What Else Would I Write About?

When the topic of the 2nd Amendment comes up, as it always will after tragedies like these, I always wind up debating people on its merits.  Most people (on both sides) have knee jerk and emotional responses to these events and having a good discussion is very difficult and often one sided. But I have a couple of friends that sit on the other side of the political fence than me who aren't complete idiots so I get to put on my thinking cap and throw out some more thought out arguments.  Here are two from the past couple of days.  The first one stands alone but the other is from an ongoing conversation so I will preface it with the arguments made by my friend.

#1 a Facebook Status.

Have you seen the trend of these mass public shootings? They happen in gun free zones and, in this case, in one of the most firearm restrictive states in the union (the Tucson shooting is the one exception). More regulation will stop nothing. As it stands the shooter broke several laws (too young to own a handgun, took it into a gun free zone and more) more laws would not have stopped him. You say we should just stop selling guns, okay what does that solve? There are already millions of guns in the hands of American citizens. Are you just going to take all those away? And if you take all of the guns away from everyone what about our incredibly porous border with Mexico, millions of tons of illegal drugs easily flow through what would stop guns? And if we plug the border what about knives, fires, and bombs? The last two of those three are responsible for much larger tragedies than guns (Happy Land fire 87 dead, Oklahoma City bombing 165 dead). Today in China 22 school children were slashed by an adult with a knife.

We don't have a gun problem we have mental health problem and a lack of real protection for what matters most. Our money is guarded by armed men why can't our children be protected in the same way? 98,817 public schools in the US as of 2010. Two men at $60,000/man per school = ~$12,000,000,000 per year. That is a drop in the bucket of our national budget. Laws are obeyed by people who are not criminals. Criminals are not stopped by laws but by the enforcement of laws.

#2 A response to a private conversation.

My friend brought up the example of Australia who, after their gun ban, has had no more massacres.

My response:  

I'm going to ignore Australia for now for a couple of reasons, one I just don't know enough about their history with firearms and two I don't know there culture very well at all.  I think comparing the U.S. to any other developed country is very difficult because of our vast differences in ideology, culture, history, and form of government. (Besides they’re just a bunch of convicts anyway ; )

Now for what I think is a pretty good response to the all too often comment of, "I don't think our founders would think the same way about guns today as they did then" and all of its different incarnations.

My response:

Now onto Madison and Jefferson.  I am going to argue the complete opposite, but be for warned that this is a new idea that popped into my head so it may not be fully formed.  Most supporters of gun rights and myself would argue that the 2nd Amendment (2A) was crafted to protect the citizen from the government not for self-defense (and the hunting crowd needs to get a clue). This conclusion is fairly well supported and even if you do not agree with it you still would have to admit that there is good evidence for it.  Now if we put ourselves in Jefferson's or Madison's shoes and looked at what they were planning on fighting, the most formidable military in the world, they would probably want every advantage they could get. This would include the most advanced arms they could get (or militarily relevant firearms). A lot of the citizen militia was in fact armed with far superior weaponry than the British and that played key roles in several engagements and throughout the war.  So if Jefferson and Madison were to look upon what our military (and other nation's armies) now have in their arsenal they would argue for far less restrictions and that once common freedoms of no background checks (gun owner lists), owning unlicensed fully automatic weapons, cannons and other weapons that had only a militaristic value (as opposed to self-defense, hunting) should be reinstated so that armed rebellion would be possible.  Now I won't go so far as to say that in our current cultural state that I think we need to 'legalize' everything but if our culture were to shift back to one of self-responsibility then yes our freedoms should be restored.  Also I think that a slow phase out of government regulations (on all things, some more important than gun laws) would start to shift our culture back to one of self-responsibility and accountability.

Now onto one of the obvious attacks on this line of thought, how could the citizen stand up to the might of the military with all of its advanced technology, air power, and mechanized armor?  There are several possibilities and examples of how this would be possible.  Vietnam and to a lesser extent Iraq and Afghanistan are great examples of what an untrained, poorly equipped, and uneducated but highly motivated force can do with only small arms and captured explosives against the most advanced and strongest military the world has ever known.   Another possibility is what lies in waiting in the future. At the moment everything is relatively safe for Americans but no one knows what the future holds especially 40 years from now so why get rid of guns now when they may be very important in the not too distant future.  It does not take long for a government to crumble into nothing leaving its population vulnerable to outside attacks.   It takes an even shorter time for a government to grow far too strong and become a threat to its own populous.

There are probably many more problems with this line of thought but like I said it’s pretty new to me so it still needs to be fleshed out.

Required viewing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4