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Am I rare conservative that just doesn’t care much about gun rights?
The big issue to me with gun rights is the 2nd Amendment seems very clear to me.
“ A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The words seem very clear to me “shall not be infringed”. This isn’t Roe where you’re finding some abortion right in a right to privacy. And the right to privacy isn’t even explicit in the constitution.
If you do not only textual meaning but look at context at the time then it seems clear to me it’s not just personal weapons, but the right to have the arms to challenge Washington DC and fight the US military. If the Koch brothers wanted nukes I think the Constitution is very clear that they are allowed to have nuclear weapons. But context of the time the writers were a bunch of rebels who became patriots when they won. That would seem to strongly imply that the rebels would support full arsenal of weapons to fight their own government.
This is just another sign to me that the SC is just a Senate. Koch Bros (or Soros or other rich guy) wanting Nukes would be obviously unpopular. And we on nukes we would be able to pass a Constitutional Amendment. And we should. It would be interesting if we could get an amendment passed banning tanks etc.
Now to actual throw a little heat. I’ve considered just accepting the SC is a Senate and adopting a common good philosophy for law. Nobody enforces the text of the constitution and I think this would largely eliminate most issues with guns:
Blacks can not own guns. Straight to jail if you have one. The 54% of murders coming from this group would seem to indicate this is good. I can probably drop their murder rate by 75% with this. We can do DNA testing here with like <20% African DNA as a cutoff. Might give them a carve-out for true hunting rifles. I feel fine saying that as a community they’ve proven guns are very bad for them.
Under 25 can not own guns. This takes away most of the school shootings. Rittenhouse seems like he can properly own a gun but whatever blanket age works better. Most mass shootings would be eliminated except the very rare case where someone super competent does it like the Vegas shooting.
Koch types can’t own nukes. I would likely also ban tanks and real military hardware. This kills the 98% of the ability of citizens to preserve a free state thru insurrection, but feels practical.
Everyone else gets to own for the most part whatever they want. Some severe criminal penalties for not properly storing your guns if your kid goes off and shoots up a school.
You would be left with a bunch of suicides by mostly 60 year old white men, but that doesn’t have huge externalities.
Some kind of mental health rule would be a nice to have, but I’ve got no idea how to implement it that would be abused. Age/race restrictions are easy to enforce. Complexity allows the beauracracy to play games.
I think from a common good philosophy my rules would eliminate 80% of Americas gun problems while maintaining a general right for the public to own guns.
I agree that the Constitution is dead and America being a creedal nation is largely false. Part of the creed and by Constitutional design is that one of the checks on the power of DC is an explicitly designed right to tell DC to fuck off because everyone has guns and your not coming to “City/Wilderness” to enforce this law because we got 100k men with guns. That is what is meant by “security of a free state”. A right to rebellion was in the Constitution.
Banning ownership of something for a certain group is very hard to do if that thing is abundant in society. Your suggestions seem to imply that 'not allowed a gun' = 'cannot get hold of a gun'.
Case in point, teenagers are not allowed to own or carry knives in the UK. This law is completely useless at stopping teenage stabbings, because literally every teenager can grab a paring knife from his parents' kitchen before he goes out (plus laws against possession aren't actually enforced).
By contrast, even hardened adult criminals in the UK rarely use handguns, because they are genuinely hard to get hold of. Because there are no legal reasons to anyone to own a handgun (even most police don't have them) there simply aren't many guns for criminals to use.
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My interpretation is that the phrase, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," modifies the noun arms, not the noun people. So all of "the people", regardless of whether or not they are part of the militia, get to bear arms, but the "arms" that they have the right to bear are militia arms, i.e. infantry weapons. This means that both you and the Koch brothers get to own assault rifles, RPGs, light machine guns, and mortars, but neither of you can own tanks, attack helicopters, or nuclear warheads.
How does “infantry arms” maintain the security of a free state today? If Russia invades some guy with a machine gun (which is illegal) isn’t repelling Russia.
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If you would have a regime where Tyler Robinson is allowed to buy a gun and Clarence Thomas is not, than I do not believe that you are a "Conservative" in any meaningfully American sense of the word.
You stand in opposition to not just the United States Constitution but to the very principles and ideals upon which this nation was founded.
You are who conservatives are trying to conserve against.
This is a very funny comment. And I hope you can see why.
I would be interested to hear why you think it's "funny".
Conservative means to keep things how they were.
Clarence Thomas wasn’t allowed to own a gun when this country was founded. And my gut says forgetting slavery (which many wanted rid of) the northerners would have laughed at the idea of army the negro population.
You need to read more Burke and Chesterton.
While there are certainly debates about whether conservatism is more of a temperament or an ideology, usually conservatism is a little more broad than just keeping things how they were.
In the United States, most conservatives worthy of the name are trying to conserve the founding, little-l liberal ideals of the Revolutionary War. It is part of what sets American conservatives apart from the blood and soil conservatives of Europe.
