[Discussion] Mass Shooting at Uvalde Elementary School

[Pato del Muerto 52322]

11 minutes ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

And it's going to be much more difficult for many of them to arm themselves.

Chappelle said it on a recent special- the best thing to get gun control passed is for every minority to be armed at all times. 

[Ghost of LL 15348]

2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I know personal interests and lawyers get involved but you would think the school district police chief (& now city council member) would have delayed joining the city council.  We'll never know how many children could have been saved if he wasn't incompetent but the general assumption is the number would have been greater than 0. 

Personally if I was that guy I would be seeking help to ensure I don't kill myself. I wouldn't be attending city council meetings and refusing to fully cooperate with the investigation.

In the West, we have a very negative view of seppuku.  But I'm going to tell you, in a situation such as this in which your cowardice killed numerous children, it may be the only way to regain your honor.

14 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Chappelle said it on a recent special- the best thing to get gun control passed is for every minority to be armed at all times. 

I think I have made that point as well.  

The history of gun ownership in this country is directly tied to our treatment of African-Americans.  In Antebellum Charleston, a city ordinance required that every white male not only own a gun, but open carry his gun when in public with a goal of intimidating slaves and thereby preventing a slave revolt.  The "Militia" referenced in the Second Amendment had two primary purposes in the late 18th Century: (1) fending off Indian attacks and (2) suppressing slave revolts.

It has long been an assumption of American gun ownership that whites are the ones who own guns and Blacks do not (at least not legally).  If you overturn that assumption, then the entire calculus changes.  

[Foosters 17691]

50 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

The history of gun ownership in this country is directly tied to our treatment of African-Americans.  In Antebellum Charleston, a city ordinance required that every white male not only own a gun, but open carry his gun when in public with a goal of intimidating slaves and thereby preventing a slave revolt.  The "Militia" referenced in the Second Amendment had two primary purposes in the late 18th Century: (1) fending off Indian attacks and (2) suppressing slave revolts.

It has long been an assumption of American gun ownership that whites are the ones who own guns and Blacks do not (at least not legally).  If you overturn that assumption, then the entire calculus changes.  

Now do the history of police....

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

On 5/29/2022 at 1:55 PM, Chopper said:

My point is NOT that there can be no middle point on gun laws. It is that there is no Constitutional Right to own one. (Republicans will not compromise on this. They have lied so much and so often about a supposed individual right that does not exist, it would be unfathomable for them to now compromise. They have abused and stacked the Supreme Court, which is fully complicit in their power grab.)

 

 

 

On 5/29/2022 at 3:46 PM, Chopper said:

C'mon, hundreds of years??? Do you seriously believe that? It was 2008 that the Court decided the 2nd amendment conferred upon individuals the right to own a gun. Look it up, Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller. Among the most appalling and dishonest of Supreme Court decisions.

 

 

 

On 5/29/2022 at 8:02 PM, Dahobbs said:

The fact that the second amendment exists is of course accepted as fact. What the second amendment actually protected was very much up for debate. The existence of a private right of ownership was not commonly accepted fact. 

Of course, until this year, the existence of a women's right to choose was Constitutional fact for decades. Apparently that doesn't mean much anymore. 

 

On 5/29/2022 at 7:49 PM, midtown said:

On 5/29/2022 at 4:01 PM, Chopper said:

Oh boy. Well from what I can tell, possibly you got fortunate and won a game of russian roulette OR maybe, just maybe, you are failing to understand. Here, let me google it for you.
https://lmgtfy.app/#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=heller decision supreme court

I will fully admit I was wrong. I am shocked that the Supreme Court had never ruled on the second amendment in history. Have they ever not heard a case that was 2nd amendment related in order to leave a ruling in place from a lower court? Is it possible or likely that there simply have not been many cases that even made it that far because the 2nd amendment is so accepted as fact?

Basically you’re right. 
 

Spoiler

It has never been ‘mainstream’ to interpret the Second Amendment as guaranteeing anything other than an individual right to bear arms.

If it will please the court, I will happily fall onto both my knees, throw my arms up into the air, shake my head plaintively, and plead with America’s journalists, in the name of all that is good and right, to stop doing this:

The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.

This claim was made yesterday in the Washington Post, by a staff writer named Amber Phillips, under the tag “Analysis.” It is, of course, a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.

