McDonald v. Chicago decision

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Anyone that goes into McDonalds without protection is an idiot. Antacids at least but a handgun for preference!

[FBM]

Anyone that goes into McDonalds without protection is an idiot. Antacids at least but a handgun for preference!

Old McDonald had a firearm.

[JimC]

Surely getting a firearm should be A LOT harder than a driving licence ?

It shouldn't be hard if you're competent with a firearm. If you can't handle basic firearm safety and can't hit the broad side of a barn from inside, it should be impossible.

I think that you should Prove you have a legitimate use ,reason and safe place to fire a firearm .Not up to the police to prove you should not be allowed one .

I should be able to join a gun club and fire almost any fire arm I want as long as they are kept securely at the club .....I should not be allowed a hand gun in my bedside table or a .338 on my wall without having legitimate access to deer stalking .

That is basically the position in Australia, and one I agree with. I used to own a variety of rifles and shotguns, and hunted (only introduced animals like rabbits and foxes). I sold them years ago given deteriorating eyesight (rather sensibly, I think... ), but I enjoyed shooting, so I am by no means anti-gun. I had a license, and my guns were registered.

My father was a competition standard pistol shooter in his day, but it was all via his gun club... (Mind you, in the war years he used to put on a show of shooting out a fellow officer's lit cigarrette with a .22 target pistol at 20 paces, until the brass put a stop to it... )

[Martok]

Surely getting a firearm should be A LOT harder than a driving licence ?

It should be, but gun wackos think gun access should be unrestricted.

whackness aside, the constitution is on their side though, since restricting access is effectively restricting the ability to own.

Not true. up until the conservative activist judges on the Supreme Court started ruling the second amendment protected an individuals rights to own a gun, almost every other court decision, especially United States v. Miller, said the second amendment did not protect an individuals right to gun ownership.

[Martok]

I see a large part of the problem as being that people in other countries are applying their own cultural context to the US, where it doesn't apply. Guns were necessary for survival during colonial days, for both food and protection from threats like wild animals, natives and potential tyrants.

According to historian Garry Willis thats not true:

DAVID GERGEN: Right. You had another strong argument in your book that we have misunderstood the role of guns and the role of militias in the early founding. It's been used by a lot of NRA advocates today. You think there's a myth... there are myths about that.

GARRY WILLS: Oh, many, many. For one thing, we all have kind of grown up with the idea that everybody had a gun in colonial America. Well, they didn't. Guns were expensive. They didn't work well. They were hard to repair. They were no good for hunting. You can't hunt with a musket, or a dueling pistol. And even a long rifle, once you've shot it, you have to get it down and put that long ram thing in and reload it. You get one shot. So most people netted animals, insofar as they didn't eat domesticated animals like pork. But anyway, now people have gone back and looked at insurance rates, and wills, and that kind of thing, and they find that there were very few guns. None of the militias were fully armed. They all complained about that. None of the Revolutionary troops were fully armed. They all complained about that. When we had no imports from the British people, we had to depend on the French. There was very little domestic manufacture. So this whole romance of the gun arose in the 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution, Colt and Remington pouring out these guns-- new kinds of guns, more accurate, and the myth then of the frontier led to this. But the idea that the Constitution had anything to do with private ownership of guns is nonsense.

DAVID GERGEN: And I was astonished by how few guns you said there were. Scholarship now finds like one out of every ten people had a gun.

GARRY WILLS: Yeah, very few. And that's against one out of every ten men, whereas now there are three guns per adult male in America. You know, there's a gun for every man, woman and child in America. There are more gun dealers than gas stations. If you it's easier to get a gun license than to get a liquor license. You know, it's madness. It's just totally out of control. And so they're trying to go back in history and invent these roots of our love of the gun. And they come up with really bogus arguments and bogus history.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/july ... _12-3.html

[FBM]

I didn't mean that every colonial was armed to the teeth from the moment s/he stepped off the ship, and I don't think anything I wrote merits that conclusion. The Constitution is not applicable to anything that happened before it was written. My understanding is that the 2nd Amendment was included as a protection against tyranny. Western immigration had been going on for a couple of centuries before that. As guns gradually became more available, affordable and reliable, more people started owning more of them. They would never have been able to expand westward without them. They've been an integral part of this population from its early formative period, and with good reason. The society we have today is naturally a product of its formative years, just like every other. It's no mystery how America's gun culture developed over time, and conditions continue to the present that make it advisable to continue allowing gun ownership.