Words can clearly have more than one meaning. There is a chestertons fence conservatism where you don’t exactly know why the fence was there but maybe you shouldn’t tear it down because that fence is doing something important that you don’t understand.
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No that's not what that "Conservative" means, that's what historically revisionist Marxists like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky like to claim it means when straw-manning their opposition. A conservative is someone who has some specific thing that they are trying to conserve. That is the etymological root of the word.
Now within a given context that "specific thing" may be "the Status Quo", but within the context of US politics the thing that "conservatives" are broadly understood to be "conserving" are the constitutional order and the ideals put forth by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence.
Ok so you’re just picking and choosing what is “ok” to conservative. Kind of like how a progressive changes the meaning of the world. You like things one way and want to call that “conservative”.
But the ideals in the constitution included a ban on black people from owning guns. I think the founding fathers made a mistake on the whole slave thing. But you can make a solid common good argument that they were in fact correct banning gun ownership for blacks. 50% of founding fathers plus or minus supported slavery. Well north of 90% were likely against gun ownership.
I think it’s fine if you think your limiting rights to black people is a bad thing and mostly agree with that, but it 100% fits with a conservative philosophy.
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There's multiple major issues with this.
The US is supposed to be an individualist nation where personal responsibility is the key factor. If you are innocent, you do not have your rights infringed. Dismantling this concept means destroying a key piece of America and will have knock on effects.
Once you do start just infringing on rights, then the path has been opened to infringe even more. There are some that are riskier than others here, a ban on gun ownership from convicted felons is harder to scale up. But a ban on "Group with X% risk" is incredibly easy to transform into "Group with Y% (y<x) risk is now also included". If you won't tolerate 40% risk, then why tolerate 35? If you won't tolerate 35%, then why not crack down on 30%? Gun rights groups know this and speak out against firearms bans of minority groups.
Most gun crimes are not done with legally owned guns to begin with and therefore cracking down on legal ownership doesn't really have too much an effect except in the indirect sense of preventing irresponsible or corrupt owners/sellers from being a source of illegal guns. But if that is the basis of the argument, then anyone who leaves a gun in a car or sitting on the countertop or whatever else should also be held responsible then.
Honestly I just wanted to have fun with courts making up law on (1) but it does seem from a common good perspective that could make America a lot safer.
(2) In my opinion the 2nd Amendment passed by slippery slope arguments a long time ago. I think it guarantees tanks. They’ve banned hand guns. I don’t even like guns. Just my autism seems evident to me the amendment guaranteed a right to do nation-state level violence. I think the words are already being ignored. (3) we can prosecute illegal transfers and not safely taking care of guns.
Words on paper have no power of law if the government just ignores them which is what I believe has happened with the 2nd. Perhap for good reasons they ignore them.
I'm not sure that's true, why should we interpret a nuke under the right to bear arms to begin with? Nuclear weapons are a modern creation and thus we could easily claim they are exist in a different category than conventional arms and thus not under the protections even by a purely textual reading.
Illegal transfers are already illegal! Stealing guns out of someone's car is already illegal!
The inclusion of “necessity to preserve a free state”, the founders be rebels, an early act in the war was securing cannons. I think all these point in the direction that the amendment wasn’t just to protect yourself from your neighbor but to wage war against the sovereign or an invasionary force. All of that would include full military capability. There is no better weapon at preventing occupation than nukes.
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You do not need to speculate about rebel weapons that much. Lexington and Concord was triggered by an attempt by the British to seize colonial military supplies including cannons. Either British actions were legitimate (which calls into question the existence of the US) or were not (in which case private ownership of weapons of war is a-ok).
I agree. Personally I think the 2nd Amendment is perhaps the most specific of all rights in the constitution. Its true meaning as written and understood by the crafters is as expansive as the commerce clause has become in practice.
To me the only way you could limit its power would be to argue the bill of rights as a whole does not apply to states. That’s a better argument for limiting its scope. But that would change a lot of other jurisprudence.
If the 2nd Amendment was interpreted correctly I think it would be the only amendment we could actually get a bipartisan amendment passed right now to limit its scope.
As written America has a right to wage war on Iran to prevent them from getting nukes but no right to stop an Iranian dual citizen from buying a nuke in the US.
This is plausible for land-based weapons, but the Letters of Marque power (which implies that private citizens cannot legally operate warships without a letter of marque) and the prohibition on state navies (which would be nugatory if the states could support private navies) only make sense if the 2nd amendment did not cover naval weapons.
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If "people [you] consider subhuman don't get to" is an exception to a right, it's not a right. Remember, these groups are also overwhelmingly victims of violent crime, and that'll be true gun or no gun. They're also, overwhelmingly, the soldiers you'd have for your rebellion.
Also, "subhumans" is "the whole of Red" from Blue's perspective anyway, which is why the complete lack of compromise is optimal for you/them.
Too late; Elon Musk's business is ICBMs.
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