Three months before Heller was decided, 73 percent of Americans believed that “the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns,” with just 20 percent contending that it “only guarantees members of state militias such as National Guard units the right to own guns.” That 73 percent supermajority (we might call it the “mainstream”) included a majority of non-gun-owners — which, well, of course it did, given that the alternative interpretation represents a preposterous conspiracy theory. To be within that 20 percent minority, one must ignore all of the history before the Second Amendment’s passage; all of the contemporary commentary as to its meaning; James Madison’s intention to insert it into the Constitution next to the other individual rights in Article I, Section 9, rather than next to the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16; the 45 state-level rights to keep and bear arms, many of which predated the Second Amendment; the meaning of “the people” everywhere else in the Bill of Rights; the fact that it would make no sense at all to give an individual a “right” to join a state-run institution from which the federal government could bar him; and all evidence of what the United States was actually like prior to 2008.

Writing in 1989, the progressive law professor Sanford Levinson explained in the Yale Law Journal that the theory that Amber Phillips is now laundering “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,’ interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” Or, as Adam Liptak put it in the New York Times in 2007, the theory that Phillips has shared is based on “received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution.” Once one undertakes that “serious consideration,” one recognizes immediately that the “collective right” claim is, and always has been, a cynical, dishonest, outcome-driven farce. There is a good reason why even Barack Obama responded to the Hellerdecision by confirming that he had “always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms”: The alternative is a joke.

Phillips’s attempt to rewrite history isn’t new, of course. Back in 2000, the historian — “historian” — Michael Bellesiles wrote a ridiculous book called Arming America, in which he claimed that American “gun culture” was invented in the mid 19th century, and that prior to that, gun ownership in the United States had been rare. For this contribution to the canon, Bellesiles won the Bancroft Prize . . . and then lost it, after his argument was exposed as a ridiculous fraud. Clayton Cramer, one of the men who brought the hoax to light, noted that the reason so many “historians” had “swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well. . . . Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right.”

Neither, it seems, has Amber Phillips. “How did we get here?” she asks, before proposing that “historians attribute it to a relatively recent political push by gun rights groups to reinterpret the Constitution” and blaming the “appointment of judges and funding of scholars who would interpret the Second Amendment more broadly.” One must ask to what Phillips’s “relatively recently” modifier applies? Does it pertain to the 1982 Senate report that concluded that it was “inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner”? Is that when this started? If not, how about in 1960, when Hubert Humphrey — the man who invented the Peace Corps and Medicare, and was a tireless opponent of nuclear-weapons testing — insisted casually that “one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms,” and submitted that “the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible”?

Perhaps Phillips’s “gun rights groups” went back in time a little earlier, to 1880, when the most famous legal scholar of the era, Thomas Cooley, observed that the meaning of the Second Amendment was “that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose”? Or to 1868, when, during the debate over the 14th Amendment, Senator Jacob Howard listed the “right to keep and bear arms” among the “privileges and immunities” that would now be extended to freed blacks? Perhaps they helped draft the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the disgraceful Justice Taney warned that if black Americans were to be regarded as citizens, they would enjoy “the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went”?

Am I still underestimating it? Did this dastardly plot to read the English language plainly start even earlier? Was St. George Tucker on the Federalist Society payroll when he wrote in 1803 that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; . . . and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government”? Did it begin in 1791, when Representative Roger Sherman described the Second Amendment as protecting “the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made”? Or 1789, when the Philadelphia lawyer Tench Coxe observed of the unamended Constitution that “the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people,” and of the Second Amendment specifically that “the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms”? Surely, the scheme cannot have reached as far back as 1776, 15 years before the Second Amendment was ratified and 232 years before Heller, when Pennsylvania became the first state to affirm in law that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state”?

I could go on, but I won’t, because it’s not necessary. Instead, I will reiterate my plea to the press: Please, stop it. You’re not fooling the American public. You’re not fooling the courts. You’re just making fools of yourselves, and of the handful of motivated reasoners whom you’re misinforming. Democracy, Darkness — you know the rest.

 

A pretty thorough debunking of Chopper’s asinine position. 

[Chopper 17126]

2 minutes ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

 

 

 

 

Basically you’re right. 
 

  Reveal hidden contents

It has never been ‘mainstream’ to interpret the Second Amendment as guaranteeing anything other than an individual right to bear arms.

If it will please the court, I will happily fall onto both my knees, throw my arms up into the air, shake my head plaintively, and plead with America’s journalists, in the name of all that is good and right, to stop doing this:

The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.

