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This is a wild comparison; the gun is inert and has no volition of its own. Nor is it always in a state of active danger like the running chainsaw. Firing a gun is not something that is done by failing to pay sufficient attention to the gun - it requires volition and active intent across several particular bodily motions to draw, aim, turn off a safety, and fire a gun, just like it would to grab someone by the head and try to break their neck, or try to stab someone with a knife or pen, etc.
The sad but accurate truth is that crimes of passion are common to mankind (men especially but occasionally women too). And when talking passion and anger, it actually is quite true that even small impediments can help reduce rates. I think when talking about society-wide gun policy, it makes sense to weigh the pros and cons; the typical gun-carry argument is what, that in case a mass shooting happens you can step in? Sure, fine, but compare the number of those cases to cases where an easily accessible gun leads to a death of passion, and I think the latter case is a clear winner.
I think being around open carry guns should be in the same "nervousness" category as crossing a busy street, or driving a car through a heavy pedestrian area. So being around a carrier gives a bit of an edge of seriousness, and demands reasonable attention. Enough to be annoying and noticeable, I think, and mildly unpleasant. Chainsaw is probably a bit too far a comparison in my view because of the intentionality, but lethality is far different for guns than basically any other mundane item (pens? please. except maybe knives but in the US that's not super common knowledge) so it's not an irredeemable one.
Mind you I personally have two main opinions on guns: one, that if we want to significantly change gun laws, we probably need an actual constitutional amendment, and two that insofar as the constitution allows* getting a gun should be a medium annoyance, no more no less. Requirements that are de facto bans are stupid or illegal. I like well-written red flag laws. I'd love for there to be a minimum licensure, think learner's driving permit. An interesting idea would be to also ask for a character reference or two, essentially someone vouching for the gun owner? That could create some desirable social externalities. I love being careful about buying and selling laws, though don't think an actual permanent registry or record is needed.
* (edit) I'm not totally convinced by the argument that any gun control is proscribed Constitutionally. To me the regulated-militia bit implies a strong skepticism of loose cannons and even an outright endorsement of some loose degree of government (perhaps suitably local) control. The text more or less says because of this reason, then there is a right to bear arms, and so I think it logically follows that if the reason is not satisfied, then there is no such right. A more extreme version of this argument I haven't seen much suggests that a properly accountable municipal police force is essentially filling the militia role, thus there's not even an individual right provided the rationale holds. I don't think I quite endorse that, but on factual grounds (i.e. police don't fill the role) not rhetorical ones. Practically speaking for the idea of a militia to work, you probably need an individual right, but I think states have some decent leeway there as to how they get that done, so I wouldn't call it a requirement. Which is also worth mentioning as national gun laws should never be the primary focus. Again, if you don't like it (either because you want more or less than that)? Yep, constitutional amendment, only way. Sucks but them's the breaks.
In other words, Heller is wrong (well, right on the conclusion but partially wrong on the reasoning). Or that it's correct but the phrase in 1(b) "so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved" holds more weight than the SC gave it credit for, i.e. states as holders of responsibility for militia regulation can do any law that doesn't result in a de facto infringement on the idea of a citizen militia, and the DC handgun ban clearly was an infringement.
There has been linguistic drift; at the time of the founding, the word "regulated" meant "functioning," and in the concept of a militia - which the founders generally intended to be the primary American military force to the exclusion of standing armies - meant well-equipped, trained, and disciplined. [Edit: the militia was supposed to supply their own weapons, or draw from privately-stocked and -maintained armories. Hence why ensuring that the militia would be well-armed would require the private ownership and carrying of military arms]
As far as I'm concerned the 2nd Amendment, properly understood, requires every citizen to own, maintain, and drill with M4s and other military weapons, a la Switzerland. However, practically the champions of militia vs. a permanent, professional military establishment lost for good after WWII.
