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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.
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.
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.
Yes_Chad.jpg and I believe that a overwhelming majority of US Conservatives would agree with my take on your proposal.
Please, quote me the article and the paragraph in the Constitution, or the relevant line in the Declaration or Federalist Papers.
Also please stop trying to pretend that you suddenly "mostly agree" with me that limiting rights to black people is a bad thing, if you sincerely believed that, you wouldn't be arguing the point in the first place.
They were literally slaves under the constitution. Of course they couldn’t own property or guns in this case. I don’t need to state things you already know.
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