I don't know the details of your stance on this issue, so please don't take this as an insult, but in my experience, those who populate either extreme of an issue tend to be the whackiest, the least able or willing to evaluate the issue with detached reasoning. They tend to rely on emotional appeals, hyperbole, special pleading, straw men, cherry-picking, etc. I'm not interested in having a debate with someone like that. The thing about the teddy bears raised a red flag for me, as did the way you interpreted what I wrote earlier. Are you being objective in your treatment of this issue, or are you fueled by emotion? I think I've already made it clear that I'm much more moderate. I can recognize good arguments on both sides, and crappy arguments on both sides. I'm not interested in debating the pros and cons with anyone who's emotionally committed to an extreme view, as they're the least likely to be able to make an interesting debate.

[Svartalf]

Anyone that goes into McDonalds without protection is an idiot. Antacids at least but a handgun for preference!

dangit... and I wanted to make that one for so long but never dared.

[Svartalf]

Surely getting a firearm should be A LOT harder than a driving licence ?

It should be, but gun wackos think gun access should be unrestricted.

whackness aside, the constitution is on their side though, since restricting access is effectively restricting the ability to own.

Not true. up until the conservative activist judges on the Supreme Court started ruling the second amendment protected an individuals rights to own a gun, almost every other court decision, especially United States v. Miller, said the second amendment did not protect an individuals right to gun ownership.

Which shows that there used to be a bunch of liberties killing librul activist unjustices before and the current court is just starting to clean house on those.

Seriously, both camps are really going to sling that "activist judge" argument back and forth at each other, and any serious analysis of the wording, context and intent of the second amendment shows that restricting gun ownership on grounds that it should only be in the frame of a militia or other organized (and presumably state sponsored) group is specious, as part of the necessity for gun ownership is being able to resist to tyrants.

[Coito ergo sum]

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Exactly, which is why it needs to be so heavily goddamn regulated. People are idiots.

Yes, but the key issue is what sort of regulations we're talking about. What sort of regulation are you talking about?

[Coito ergo sum]

Surely getting a firearm should be A LOT harder than a driving licence ?

It shouldn't be hard if you're competent with a firearm. If you can't handle basic firearm safety and can't hit the broad side of a barn from inside, it should be impossible.

I think that you should Prove you have a legitimate use ,reason and safe place to fire a firearm .Not up to the police to prove you should not be allowed one .

I should be able to join a gun club and fire almost any fire arm I want as long as they are kept securely at the club .....I should not be allowed a hand gun in my bedside table or a .338 on my wall without having legitimate access to deer stalking .

That is basically the position in Australia, and one I agree with. I used to own a variety of rifles and shotguns, and hunted (only introduced animals like rabbits and foxes). I sold them years ago given deteriorating eyesight (rather sensibly, I think... ), but I enjoyed shooting, so I am by no means anti-gun. I had a license, and my guns were registered.

My father was a competition standard pistol shooter in his day, but it was all via his gun club... (Mind you, in the war years he used to put on a show of shooting out a fellow officer's lit cigarrette with a .22 target pistol at 20 paces, until the brass put a stop to it... )

That is anathema to the American concept of justice. We are loathe to have to prove things to the police in order to continue behaving lawfully.

