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I’d like to start a discussion about the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. After the tragedy in Connecticut (of which I am a native), I think most of the country has decided it’s time to take a serious look at gun ownership in the United States (I am a gun owners as well).

What this thread is: In this topic, I want to take the Second Amendment down to the studs and examine its relevance to modern day citizenship in the US and in the world. I want to explore the philosophical underpinning of the Amendment, not its specific interpretation.

What this thread is not: This is not a discussion about specific implementations of gun control. This is not a discussion about statistics. I’ll assume that everyone here is educated and savvy enough to find statistics to support their opinions. Appeals to emotion don’t move the discussion forward.

So, that being said, let’s start with an interpretation of the motivation for the Second Amendment and the philosophy behind it.

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.

I believe that the motivation for this amendment was to grant citizens the right to have the means to violently overthrow their government, to serve as a deterrent against tyrrany.

However, this is not to say I think every American has the right to own a gun, since it may be the case that private gun ownership is not sufficient means to overthrow the government, or that there are means of overthrow that don’t pose such a collateral hazard to the people.

So, to this end, I pose two questions for discussion:

Ought citizens of a State be granted the right to the means to overthrow that state?

In my opinion, yes. It should be a natural born right of a person to be able to participate in an overthrow of their government, at their own peril, but where there is a nontrivial probability of success.

In present-day America, is private gun ownership a feasible means of overthrow? If not, then what is?

This is what I’m not sure of. I used to think yes, a gun in every home keeps the government in check. But after watching the Arab Spring, I’ve seen that it’s possible to overthrow a government without significant bloodshead, but rather with the dissemination of information. Twitter may be more powerful than a squadron of fighter jets, Facebook more powerful than an army.

However, the Syrian rebellion is far different. It’s a bloody battle. This is where my philosophical understanding of the Second Amendment breaks down.

Thanks

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To me this is all a game of odds,

What are the odds ubiquitous gun ownership is going to save America from tyranny vs. the odds that it will provide guns to people who clearly should not have them.

Given the prevalence on mental illness odds are quite high people who are nuts have access to guns. Now, I am not saying that access to guns mass incarceration of the mentally ill. ( 1/6 of the inmates in US prisons ) It’s more likely to be the lack of care. However, nothing good can happen out of crazy people having guns, or sane people having access to guns cause everyone knows a few crazies.

Even if you can argue there is relevance, it is your duty to also explain how the greater good is served.

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Definitely not.

Now I should say that I live in Canada. In my city of residence, our much hated mayor was recently ordered out of office. We didn’t need guns to disable him - we used facts and information and due process.

One could argue that when those things fail, due to an endemic of corruption perhaps, you’d need another avenue. I’d say large scale mass protest has been shown to be effective.

The simple truth is people are much more likely to kill innocent people with their personal firearms than overthrow a government or protect themselves.

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Oooooh, guns, guns, guns!

Was it, though? How do we define “well regulated militia?” I think at a minimum I’d define it as military level training in the safe and responsible use of that weapon.

Even in Israel, a dangerous place where even I would consider carrying a gun, and military training (including the use of firearms) is required by law, guns are tightly regulated.

In Israel, assault rifles are banned except for special circumstances, such as communal self-defense in areas deemed to be a security risk. And while political violence in Israel is all too common and gun violence is a growing problem, random shootings of strangers – like the Aurora massacre – are virtually unheard-of here.

Unlike in the United States, where the right to bear arms is guaranteed in the Constitution’s Second Amendment, Israel’s department of public security considers gun ownership a privilege, not a right. Gun owners in Israel are limited to owning one pistol, and must undergo extensive mental and physical tests before they can receive a weapon, and gun owners are limited to 50 rounds of ammunition per year.

Not all Israelis, however, may own guns. In order to own a pistol, an Israeli must for two years have been either a captain in the army or a former lieutenant colonel. Israelis with an equivalent rank in other security organizations may also own a pistol.

In addition, residents of West Bank settlements, and those who work there, may own pistols for self-defense.

This so often becomes a case of my data set can beat up your data set. For every Australia…

… there is some counter-example of a country with prevalent firearms that doesn’t have gun massacres on a regular basis like we do in the USA. So it’s obviously a cultural problem too.

