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My point is that there is no "they" you're negotiating with, though. "Democrats" do not speak with a single voice. Even if you look at majorities, that Pew survey I linked indicates that a majority of Republicans agree with preventing people with mental illnesses from owning guns, raising the minimum age to buy a fire arm to 21, and oppose allowing people to carry a concealed fire arm without a permit. Put that way, there is no party that is universally against gun rights or for gun rights.
The Democrat blob is not a monolith, and neither is the Republican blob.
If you're trying to make a point that Democrats who won't pass their preferred gun control policy (but limited to registered Democrats only as a compromise) are being hypocritical, I'm not sure the argument straightforwardly gets off the ground. First, I don't think the vast majority of gun rights advocates would be in favor of such a compromise, so you're not putting forward a live proposal that is really worthy of consideration. And second, there's reasons for wanting to oppose such a proposal apart from believing in gun rights. It's stupid to unilaterally disarm yourself, in a society where 40% of your "enemy" is legally armed.
Nobody has made this proposal seriously, so perhaps this is simply a matter of it not being considered at all yet.
Why not change that.
Wow, maybe there's certain advantages to owning guns that THE SECOND AMENDMENT WAS MEANT TO PRESERVE?
I GUESS THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS GOOD FOR SOMETHING AFTER ALL.
/sarcasm
So this argument now convinced me that I should oppose ALL gun control measures.
Debate over, as far as I'm concerned.
I agree that there are advantages to owning guns, but the 2nd Amendment is about more than an "advantage" it is about a supposedly inalienable right. I would imagine that we should hold rights to higher standards than merely being "advantageous", as there are plenty of advantageous things that aren't rights. Cars are advantageous, for example, but there is no recognized right to car ownership or operation.
I'm weakly pro-gun rights, because I think that gun ownership is one of the more likely ways for minorities to protect themselves against right violations by the majority (i.e. a black man during segregation, or the Black Panthers following cop cars in the 70's), but I honestly have trouble mapping the limits of acceptable political violence within that framework. What is the dividing line between the 1954 attack on the United States capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists and the January 6th riots? What is the dividing line between trying to assassinate Hitler or Pol Pot and trying to assassinate Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? If cops are a representative of the force and will of the state, who gets to decide when cops have crossed the line into tyranny and it is thus morally justified to kill them?
Because I am pro-civilization and anti-violence, I have trouble with my tepid support of gun rights. It seems great to be able to defend against a tyrannical majority in the abstract, but how do we balance that against the fact that any state (tyrannical or not) is going to defend itself and attempt to delegitimize resistance by the oppressed? Why do we consider the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers good, but the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War bad and illegitimate?
If you live in a civilized country, you should have little trouble trusting your neighbors with weapons.
If you don't live in a civilized country, the need for weapons should be almost self-evident.
I used to lean slightly pro-gun-control, but there's simply no way you can deep dive into the statistics and come away with the idea that the guns are the problem, and by focusing on guns, it is in fact harder to address more fundamental issues.
Which is why I am losing patience with gun-control advocates who burn so much effort on a cause that simply will not achieve its purported benefits.
I mean, you can own a car and it can't be taken from you by the government without due process and such (literally the fifth amendment), whereas operating one on public property is explicitly a 'privilege.' So no, there is no explicit right, but there's still an inherent protection in there.
I mean, in my civilized country, a rando tried to assassinate the candidate of one of the two major political parties, so my trust is being strained.
My basic problem is that I can't say whether a rando trying to assasinate a political candidate is the 2nd Amendment working as intended (since it puts the power to decide when to overthrow tyrants in the hands of individuals), or if there is some principled way to criticize some acts of political violence as outside of the intended scope of gun rights?
The relevant comparison is whether it would be constitutionally possible for a Federal or State ban on cars to be enacted. I very much doubt if such a thing would ever happen, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
And in Japan, another civilized country, THAT HAS GUN CONTROL OUT THE WAZOO, a rando succeeded at killing an ex-prime minister. With a gun.
As I said, dive into the stats nice and deep and things become clearer.
If the problem is you DON'T trust your neighbors, that's a significantly larger issue, and evidence you don't live in a civilized (part of the) country.
And I should perhaps remind you that we can 3D print firearms at home now so you're NOT going to prevent a sufficiently dedicated rando from getting one.
The interstate commerce clause MIGHT stretch that far, but it is not in fact clear to me that a blanket car ban would pass muster unless there was some actual harm that the government was intervening to prevent. "Climate Change" might but probably doesn't cover that base.
The point of criminal laws is not to ensure that a thing never happens. We outlaw murder, but there will always be murders. The point of laws is threefold: 1) to discourage other criminals from committing the crime in question, 2) to reform the criminal so they never commit the crime again, and 3) if 2 is impossible, to safely contain a criminal away from the rest of society so that everyone else is safe.
My guess is that the number of gun-related assassination attempts in Japan over the last 50 years is probably going to be less than the equivalent number per capita in the United States. Now, if all-cause assassinations per capita were the same between the two countries (all else being equal), that would be evidence that gun control is unlikely to play much of a role in preventing assassination attempts.
... I mean, you can say that. But if that were the real point, surely we'd be seeing much stricter punishments for even petty crimes. And its the same people pushing for gun control who push for decriminalization of various activities, and 'defund the police,' and set up bail funds, and otherwise support an agenda that is so-called 'soft on crime.'
Yes, I have no problem admitting that the Japanese are far less violent on average than Americans. Not even a controversy.
Do YOU want to assert that violence in Japan would substantially increase if they repealed all gun laws and suddenly gun ownership became widespread in Japan?
(Because that's when we can start talking about the ACTUAL cause of violence, aside from guns)
What's your theory of the case? What, say, three interventions do you believe would have the largest effect on societal violence and crime, and be implementable within a little-l liberal constitutional republic under the rule of law?
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