain fraction of them are capable of using them properly, I do not trust the American public in general with guns.
The main reason why I have had a pro-2nd Amendment position in the past was because I believed that the 2nd Amendment is a bulwark against government overreach. However, while the US is to me unquestionably more free when it comes to civil rights than, for example, Europe, I am not sure how much this has to do with private gun ownership. I have also seen the class of people who share my attitudes about the 2nd Amendment being a bulwark against government overreach repeatedly fail to actually use their guns even when they believe that such overreach exists. When I hear that something like half of Trump supporters claim to literally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, yet I also see that basically none of them used guns to do anything about it, it gives me some doubt about this whole "bulwark against government tyranny" train of thought. And almost needless to say, widespread public gun ownership did nothing to stop NSA domestic surveillance or, long before that, things like the WWI-era Espionage Act. Or, for that matter, slavery.
Now, I do believe in the argument that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns". Hence the part about "theoretically" in my first paragraph. Changing the 2nd Amendment now would likely be a bad idea for the simple reason that there are already so many guns in the US that there is no plausible way that simply getting rid of the 2nd Amendment would lead to any outcome other than a bunch of pro-social people handing in their guns while a huge fraction of anti-social people keep them. And that would be very bad. Hence I mean, I still support the 2nd Amendment in practice as a defense against anti-social people. But I am questioning whether it might not be better now if the US had gotten rid of the 2nd Amendment say, a hundred years ago or so.
I should make clear that I am not clearly against the 2nd Amendment even theoretically. Like I said, I am just beginning to lean against it. I am no longer convinced that its supposed upsides are worth the downsides.
It is clear to me that the modern Democratic Party is essentially an enabler of violent crime, and that is one of the main reasons why I cannot imagine myself voting for a Democrat. However, I also see how the Republicans' pro-2nd Amendment position has contributed to the problem, and I cannot let them off the hook.
Edit: I should note that I would vastly prefer a hardcore crackdown on violent crime that does not take away pro-social people's guns, as opposed to taking away most people's guns. I believe that only a very small minority of Americans commit violent crime. However, I am not sure how likely it would be for such a crackdown to work in America to reduce the level of violent crime to what I would like it to be (not zero, but something like Japan levels), given the sheer size of the country and the sheer number of guns that exist here.
Isn't this a fully general argument that applies to everything? "People are too stupid to make good decisions, so the government should make those decisions for them!" And yet despite the fact that many people are very stupid, the government almost always seems to do a worse job at making decisions than those "stupid" people did. It's the same intuition that leads people to think communism is a great and flawless idea that "just hasn't been implemented properly." It's important to judge policies by how well they work, not how good they sound.
Agreed, but it seems to me that empirical evidence shows that letting people make more of their own economic decisions clearly leads to much better economic outcomes, in general, than centralized economic control. I agreed with that ten years ago and I still agree with it today. To me the evidence for that seems overwhelming. However, when it comes to guns I am not so sure. Is it really the US' gun rights that are a major factor for why it, for example, the US government does not suppress free speech as much as England's government does? Or is it the explanation for that more of a cultural thing?
Also note that I am not advocating for the government to make all decisions for people. My attitude about the 2nd Amendment is more that I no longer believe that it is necessarily the best idea of gun ownership to be available to basically everyone except felons and people who have been proven to be mentally unstable. I think it might be better to revise the 2nd Amendment so that gun ownership is restricted to a significantly smaller subset of the citizenry that it is today. Not along lines of "what politics do they support", but more along the lines of "how likely are these people to be likely to use these guns purely for defense rather than in an attempt to obtain profit". Not necessarily saying that it is realistically possible for any laws to make such delineations well, but I am just trying to explain my current thinking.
While I probably have the same terminal values as you do here, this feels like wishcasting.
If the 2nd Amendment were to be cast aside, we wouldn't get a newer, better 2nd Amendment. We'd get a wholesale ban on guns like they have in the UK, Australia, or Japan.
To put it another way... we should be very careful about casting aside long-established norms. Because when we do, we will not end up at some ideal, better place. We will end up wherever the regime wants to take us. There is no world in which you get to have a gun but the people you dislike do not.
I don't think this is true. There is a large pro-gun constituency in the US that does not exist in other countries. Maybe in several generations time that would change, but I would struggle to imagine eg Texas passing a full ban in the forseeable future even if it was allowed to.
I think the existence of the Second Amendment is partially causative in the continued existence and size of that constituency due to the way Kohlberg IV morality works.
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The federal government bans drugs, why not guns too?
Everything I know about Kamala Harris tells me she would have no problem regulating guns on a federal level. The 2nd Amendment makes that a lot harder.
For the same reason - there is a large pro-gun constituency in America, and those people have political power and influence in a democratic system. There are many levers of power in America, and many of them are within the grasp of the pro-gun faction.
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