This claim was made yesterday in the Washington Post, by a staff writer named Amber Phillips, under the tag “Analysis.” It is, of course, a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.

Three months before Heller was decided, 73 percent of Americans believed that “the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns,” with just 20 percent contending that it “only guarantees members of state militias such as National Guard units the right to own guns.” That 73 percent supermajority (we might call it the “mainstream”) included a majority of non-gun-owners — which, well, of course it did, given that the alternative interpretation represents a preposterous conspiracy theory. To be within that 20 percent minority, one must ignore all of the history before the Second Amendment’s passage; all of the contemporary commentary as to its meaning; James Madison’s intention to insert it into the Constitution next to the other individual rights in Article I, Section 9, rather than next to the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16; the 45 state-level rights to keep and bear arms, many of which predated the Second Amendment; the meaning of “the people” everywhere else in the Bill of Rights; the fact that it would make no sense at all to give an individual a “right” to join a state-run institution from which the federal government could bar him; and all evidence of what the United States was actually like prior to 2008.

Writing in 1989, the progressive law professor Sanford Levinson explained in the Yale Law Journal that the theory that Amber Phillips is now laundering “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,’ interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” Or, as Adam Liptak put it in the New York Times in 2007, the theory that Phillips has shared is based on “received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution.” Once one undertakes that “serious consideration,” one recognizes immediately that the “collective right” claim is, and always has been, a cynical, dishonest, outcome-driven farce. There is a good reason why even Barack Obama responded to the Hellerdecision by confirming that he had “always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms”: The alternative is a joke.

Phillips’s attempt to rewrite history isn’t new, of course. Back in 2000, the historian — “historian” — Michael Bellesiles wrote a ridiculous book called Arming America, in which he claimed that American “gun culture” was invented in the mid 19th century, and that prior to that, gun ownership in the United States had been rare. For this contribution to the canon, Bellesiles won the Bancroft Prize . . . and then lost it, after his argument was exposed as a ridiculous fraud. Clayton Cramer, one of the men who brought the hoax to light, noted that the reason so many “historians” had “swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well. . . . Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right.”

Neither, it seems, has Amber Phillips. “How did we get here?” she asks, before proposing that “historians attribute it to a relatively recent political push by gun rights groups to reinterpret the Constitution” and blaming the “appointment of judges and funding of scholars who would interpret the Second Amendment more broadly.” One must ask to what Phillips’s “relatively recently” modifier applies? Does it pertain to the 1982 Senate report that concluded that it was “inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner”? Is that when this started? If not, how about in 1960, when Hubert Humphrey — the man who invented the Peace Corps and Medicare, and was a tireless opponent of nuclear-weapons testing — insisted casually that “one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms,” and submitted that “the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible”?

Perhaps Phillips’s “gun rights groups” went back in time a little earlier, to 1880, when the most famous legal scholar of the era, Thomas Cooley, observed that the meaning of the Second Amendment was “that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose”? Or to 1868, when, during the debate over the 14th Amendment, Senator Jacob Howard listed the “right to keep and bear arms” among the “privileges and immunities” that would now be extended to freed blacks? Perhaps they helped draft the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the disgraceful Justice Taney warned that if black Americans were to be regarded as citizens, they would enjoy “the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went”?

Am I still underestimating it? Did this dastardly plot to read the English language plainly start even earlier? Was St. George Tucker on the Federalist Society payroll when he wrote in 1803 that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; . . . and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government”? Did it begin in 1791, when Representative Roger Sherman described the Second Amendment as protecting “the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made”? Or 1789, when the Philadelphia lawyer Tench Coxe observed of the unamended Constitution that “the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people,” and of the Second Amendment specifically that “the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms”? Surely, the scheme cannot have reached as far back as 1776, 15 years before the Second Amendment was ratified and 232 years before Heller, when Pennsylvania became the first state to affirm in law that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state”?

I could go on, but I won’t, because it’s not necessary. Instead, I will reiterate my plea to the press: Please, stop it. You’re not fooling the American public. You’re not fooling the courts. You’re just making fools of yourselves, and of the handful of motivated reasoners whom you’re misinforming. Democracy, Darkness — you know the rest.

 

A pretty thorough debunking of Chopper’s asinine position. 

