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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.
To be honest, I'd be against a right to bear arms if I was writing a constitution for a new country. HOWEVER, in light of the fact that the US constitution does grant a right to bear arms, I am very strongly against allowing anyone to do an end run around the process for amending the constitution.
The true test of the strength of your institutions is whether or not you can stick to them even when there's a legitimately good idea that you can't implement because your institutions are in the way. If you can't respect your institutions when they're actually wrong then you don't respect your institutions at all.
I'm curious why, in the abstract?
I'm pretty partial to the ancient prejudices of Englishmen personally.
I don't think an armed uprising is plausible in this day and age. People revolt because they're desperate, and the western world is too rich to foster that kind of desperation. The big difference since the days of George Washington is that we're much richer and more comfortable now.
With no possibility of being able to productively use them against the government, guns can only be used against the citizenry. Having a right to guns just makes your society more dangerous to live in.
Anglosphere governments do not enforce laws particularly evenly, and this being known, I’m sticking with being allowed to carry a gun over criminals being ignored when they do it but being policed with presumption of guilt for firearms ownership.
In Japan, sure, I would happily go unarmed, and comply with whatever ridiculousness they demand for hunting shotguns. We’re not Japan.
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This is a bad and inaccurate model for how successful revolts happen. The American Revolution was led by dissatisfied elites who were living at the pointy end of life satisfaction at the time and risked it all for reasons that were partially ideological.
Desperate people foster low-level street violence that is typically easily crushed. Dissatisfied elites are the true threats to regimes, and they don't revolt out of desperation. There's a reason that every few years people discover that DHS or someone has been flagging disgruntled O6s as threats to homeland stability, and it's not because they're stupid.
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I guess we disagree on that very premise. You think we're beyond warfare because you haven't done it in a while. You obviously haven't been to Northern Ireland. They have video games there too you know. And the 90s aren't that far back. Pretty comfortable times then too, arguably more comfortable than today.
Nonsense. Citizens can also use them against criminals. Who always have them anyways.
There's certainly a tradeoff but my bias is to favor a slightly more dangerous society where I'm allowed to execute the man that has designs on my property (and therefore myself).
I have, in fact, been to Northern Ireland.
Then you may have seen large mementos of people using small arms to get concessions from their government within living memory. Which makes the implausibility of something that did happen very weird indeed.
Except they failed. The express goal of the IRA was a united Ireland. Indeed there is an argument their goal would have been further along without their intervention. They accepted a peace deal that had been offered to them in the 1970's in 1998. All the violence didn't actually get them any further forward than the government had been willing to accept beforehand.
With another 25 years of (mostly) peace we are now closer to a United Ireland (polling wise) than we ever were during the Troubles.
I fail to see how that's relevant to the plausibility of the insurgency in the first place.
You can say the PIRA failed, but it did exist.
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