I'm going to need a citation there. I've also seen that claim but I believe that to be a modern projection/cope rather than an actual scholarly argument. 1785 dictionary says:
To RE'GULATE. v.a. [regula, Lat.]
To adjust by rule or method. Nature, in the production of things, always designs them to partake of certain, regulated, established essences, which are to be the models of all things to be produced: this, in that crude sense, would need some better explication. Locke.
To direct. Regulate the patient in his manner of living. Wiseman. Ev’n goddesses are women; and no wife Has pow’r to regulate her husband’s life. Dryden.
I agree to an extent: part of the concern with the Articles of Confederation was that they had discovered early flaws with the national army (originally it was a pure volunteer state by state basis kind of thing IIRC), and so wanted it to be stronger but not so strong that it could crush legitimate internal dissent. It's also true that at least a good chunk of the arms were assumed to be (or even encouraged to be as some states even incentivized such) produced on an individual basis. It's also true that there was often a distinction made between an organized militia that was directed, drilled, and with some kind of chain of command and unorganized militias that were more like mobs, so it's not as if the concept is all wrong.
Despite all of that being true, I want to emphasize that last bit there. The intention was never that random groups should spontaneously rise up formed from ad-hoc combinations of gun-toting individuals! The intention was that localized governance was sufficiently democratic that they could decide to take collective action and associate with ad-hoc combinations of other cities and states to overthrow an overbearing national (or international) government. The distinction is quite crucial there! While I allow some nuance as to how states decide to implement this, the state was in charge at the end of the day of regulating its militias. Drilling and organizing and making them effective yes, but also deciding the proper shape, leadership, and call to action! While an individual owning firearms is useful it's still a bit incidental, because the goal the 2nd Amendment clearly states is merely that militias are capable of protecting liberty from tyranny.
In that context, a state can be somewhat strict in its regulation if the core purpose is accomplished. The test is all about core purpose, but some people have substituted an individual right-test in its place. This is subtly wrong. A state could probably choose to implement its core militia duty via individual gun-rights, but is not compelled to do so. A more modern-left state may well decide to be more discerning provided they meet the end goal. In practice, these might end up appearing similar, but they don't have to be!
Shay's Rebellion actually illustrates this, taking place in the Confederation period. Informal and ad-hoc groups of farmers and former soldiers banded together to revolt. They were not official local militias! In fact they raised themselves up in parallel to actual state legal authority, in defiance of such. Remember that that is where a lot of the power lay - the revolutionary Congress was formed from state delegations, in almost all cases with official representation!! That's where their legitimacy came from! Many people today fail to notice that, it wasn't an "extra-legal" effort, the original Revolution proceeded directly from local democracy. This was very front of mind for Constitutional drafting and party of why Washington himself and many others opposed Shay's rebellion (to be fair Jefferson was more sympathetic but he was always a little more radical in his ideas on the topic). They were an individualized mob, not a democratic effort against tyranny. The amendment was crafted in part this way to distinguish that stuff like Shay's rebellion was not the proper method of resistance (and also because at the end of the day the issue was about the policies of debt structure, not a core liberty, which farmers had failed to get implemented by official legitimate democratic means).
So the history of the matter rejects the modern framing by gun-rights advocates that it's a purely individual right. The history suggests that local democracy is important, that local democracy should be empowered, and that gun ownership is helpful to those aims. It's not saying that individualized gun ownership is a cornerstone by itself, supreme to everything else! Merely that a local repository of legitimate resistance is a duty of states to maintain.
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The 2nd amendment as written requires a physical fitness test to own a gun.
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People seem to trip over the Constitution a fair bit, operating under the assumption that it somehow developed in a vacuum. But if you look at the political science of the time, no, there was a lot of robust discussion involving all points of the Constitution, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers being just a small part of a larger landscape.
Several politicians of the time make no bones about how the 2nd should be interpreted - that all the terrible implements of the soldier and warfare should belong to all the citizens, barring a few government officials.