Are you seriously linking the National Review to prove a point? A magazine run by frothing fascists with zero morals who were complicit in covering up the breach of countless laws in the previous presidency and who then tried to help overthrow our democracy? LOL get out of here sir, you dumb fucking twat.

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

1 minute ago, Chopper said:

Are you seriously linking the National Review to prove a point? A magazine run by frothing fascists with zero morals who were complicit in covering up the breach of countless laws in the previous presidency and who then tried to help overthrow our democracy? LOL get out of here sir, you dumb fucking twat.

Smart move. I wouldn’t engage with the substance on this one either if I were you. 

[Pods 7522]

GOP Former Chief Justice Warren Burger. Each quote is a separate time he was talking about the issue. 

Quote

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime.

Quote

the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies, the militia, would be maintained for the defense of the state.

Quote

The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

 

[Homercles 10205]

Four people dead in a Tulsa hospital shooting this evening, armed with rifle and pistol.  

[Dahobbs 17420]

6 minutes ago, Homercles said:

Four people dead in a Tulsa hospital shooting this evening, armed with rifle and pistol.  

Obviously it is the fault of doors. They are the common connection to all these mass shootings. Guns are definitely not the issue. 

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

22 minutes ago, Pods said:

GOP Former Chief Justice Warren Burger. Each quote is a separate time he was talking about the issue. 

 

The weight of the evidence over more than two centuries favors it being a constitutional right, one Chief Justice opinion not withstanding. There’s a lot of receipts in that piece if you’re willing to read it. 

Edited June 2, 2022 by Immaculate Vibes

[chainsaw 9831]

13 minutes ago, Homercles said:

Four people dead in a Tulsa hospital shooting this evening, armed with rifle and pistol.  

I wonder if this was related to billing bullshit

[Captainant 27311]

35 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

I wonder if this was related to billing bullshit

Speaks volumes that people are driven to violence by the state of our healthcare system. But hey, at least profits are better than ever!

[formermav43 4599]

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

Are you seriously linking the National Review to prove a point? A magazine run by frothing fascists with zero morals who were complicit in covering up the breach of countless laws in the previous presidency and who then tried to help overthrow our democracy? LOL get out of here sir, you dumb fucking twat.

You don’t have to agree with National Review’s politics to acknowledge that they have pretty consistently called out the events of January 6 and the entire election fraud narrative. And I don’t know that I would count them as Trump supporters either. Just a random sampling from a quick search.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/anniversary-of-a-disgrace/

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/a-dark-day-in-america/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/trump-election-fraud-disgraceful-endgame/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/another-defeat-for-election-truthers/

[TwiceHorn 31184]

1 hour ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

The weight of the evidence over more than two centuries favors it being a constitutional right, one Chief Justice opinion not withstanding. There’s a lot of receipts in that piece if you’re willing to read it. 

The "legislative history" of it is vague and ambiguous, and anything post-ratification, or even anything post-1787, is largely irrelevant.

It was not the subject of a higher court decision addressing the private right to bear arms until Heller.  So, that part is technically correct.

The rest of it is the opinion of academics and commentators, and private citizens who assumed they had the right to bear arms, worth about exactly zero.

It wasn't really addressed formally and directly in any way until Heller.  Other decisions inferentially support a private right to keep and bear arms, but also an ability of the state/federal government to regulate that right.

It's interesting that Sandy Levin thinks there's a private right to keep and bear arms and he is mightily opposed to it.

Edited June 2, 2022 by TwiceHorn

[TwiceHorn 31184]

37 minutes ago, formermav43 said:

You don’t have to agree with National Review’s politics to acknowledge that they have pretty consistently called out the events of January 6 and the entire election fraud narrative. And I don’t know that I would count them as Trump supporters either. Just a random sampling from a quick search.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/anniversary-of-a-disgrace/

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/a-dark-day-in-america/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/trump-election-fraud-disgraceful-endgame/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/another-defeat-for-election-truthers/

Yeah, National Review is not a Trumpist publication.  It does, however, continue to promote policies that, to me anyway, have been thoroughly discredited, most recently by Trump.

[formermav43 4599]

1 minute ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yeah, National Review is not a Trumpist publication.  It does, however, continue to promote policies that, to me anyway, have been thoroughly discredited, most recently by Trump.

That’s fair.

[Michael Knight 12863]

 

[cmontexas 3242]

This town is crawling with cops from all over. Apparently here to protect Uvalde PD. Wtf is the Georgia Forestry Service?