I think in the end, like @Sam said, it boils down to statistics. If you assume a certain small percentage of crazy people who will hurt people for no reason, and a certain larger percentage of people with dangerous weapons designed for efficient killing, the intersection of those two numbers is going to end up in tragedy.

Two specific things I think should have happened before this month’s tragedy:

  1. Banning assault rifles.

    Why isn’t a pistol sufficient for “protection”? I can’t understand what use citizens have for weapons that can deliver such massive damage in such a short period of time. Letting the ban on assault rifles expire was a huge mistake. If you put a pistol in the hands of that shooter, he’d have killed less, and there would be more survivors; assault rifles are an order of magnitude more lethal than pistols. See for yourself.

  2. “Smart” weapon grips that only fire when held by their owner.

    Crazy talk? Maybe. But the technology exists today and would have prevented this shooter from using his mother’s weapons. Yes, I think guns should also be locked up, but at the point when you’re willing to kill your mother to obtain her weapons, I don’t think the locks would have mattered.

I’ll tell you this though: if the death of twenty six and seven year old children at the hands of a military style assault rifle in under 10 minutes doesn’t move the needle on gun control here in the USA, nothing will ever change.

I did my part.

Did you do yours?

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there is some counter-example of a country with prevalent firearms that doesn’t have gun massacres

The two most common counter-examples provided are Israel and Switzerland. But it turns out that it’s a myth.

Those countries regulate firearms more than the U.S. So are there other countries that we’re unaware of that serve as counterexamples?

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Interesting. But even if it is not a country, there is some pet data set they can find that shows low or zero correlation between gun ownership and gun violence.

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A classic case of confirmation bias. But I believe there must be folks who are willing to have a sane discussion on it. It just seems like they’re not in congress.

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Even assuming this is true, what is the advantage of gun ownership? Why should it be a right?

I can’t own a tub of anthrax even though there’s little reason for me to poison someone. Why should I be able to own a gun?

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Everything is a right unless specifically denied by federal or state law. That’s what freedom is all about.

The question isn’t why should it be a right to own a gun, it’s why shouldn’t it be a right, what reason is strong enough to deny you that right, and whether the constitution allows the government to take away that right.

The point of the second amendment is that the amendment explicitly prevents the government from taking away the right to own deadly weapons.

Personally, I don’t know what the original intent was, but it seems clear that it was meant to prevent the government from taking away weapons of some type. Since guns, cannons, swords, and knives were the only weapons available back then, one would have to assume that’s what they meant.

Should the despicable acts of a few crazy individuals be enough to deny the right of the remaining hundreds of millions of people from owning a weapon under any circumstances?

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This was pointed out in the first post: The second amendment. So to some extent, the United States of America, for better or worse, was founded on the concept that there is a fundamental right to bear arms.

We can however debate what “well regulated militia” means and whether the founders intended any random guy with $785 in his pocket to have incredibly lethal technology designed for a kind of killing they had no concept of…

Does “arms” cover bazookas? RPGs? Plasma rifles?

We’re left guessing a lot of intent here.

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It goes further than a few crazy individuals though. Guns in the home provide greater health risk than benefit. That’s not just crazy people, that’s regular people putting their families at risk of danger.

I think it’s time to repeal it. The evidence has spoken: guns are dangerous, they result in much violence and death, and gun ownership offers virtually no tangible benefit.

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Guns don’t result in violence and death. Violent people with guns result in violence and death.

Violent people do violent things. Sure, you can use some type of weapon control to make them kill less people at once… but isn’t that missing the point? The real problem is with a society churning out killers and doing nothing to stop them before they crack.

If you just take a quick look through the list of rampage killers across the world, you’ll see that violent people do violent things. Sure, many of them use guns, but others burn down buildings, create bombs, or even use a vehicle to kill a surprising number of people. (each list is just the top 15, you have to click through to see the entire list, and this is only killings of 4 or more people)

Just throwing this out there…

If Adam Lanza was allowed to be a pothead he probably wouldn’t have killed anybody.

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Yes! If there’s a way to make them kill less people at once, that’s a big win.

