The OK case

[hollodero]

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 1. You have a right to own a firearm. It doesn't mean that a firearm seller has an obligation to sell to you. Go find another person who will. You thinking that's a constitutional violation is the same people who think their first amendment rights of free speech are being violated when people criticize what they say. You have the right to say what you want, but it doesn't mean people can't make fun of you for it, or your employer can't fire you for it.

That makes perfect sense. I withdraw my argument.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Honestly, when you read articles about "super gun owners" or whatever, it's very common to have guns handed down from grandparents and great grandparents. Like SSF mentioned, my family also had a Civil War cap-and-ball revolver and battle damaged regimental battle flag (currently on loan to a museum). 

1. Nice piece of history you have there, cool.
2. Exceptions in these cases can easily be made.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: As for you starting to take it over-the-top with grenade launchers, tanks, and the like.. you can legally own all of that in the US. Just have to get the right permits, which generally means paying large amounts of money. Money shouldn't be the thing keeping you from Constitutional rights.

First, I'd argue the founders didn't have these arms in mind, so for me it gets tricky with the constitution in its first stages here. I reach that point often.
I try to grasp your point... are you against permits for owning a grenade launcher or a tank? In principle or because of the money?

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 2. Who determines how mentally ******** you need to be in order to no longer be allowed your Constitutional right? Now you're giving a psychiatrist (are they a government psychiatrist, a police psychiatrist, a private practice one?) the ability to strip people of rights. This is already in action, though. If they're able to function in society, I don't mind them owning.

That is right, that's what I'm doing, stripping them of rights. It's done all the time, to every principle there's a limit. You don't allow convicted felons a gun for the greater good, you don't allow people with impaired eyelight to drive a schoolbus. Who determines? Experts and lawmakers.
Now this is more about lines and where there should and should not be lines, and I can not be too convincing. I think that individual rights come to an end when they endanger other people's rights, for example by putting their health and life in danger. Mentally unstable persons with guns are a threat to family and strangers, and I think it's not misguided to think about restrictions in that light. Potential victims have rights too. But how these things should balance out, I dare not say. But I guess one needs to at least see the other side of the coin when making this fundamental argument the way you did.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Convicted felons are stripped of their right to bare arms, though they can apply to have them reinstated by a judge, since felon doesn't automatically mean violent. How violent is a history of violence? A highschool fight? A bar fight in college? That seems silly.

Yeah it seems silly, and those are also details. I am all for setting the bar way higher then instances like those, sure.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 3. I'm not sure why you think common sense (not giving firearms to blind people) means the door is open to force everyone to jump through hoops, pay fees, and register to use their rights.

I didn't make that connection directly, I used that extreme example to refute a principle (I wanted to show there are always exceptions). My stance is that I want people with arms to have a proper licence, and it's not because of blind people. Then again, I come from a country where licences are also required for certain types of dogs that could potentially kill other people - and I'm all for that too. 
I respect Americans to be less strict and less protective, that freedom comes with responsibility and both shoud stay individual.
I just don't know if it's the best way to go given the data that's created. If people are responsible enough for that amount of freedom, that is. Plain and simple.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: You can bet your ass it'd cost money to go through the course, training, and licensing you described. So you're basically not only wanting any poor people to be able to use their rights. Inherited firearms are a pretty big thing, so you don't even need to have ever spent money to buy a gun in order to own a gun.

Yeah, so it costs money. I'm all against taking advantage of people that want this licence, I'm aware it would still happen to some extent. I'm OK with that. If my proposal would mean some people who can't afford the gun licence can't purchase guns, so be it. :)

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Or protested, because there's already assholes with nothing better to do than sit outside a planned parenthood with signs all day long, or wear vagina hats and go marching around. You just know some gun owners in Seattle or LA would have people protesting outside their house.

Why do you mind the vagina hats? They seem harmless in executing their rights... apart from that, I sure agree, I wouldn't want protesters in front of gun owner's houses. I think it's a bit far fetched to say gun licences would lead to that. That being said, what that newspaper did, see SSF post, was of course really awful. So I can't dismiss the point.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: That's not even taking into consideration the whole confiscation aspect. Before anyone pshaws about that, there was a mass shooting by some jackass in Connecticut. In response the state government shoved through a law without any vote or discussion retroactively making quite a few different types of weapons illegal to own (which is illegal to do). They made it the law to either sell them to the state (you wouldn't get anywhere near it's worth) or destroy them. Almost nobody complied, so the state technically made a huge portion of their citizens felons if they ever got found out.