[texas08 1599]

Good, those bastards deserve whatever is coming to them.

If I was a community member of Uvalde, I would make sure that fucking city council never had a normal meeting for as long as I lived, especially with that asshole that was recently appointed.

[tbone_ 14020]

Hospital shot up in Tulsa. 4 dead. Coward killed himself. Suppose there is a thread somewhere.

By all means though, let’s don’t try to restrict guns at all.

[Chopper 17126]

12 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

Smart move. I wouldn’t engage with the substance on this one either if I were you. 

You might as well link to a post by iliketojizupmyownass on stormfront, or incellover on 8chan. I wouldn't read those either. Just like NR - a bunch of unprincipled and amoral fucksticks.

[DigglerontheHoof 21022]

11 hours ago, Captainant said:

Speaks volumes that people are driven to violence by the state of our healthcare system. But hey, at least profits are better than ever!

Well, we certainly don't want to reform HC in this country, so time to turn all hospitals into fortresses.  I can see it now.  An ambulance pulls up to the ER w/ a heart attack patient but before they can be rolled into the ER they have to go through a frisk and metal detector.  Should probably also have an armed attendant in every room. 

Now that makes perfect sense.  /Repbulicans/ 

[Chopper 17126]

10 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yeah, National Review is not a Trumpist publication.  It does, however, continue to promote policies that, to me anyway, have been thoroughly discredited, most recently by Trump.

They were supportive of everything trump did to undermine democracy UP UNTIL jan 6. Going by simple memory I may find them a bit difficult to separate from the nuts at The Federalist as far as who did what. But a simple scroll of their twitter feed will show you they are unhinged liars dedicated to spreading propaganda. NR definitely not in the same boat with the conservatives with principles, like Tom Nichols.

[Chopper 17126]

The fact is that up until 2008 when the Koch-funded Antonin Scalia penned Heller there was no national individual right to own firearms. Up until that moment, the Supreme Court had never interpreted the 2nd Amendment as creating a right of individuals to have guns apart from militia service.

Also in those 200+ years, no Supreme Court cases in American history had ever found any law to violate the Second Amendment. Many states had however created a right to gun ownership, as was their right.  The extreme right has seized Heller to sell their bs of an existence of an unfettered individual right to own any firearm of their choice.

Edited June 2, 2022 by Chopper
bolded for emphasis because some asshole named immaculatevibe wanted to discuss the merits

[BurntOrange&White 39486]

All this toxicity and attachment to guns because a black man was elected? sheesh

[Jameslaw121 4445]

15 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

 

 

 

 

Basically you’re right. 
 

  Hide contents

It has never been ‘mainstream’ to interpret the Second Amendment as guaranteeing anything other than an individual right to bear arms.

If it will please the court, I will happily fall onto both my knees, throw my arms up into the air, shake my head plaintively, and plead with America’s journalists, in the name of all that is good and right, to stop doing this:

The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.

This claim was made yesterday in the Washington Post, by a staff writer named Amber Phillips, under the tag “Analysis.” It is, of course, a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.

Three months before Heller was decided, 73 percent of Americans believed that “the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns,” with just 20 percent contending that it “only guarantees members of state militias such as National Guard units the right to own guns.” That 73 percent supermajority (we might call it the “mainstream”) included a majority of non-gun-owners — which, well, of course it did, given that the alternative interpretation represents a preposterous conspiracy theory. To be within that 20 percent minority, one must ignore all of the history before the Second Amendment’s passage; all of the contemporary commentary as to its meaning; James Madison’s intention to insert it into the Constitution next to the other individual rights in Article I, Section 9, rather than next to the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16; the 45 state-level rights to keep and bear arms, many of which predated the Second Amendment; the meaning of “the people” everywhere else in the Bill of Rights; the fact that it would make no sense at all to give an individual a “right” to join a state-run institution from which the federal government could bar him; and all evidence of what the United States was actually like prior to 2008.

Writing in 1989, the progressive law professor Sanford Levinson explained in the Yale Law Journal that the theory that Amber Phillips is now laundering “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,’ interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” Or, as Adam Liptak put it in the New York Times in 2007, the theory that Phillips has shared is based on “received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution.” Once one undertakes that “serious consideration,” one recognizes immediately that the “collective right” claim is, and always has been, a cynical, dishonest, outcome-driven farce. There is a good reason why even Barack Obama responded to the Hellerdecision by confirming that he had “always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms”: The alternative is a joke.