Also, in my previous link it had evidence of a lot more accidental death and suicides when guns were present. Those deaths aren’t from violent people, and are very real lives that can be saved.

Look I know violent people can find other ways to be violent. I’m not suggesting we control matches because arsonists use them to burn down buildings. But matches can be used to start fires, light candles, turn on pilot lights and countless other uses.

Guns are used for killing people and that’s what they’re designed for.

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Guns are also used, and designed, for hunting animals, usually for food.

I think the conversation has devolved into the same old “I hate guns” vs “Guns aren’t the problem” argument, which wasn’t the OP’s reason for starting this topic.

If you did revoke the second amendment (nearly impossible) and require all guns be turned into the government - all 300 million of them - you would also have to modify or ignore the fourth amendment to actually go door to door in every single home in america to actually get rid of them. That would probably lead to some type of civil war.

There’s also the fact that despite every major city having very strict gun control laws, there are a lot of murders that happen in those same cities using guns that are illegally owned.

Getting rid of every gun is a pipe dream in a country this size, and still wouldn’t solve the rest of the mass murder scenarios.

Legalized pot, now that could work. The school shooters are the exact stereotype for potheads. Let them kill a bag of cheetos instead of a bunch of people.

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OK fine, but do you hunt with a bazooka? An RPG? A phased plasma rifle? A semiautomatic assault rifle with 30 round clip?

How relevant is hunting in cities? Why can’t the rules be different there?

Couldn’t there be a gun buy-back program? So for every assault rifle turned in, the government pays you $500 or something? I believe that is what was used in Australia.

It would be incredibly expensive, but my gut says it would be effective – money talks here in the land of capitalism. Given how much we spend on overtly dumb stuff like the TSA – which has a budget of $8.1 billion – that’s a lot of guns we could buy back… at $500 per assault rifle that’d be over 16 million guns off the streets.

Isn’t that why we have safety regulations on things like cars – yeah, sure cars can hurt people, but their primary design function is transportation, not killing. Even then, they have many federally mandated safety features (seatbelts, bumpers, shatter-proof glass, etc) and fairly strict licensing programs, with written tests people have to pass before they can operate one.

Guns seem to occupy this sacred position in American society where they are somehow sacrosanct by virtue of the second amendment, and therefore immune to the same kinds of basic scrutiny we regularly perform on other far, far less dangerous devices that aren’t designed for killing.

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I am actually in favor of common sense gun control.

Just trying to make the point that it will only solve a tiny piece of the problem. The real problem is a social one.

Anil Dash had a great piece today that I can’t find at the moment.

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It actually worked out fine for us with a massive buyback scheme.

An interesting tidbit there is:

A 2010 study asserted that the gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides 74%, thus saving 200 lives a year.

@anildash had this piece http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/18/opinion/dash-gun-changes/

I agree with the easy ones, but feel it is quite odd that some states in the US are interpreting the second amendment to mean you can have a magazine with unlimited bullets and others not. Some states allow semi-automatics guns and some not.

I find the premise of this topic a bit flawed as well, if the second amendment is out there to protect you from the tyrants, why is it not protecting you from the patriot act?

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In the best scenario, for a sport. Not for survival, which is what the “for food” implies.

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Folks are debating the second amendment as if it was some kind of immutable observation of nature.

As if they were debating Newton’s law of motion. Not man-made laws that have the purpose of helping a society thrive.

And as we know now, even Newton’s laws of motion that make sense in most cases, do not apply at atomic levels, at very high speeds of very large gravitational fields. So if we had to rethink laws of physics when scales and time are involved, we sure can rethink human established laws that were designed when the US was 77 times smaller and available weapons were 100 times milder.

There is no need to go splitting hairs over historic minutiae. Laws are designed to ensure that we can all live together, and the value that this provided 200 years ago is no longer suitable for the world we live in.

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I think this brings up a very important point, which other “recent” constitutions have provisions similar to the second amendment?

I recall Indonesia recently ratified a bunch of constitutional amendements, no trace of an amendment like the second there.

In fact, I doubt you would find any constitution or constitutional amendements internationally that have a second amendment like clause in the last 100 years.

Its a legal relic.