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Come on, be charitable. It's not a perfect analogy. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a dangerous thing to be carrying around in public. It does require volition, but volition may be influenced by rage, or alcohol, or psychosis, or mental illness, or one bad day.
Humans are fallible. They can just be mistaken about whether they should use a gun in self-defense and end up killing someone anyway. The difference between justified and unjustified can be seconds.
and humans are stupid. They do incredibly dumb shit (warning, death) like shoot each other over literal garbage.
Maybe it’s because I live in rural Midwest but I just don’t get that worried about the guy with a pistol in a holster on his side. I’ve never once seen anyone pull a gun like that in public. Those guys are generally the responsible ones, the guy prone to shooting at people is not going to open carry because he wants to surprise people with the gun. Open carry doesn’t lend itself to sudden shooting or crime because as you mentioned everyone notices the gun.
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The victim was named McGlockton and was killed by a ... you know the answer. Incredibly unfortunate nominative determinism.
But that's a significant difference! You've moved the goalposts from "that's something that can kill if you don't concentrate on it sufficiently" (untrue, but would strongly favor your position a la "ultrahazardous activities") to the true argument of "but people are sometimes idiots, impaired, or negligent" which is a major shift with significant consequences!
Is there so much of a difference between a pet tiger that could maul you if you accidentally trigger its prey drive, and a volatile drugged-up gangster who thinks you were chatting up his girl?
You can be pretty sure that a legal concealed carrier is not a violent drugged up gangster. There are actual studies on CHL holders; even those conducted with hostility to the policy of legal concealed carry tend to find that license holders are model citizens.
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That's still the person, not the gun itself, and a 98th+ percentile asshole-quotient person at that. Might as well ask "is there so much difference between a pet tiger that could maul you and a drunk, sleep-deprived rice-rocket driver coming back from a sideshow?"
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But you weren't objecting to volatile drugged-up gangsters. You were objecting to guns. And of course, there is a major difference between a pet tiger and a gun in terms of whether you need to watch them carefully for danger.
And yes, I realize that part of your argument has been the inability to know whether any given gun-owner is unstable. But the unstable people are always a threat to you. The volatile gangster can quite easily stab you or beat the shit out of you, even were he to not have a gun. I don't think that him having a gun meaningfully increases the amount of danger you are in, so seeing a gun should not (imo) make you any more nervous than you would be around any crowd of people.
I have a bad habit of picking examples that muddy my point. Sub out our druggy gangster and replace him with an average Joe who just had a bad week - found out a parent was diagnosed with cancer, lost big on his sports bets, got laid off, car damaged in a hit and run, etc.
I don't want to draw a firm line between stable people and unstable people. Certainly unstable people exist, but normal people can be pushed into instability, and it doesn't take much sometimes. Worse, they can just make innocent mistakes that still end with someone dead. Argument gets heated, someone shoves someone else, someone fears for their life...
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The gun massively increases your danger, surely? Firstly because it so hugely reduces the amount of effort he needs to put into damaging you, and secondly because it makes it so hugely more likely that the damage will be lethal.
I can't say I agree with that. Someone who is so violent and unhinged that they might shoot you if you look at their girlfriend wrong is not meaningfully more dangerous with a gun, in my opinion. They're going to get the job done no matter what, even if they just have their bare hands.
I'm sorry, but if being equiped with a gun doesn't increase your lethality, then what's the point? Is not the very purpose of a gun to increase the lethality of whoever weilds it?
It seems trivial to me that a person with a gun is several orders of magnitude more deadly than an unarmed person, no matter how violent or drugged up they are.
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He’s saying that someone with a gun could kill you at any moment without even trying. The same is not true of, say, a rubber duck. It’s natural to be a lot more nervous around one than the other, even if the owner has not yet demonstrated ill intent or stupidity.
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sig owners shift uncomfortably in their seats
Muppet side-eye.png
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