Phillips’s attempt to rewrite history isn’t new, of course. Back in 2000, the historian — “historian” — Michael Bellesiles wrote a ridiculous book called Arming America, in which he claimed that American “gun culture” was invented in the mid 19th century, and that prior to that, gun ownership in the United States had been rare. For this contribution to the canon, Bellesiles won the Bancroft Prize . . . and then lost it, after his argument was exposed as a ridiculous fraud. Clayton Cramer, one of the men who brought the hoax to light, noted that the reason so many “historians” had “swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well. . . . Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right.”

Neither, it seems, has Amber Phillips. “How did we get here?” she asks, before proposing that “historians attribute it to a relatively recent political push by gun rights groups to reinterpret the Constitution” and blaming the “appointment of judges and funding of scholars who would interpret the Second Amendment more broadly.” One must ask to what Phillips’s “relatively recently” modifier applies? Does it pertain to the 1982 Senate report that concluded that it was “inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner”? Is that when this started? If not, how about in 1960, when Hubert Humphrey — the man who invented the Peace Corps and Medicare, and was a tireless opponent of nuclear-weapons testing — insisted casually that “one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms,” and submitted that “the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible”?

Perhaps Phillips’s “gun rights groups” went back in time a little earlier, to 1880, when the most famous legal scholar of the era, Thomas Cooley, observed that the meaning of the Second Amendment was “that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose”? Or to 1868, when, during the debate over the 14th Amendment, Senator Jacob Howard listed the “right to keep and bear arms” among the “privileges and immunities” that would now be extended to freed blacks? Perhaps they helped draft the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the disgraceful Justice Taney warned that if black Americans were to be regarded as citizens, they would enjoy “the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went”?

Am I still underestimating it? Did this dastardly plot to read the English language plainly start even earlier? Was St. George Tucker on the Federalist Society payroll when he wrote in 1803 that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; . . . and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government”? Did it begin in 1791, when Representative Roger Sherman described the Second Amendment as protecting “the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made”? Or 1789, when the Philadelphia lawyer Tench Coxe observed of the unamended Constitution that “the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people,” and of the Second Amendment specifically that “the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms”? Surely, the scheme cannot have reached as far back as 1776, 15 years before the Second Amendment was ratified and 232 years before Heller, when Pennsylvania became the first state to affirm in law that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state”?

I could go on, but I won’t, because it’s not necessary. Instead, I will reiterate my plea to the press: Please, stop it. You’re not fooling the American public. You’re not fooling the courts. You’re just making fools of yourselves, and of the handful of motivated reasoners whom you’re misinforming. Democracy, Darkness — you know the rest.

 

A pretty thorough debunking of Chopper’s asinine position. 

Let me help you. They named alot of people who were alive between 1750 and 1800. If you could go back in time and as any of them if they were okay with Blacks, Slaves, or Indians owning guns. Would the answer be yes or no?

If yes, they would be okay with them owning guns, you are absolutely lying to yourself.

If no, then you understand that even they believed in gun regulation. 

[Deej 76511]

39 minutes ago, Jameslaw121 said:

Let me help you. They named alot of people who were alive between 1750 and 1800. If you could go back in time and as any of them if they were okay with Blacks, Slaves, or Indians owning guns. Would the answer be yes or no?

If yes, they would be okay with them owning guns, you are absolutely lying to yourself.

If no, then you understand that even they believed in gun regulation. 

Maybe they'd have been ok with them owning three-fifths of a gun?

Edited June 2, 2022 by Deej

[DigglerontheHoof 21022]

2 hours ago, BurntOrange&White said:

All this toxicity and attachment to guns because a black man was elected? sheesh

Well, that certainly turbo charged it but it all started w/ the Southern Strategy of the late 60s/early 70s.

[Eskimohorn 5610]

Hospital shot up in Tulsa. 4 dead. Coward killed himself. Suppose there is a thread somewhere.

By all means though, let’s don’t try to restrict guns at all.

Think we need a T&P forum for all these mass shootings

[TwiceHorn 31184]

5 hours ago, Chopper said:

They were supportive of everything trump did to undermine democracy UP UNTIL jan 6. Going by simple memory I may find them a bit difficult to separate from the nuts at The Federalist as far as who did what. But a simple scroll of their twitter feed will show you they are unhinged liars dedicated to spreading propaganda. NR definitely not in the same boat with the conservatives with principles, like Tom Nichols.