Everyone has a "legitimate use" for a firearm anyway: (a) I might go hunting one day (why should I have to live right near where deer can be shot? Can't I travel to the country?), (b) I want a gun for home defense, (c) I target shoot or may take up target shooting, (d) I may be put in a situation where I need to handle a weapon and want to be skilled at using it if that should happen, (e) I am a collector and probably many other "legitimate reasons."

It's not up to the police to prove that you have a legitimate use for a firearm. It's up to the police to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you have committed a crime. If you haven't committed a crime, then the police should leave you the fuck alone.

Similarly, everyone has a place to fire a firearm. If one lives in an apartment, one can take one's gun to a gun range or an open field in an area where firing weapons is not restricted.

[Coito ergo sum]

Surely getting a firearm should be A LOT harder than a driving licence ?

It should be, but gun wackos think gun access should be unrestricted.

whackness aside, the constitution is on their side though, since restricting access is effectively restricting the ability to own.

Not true. up until the conservative activist judges on the Supreme Court started ruling the second amendment protected an individuals rights to own a gun, almost every other court decision, especially United States v. Miller, said the second amendment did not protect an individuals right to gun ownership.

"Every other?" US v Miller was the very FIRST decision of the Supreme Court to directly address the second amendment. Contrary to your assertion, however, Miller did, in fact, acknowledge that the second amendment protects an individuals right to bear arms. What the Miller court did was state that the federal law banning the interstate shipment or transport of sawed off shotguns was not a violation of 2d amendment because of the type of weapon involved. Millers specifically stated that the the Second Amendment protects the ownership of military-type weapons by individuals. The type of weapon, however, has to be one that is commonly used in the military or militia organizations. The persons owning the weapons do not have to be at that time in the military or in a militia. The Court found that the sawed off shotgun was not a military/militia type weapon and was, therefore, not protected.

Lewis v US in 1980, for example, referred to the Second Amendment as protecting the right to keep and bear arms that bear a reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia. That would include things like handguns, rifles, among other things.

Boiling this down to some argument over judicial activism is simplistic and misses the point that what the court is doing is trying to interpret and apply what is not an easy to understand amendment to the Constitution.

[Wumbologist]

Worth noting is that most of the dissenting opinion doesn't dispute the original intent of the 2nd Amendment as an individual right. Rather, they focus on the concept of the Constitution being a "living document", subject to modification at the whim of the court to fit the times. If you think that conservative activist judges are a bad thing, you ought to be especially against setting a precedent to let them edit the Constitution willy-nilly.

[Martok]

I didn't mean that every colonial was armed to the teeth from the moment s/he stepped off the ship, and I don't think anything I wrote merits that conclusion.

Oh yeah it did.

[Martok]

Surely getting a firearm should be A LOT harder than a driving licence ?

It should be, but gun wackos think gun access should be unrestricted.

whackness aside, the constitution is on their side though, since restricting access is effectively restricting the ability to own.

Not true. up until the conservative activist judges on the Supreme Court started ruling the second amendment protected an individuals rights to own a gun, almost every other court decision, especially United States v. Miller, said the second amendment did not protect an individuals right to gun ownership.

Which shows that there used to be a bunch of liberties killing librul activist unjustices before and the current court is just starting to clean house on those.

Seriously, both camps are really going to sling that "activist judge" argument back and forth at each other, and any serious analysis of the wording, context and intent of the second amendment shows that restricting gun ownership on grounds that it should only be in the frame of a militia or other organized (and presumably state sponsored) group is specious, as part of the necessity for gun ownership is being able to resist to tyrants.

Tyrants? What tyrants?? The closest tyrant we've had has been Bush. He trampled on the constitution every chance he got and gun nuts were more than satisfied with him.

[Wumbologist]

Tyrants? What tyrants?? The closest tyrant we've had has been Bush. He trampled on the constitution every chance he got and gun nuts were more than satisfied with him.

I attended anti-war protests in DC, I voted for Kerry, I voted for Obama, I'm a "gun nut" (by the standards 'round here, it seems). Careful where you stick those generalizations, might get cut off when you're not looking.