OK, I know nothing more about these cases than what you said, and that seems not ok. Don't you have a Supreme Court to prevent these kind of things?

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 5. Driving isn't a constitutional right.

Fair enough.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 6. It was a little .410 shotgun and the kids were shooting at targets put on haybales. Winner got a big turkey (already cleaned), I believe. America is a big place, dude. There's a lot of different cultures in it. I didn't personally grow up on a farm, but I have plenty of friends who did and were driving tractors on their land when they were 12 to do farmwork. Had a friend in youth rodeo when he was 10 or so, I think.

When I was young, I would hop on my bike and go ranging through woods and stuff miles away from home with my friends. I think the American parents you know of are the suburban or city folk. I would play in the woods, or go fishing, or play with fireworks or whatever. Had a Swiss Army Knife when I was young and my restriction to getting a bigger pocket knife was "when you can close the lock on your own with one hand" and was taught to never cut towards myself, always away. So I have carried a pocket knife for a really long time (you'd be surprised how often it is useful for just random things) and never cut myself because I was taught to not be an idiot with it.

Teach respect for the tool and understand it's dangerous so it's not a toy, and they won't be a jackass with it. You can immediately tell if someone has been taught properly, because when handed a gun they instantly check it's loaded/unloaded status, the barrel will be pointed nowhere near anyone, and their finger won't be close to touching the trigger.

I feel like guns/gun safety when you are young is a lot like alcohol. I wasn't getting drunk or anything, but when I was younger, beer wasn't really a big deal. Have a sip, or whatever. Then when I grew up, I noticed when all my friends were at college age, it wasn't the ones who were allowed a beer now-and-then who became the big party binge drinkers. It was the ones who were ignorant of alcohol because their parents sheltered the hell out of them. The people who were seriously sheltered from guns when they were young were the ones who handled them like dangerous jackasses at first when in Basic.

Oh, and it was mostly intended as rhetorical questions, but answer is 0, and I sure hope it stays at 0.

You probably were a smart kid with good parents teaching you all the right things about guns and knifes... same can not be said about all parents. 
(And sure America is big, there are all kinds of upbringings, but the protective type is certainly one of them. But they are probably liberals and for gun control anyway, so there's no contradiction. I just generalized where I shouldn't have.)

This being said... nice childhood stories. I like those. There sure would be many individual cases where I would individually say, in that surrounding it's completely fine, these folks know what they're doing. Law can't be individual, though, and you need to put into the equation that not all families are like yours. Just for understanding where I'm coming from in this debate.
People handling guns like dangerous jackasses are out there buying guns too. And I don't think the right solution is teaching guns in school.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 7. Australia isn't America. America has ~13.6x the population. Australia also only has 5 cities of at least 700,000 people. The US has 17 cities of at least 700,000 people. The US also has a much larger gang problem.

Sure. Australia is not proof that restrictions would make a difference. It is a clue that it might make a difference, though. If it doesn't change gangs, maybe it would change other things, reducing the death toll.
An expression I don't want to use in a populistic way. The death toll of speeding is there too, still I'm against restricting vehiicles to a speed of 60 mph or so. The question for me sems to be, do the merits of more or less lawless gun ownership outweigh the damage.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: At the risk of summoning GMD (because I know GMD is just lurking, waiting for a chance to call someone racist), African Americans commit 22.4% of violent crime in America despite being 13% of the population.

If we're looking at just gun homicides, then African Americans commit 151 firearm homicides per 1m compare to 15 per 1m among whites.

Guess these are just facts. I don't think it's racist at all to point out facts. I see that as an societal and economical problem; blacks are just considerably worse-dispositioned in these areas and have lesser chance to escape it (that's how I see things from the distance, at least). The poorer folks are and the more desperate and hopeless the situation gets, the more likely is the occurrence of crime.

(04-05-2017, 01:56 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 8. I'm not quite that Libertarian, though the licenses sure as hell don't keep shitty drivers off the road, so who knows how I will feel in a few more years. Lol.. that said, we go back to the fact that driving isn't a Constitutional right.

I go back to acknowledging that... my argument was more a common sense one. But that leads me to the point that I think the second amendment is stupid from a common sense standpoint, but I know I don't even need to argue that.
My common sense just dictates me, if driving needs a licence, so does shooting guns. The constitutional argument is a technical one, though of course a very strong one in reality.