I don't follow their twitter.  I have continued to read a few articles here and there, just out of curiosity.  I have noted that they are pretty much all-in on the "social conservative" performative end of politics.

To be fair, there were some somewhat legally dubious things going on (Pennsylvania Supreme Court) regarding voting in the Covid era, but I don't believe ror a second that those materially affected the outcome of the election.  I think I did see something about that in NR.

FedSoc is crazy as a shithouse rat and overrun with scary fundagelical Catlicks.

[TwiceHorn 31184]

4 hours ago, Chopper said:

The fact is that up until 2008 when the Koch-funded Antonin Scalia penned Heller there was no national individual right to own firearms. Up until that moment, the Supreme Court had never interpreted the 2nd Amendment as creating a right of individuals to have guns apart from militia service.

Also in those 200+ years, no Supreme Court cases in American history had ever found any law to violate the Second Amendment. Many states had however created a right to gun ownership, as was their right.  The extreme right has seized Heller to sell their bs of an existence of an unfettered individual right to own any firearm of their choice.

That is true.

But some of the pre-incorporation cases dealing with state regulations, that ultimately held that the Second Amendment didn't apply to the states, imply that those regulations might have been unconstitutional at the federal level and that there was a private right to own firearms.

Nevertheless, prior to Heller, everything was inconclusive and just a buncha fuckin opinions, like assholes.

Edited June 2, 2022 by TwiceHorn

[crash_davis 23078]

funny.

[BurntOrange&White 39486]

https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Robb-Elementary-School-shooting-lawsuits-17213597.php

[Chopper 17126]

19 hours ago, formermav43 said:

You don’t have to agree with National Review’s politics to acknowledge that they have pretty consistently called out the events of January 6 and the entire election fraud narrative. And I don’t know that I would count them as Trump supporters either. J

 

For the record, while I don't disagree with your comment there, that's a little like congratulating a baby on spitting up its food.

NR is a magazine in which the author linked to above argued firmly in support of teaching holocaust denial in public schools ("Teach holocaust denial and be proud of it").

While they may have opposed the rabid election denial of the wingtards centered around Jan 6, they never acknowledged, from what I can see, the basic reality that a former president conspired twice with Russia to tilt an election his way. So maybe give them a little less than full credit about the election denial bullshit.

Also, while arguing strenuously in favor of teaching holocaust denial, they have firmly supported the wholly fictional critical race theory "controversy" which the frothers argue precludes teaching basic american history.

But basically any publication willing to give a pedestal to baseballcrank (Dan Mclaughlin) is one that belongs in the garbage.

 

Edited June 2, 2022 by Chopper

[Jshep34 2303]

Commander in charge has police outside his house for security. No uvalde coos are patrol of city. Other local pd is having to do the work

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[DDD Dad 14167]

2 minutes ago, Jshep34 said:

Commander in charge has police outside his house for security. No uvalde coos are patrol of city. Other local pd is having to do the work

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk
 

 

[Brisketexan 104465]

3 hours ago, BurntOrange&White said:

https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Robb-Elementary-School-shooting-lawsuits-17213597.php

paywall - cliffs?

[Gale Snoats 242]

12 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

paywall - cliffs?

Watts is going to team up with the CT plaintiffs' lawyers from Sandy Hook that got that big settlement from Remington and go after the manufacturer.  The Sandy Hook plaintiffs focused on CT state law (sounds kind of like DTPA) to circumvent the federal statutes that shield gun manufacturers from liability.  They're going to focus on the manufacturer's targeting of children in their marketing (apparently Daniel Defense has ads for their guns in call of duty and this asshole was really into that). 

 

Long story short -- Watts and the CT lawyers know what they're doing and are going to fuck up Daniel Defense.  Issue (of course) will likely be Daniel Defense doesn't have Remington level assets (I'd guess -- I don't know shit about that world so maybe I'm wrong).    

[Ghost of LL 15348]

33 minutes ago, Gale Snoats said:

Watts is going to team up with the CT plaintiffs' lawyers from Sandy Hook that got that big settlement from Remington and go after the manufacturer.  The Sandy Hook plaintiffs focused on CT state law (sounds kind of like DTPA) to circumvent the federal statutes that shield gun manufacturers from liability.  They're going to focus on the manufacturer's targeting of children in their marketing (apparently Daniel Defense has ads for their guns in call of duty and this asshole was really into that). 

 

Long story short -- Watts and the CT lawyers know what they're doing and are going to fuck up Daniel Defense.  Issue (of course) will likely be Daniel Defense doesn't have Remington level assets (I'd guess -- I don't know shit about that world so maybe I'm wrong).    

Going to be really interesting to see how the shooter got $3,500 worth of guns and ammunition as a high-school student with no income source.  I understand that Daniel Defense has a credit arm that also targets young buyers.

[Handcruser 2805]

We’ve been moving quite a bit of DD stuff. PDW’s are still tough to get.

Very few under 21 people coming in for guns as some might expect.

We do a lot of high dollar sales so our clientele is different and we’ll known. I did have a younger kid in this week that didn’t seem right so he got a big nope from me on purchasing anything.

[Gale Snoats 242]

We’ve been moving quite a bit of DD stuff. PDW’s are still tough to get.

Very few under 21 people coming in for guns as some might expect.

We do a lot of high dollar sales so our clientele is different and we’ll known. I did have a younger kid in this week that didn’t seem right so he got a big nope from me on purchasing anything.

Does your store have any procedure that provides notice to the other employees in case he comes back in when you’re not there? What about any reporting to authorities in those types of cases? Seems like if you felt something was off enough to deny a sale it would merit telling others.

[tbone_ 14020]

Somehow just leaving it up to gut instinct of the sales guy doesn’t seem super effective.

[Gale Snoats 242]

Somehow just leaving it up to gut instinct of the sales guy doesn’t seem super effective.

Yes I was thinking that while writing the above. What a mess. It’s all broken.

[Handcruser 2805]

Does your store have any procedure that provides notice to the other employees in case he comes back in when you’re not there? What about any reporting to authorities in those types of cases? Seems like if you felt something was off enough to deny a sale it would merit telling others.

Yea everyone knows. We also work with other local stores to let them know when someone is attempting a straw sale etc.

There is more communication than you think.

[Handcruser 2805]

We can also alert the ATF or our local designated FBI rep. Which we do and have done many times.

[tbone_ 14020]

If only there were some ideas that might be more effective

[StruggleBus 3922]

4 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

paywall - cliffs?

Lawyers about to get paid

[InkaUtexas 25426]

35 minutes ago, tbone_ said:

Somehow just leaving it up to gut instinct of the sales guy doesn’t seem super effective.

well not like the current system is working. Sometimes we need to listen to the gut instincts on top of a system. 

[tbone_ 14020]

I’ll take anything that denies any sale.

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4965]

Even if we have robust red flag laws, there is always going to be someone who manages to slip through the system. Part of that is inevitable, but part of that is due to the nature of our rights that require due process to be stripped of them. I'm not sure we want to set a precedent where we allow rights to be stripped without due process, because that leads us down a very dark rabbit hole. So we need the judgement of salespeople as a last bastion of defense against those who slip through.

Then again, we may be headed down that rabbit hole already due to the nature of technology. It is already possible to manufacture your own magazine fed semi automatic (and probably fully automatic) gun with a couple weeks and about 500 bucks using 3D printers. And that is including the cost of the printer. None of the parts required are regulated as firearm components in the EU, which is much stricter than anything here. Even the barrel can be created with rifling using electrochemical machining and 3D printed jigs. The only way to really prevent someone from a mass shooting using something like that likely involves significant erosion of rights that even people who oppose the second amendment care deeply about. 

FGC-9

Quote

The FGC-9 is a physible, 3D-printable semiautomatic pistol caliber carbine, first released in early 2020. Using the Shuty AP-9 by Derwood as the basis, the FGC-9 was designed and first manufactured by a pseudonymous German-Kurdish[1] gun designer named JStark1809. The designer created the pistol with the self-imposed constraint that its creation would not require a single potentially regulated (according to E.U. laws) firearm part in order to enable people in countries with restrictive gun control to manufacture it. The weapon is a mix of fabricated 3D printed parts, easily manufactured metal pressure-bearing parts, and readily available springs, screws, nuts, and bolts. The total cost of production, assuming the user already owns a 3D printer, is less than USD$400. The FGC-9 is noted for its deep and thorough documentation, included in the release, which make construction and assembly fairly simple. The documentation has been translated into several other languages since it was first published