Dems introduce HR Bill 5717 severely attacking 2nd Amendment rights

[JEDIYoda]

I did the math with 2013 statistics from the FBI for crime rates and some neutral and even anti-gun sources for the causality rates from gun violence about two or three years ago. Lots of math. And lots of giving the opposition the benefit of the doubt trying to find out what percentage of guns in civilian hand were used in a year to hurt someone. I included all injuries, deaths, suicides, accidents, justified and unjustified injuries and deaths with a gun. I even assumed each one of those events was done with a separate gun.

My result, and this is only for the year 2013 which was the latest FBI statistics I could find at the time, was that a bit more than 99.92% of civilian owned guns didn't hurt anyone that year. And that's assuming each shooting was with a different gun, and included even lawful and justified uses of a firearm in self-defense in the numbers.

I Posted my calculations and sources many, many times in many, many threads. I begged for feedback, for folks to find any mistakes I may have made or dispute my findings if they could. All I heard back were basically *crickets*.

Additionally, I've posted links to some of those early threads over the years, so if you want to find them please feel free to look at my history. I no longer have the link, sorry.

And it's not a case of confirmation bias. I worked as a newspaper journalist for a long time and it was part of my job to see if actual numbers supported sources claims. In this case they did not support the idea that guns are only used to kill. In fact, only about .08% of those in America were used so that year.

Not very good at math are you??

 

[JEDIYoda]

If we ban guns and force buy backs (a proposal no one is making), what are you going to do about it?

This bears repeating --

If we ban guns and force buy backs (a proposal no one is making), what are you going to do about it?

If we ban guns and force buy backs (a proposal no one is making), what are you going to do about it?

If we ban guns and force buy backs (a proposal no one is making), what are you going to do about it?

If we ban guns and force buy backs (a proposal no one is making), what are you going to do about it?

If we ban guns and force buy backs (a proposal no one is making), what are you going to do about it?

well?

 

[IJTSSG]

My unit was part of operation Iraqi freedom. I have never claimed that I was personally getting shot at or whatever.

That's what I figured.

 

[fskimospy]

Not very good at math are you??

The fact that he thinks what he wrote there is good logic is pretty frightening.

The first flaw that should have stood out to him is that he’s counting guns, not people, and people who own guns often own lots of them. Under his logic if every gun owner owned 100 guns and 100% of gun owners shot someone to death then 99% of guns would never be used to kill anyone.

Does anyone think that makes even the slightest bit of sense?

 

[JEDIYoda]

So if the American people vote for representatives that do just that are you implying that you’ll leave the country? Sounds like a win to me.

Sounds like a win -win scenario!! Nobody loses!!

 

[ondma]

[

That's an inherently flawed and invalid argument.

It assumes that the realities of gun ownership, technology and society are set in stone, and that the only acceptable stance on gun rights is an absolutist one.

Do you believe people should have the right to own machine guns with no restrictions? No? Then you have to throw out that argument. And it's trite to say, but gun rights in the US were established at a time when single-shot rifles were the best you could get and the main concern was fielding resistance to foreign invasions. If you told people amending the Constitution that rifles nearly 250 years later could kill dozens of people, and that guns were involved in tens of thousands of murders and suicides per year, would they have been absolutist in defending it? I wouldn't count on it.

Remember, while the 2nd Amendment did grant individual rights, it did so with a specific purpose; it was not meant to be a catch-all for people who feel like they 'need' an AR-15 to shoot deer (but really just want a toy) or don't like waiting a day or two for a background check. And you know full well that an absolutist approach would lead to some pretty horrific outcomes. Like it or not, "compromise" is necessary in a world where observable evidence matters.

Excellent post.

 

[JEDIYoda]

The fact that he thinks what he wrote there is good logic is pretty frightening.

The first flaw that should have stood out to him is that he’s counting guns, not people, and people who own guns often own lots of them. Under his logic if every gun owner owned 100 guns and 100% of gun owners shot someone to death then 99% of guns would never be used to kill anyone.

Does anyone think that makes even the slightest bit of sense?

I love it when you are a voice of reason in the face of Gun Nutters!!! Carry on....

 

[JEDIYoda]

My unit was part of operation Iraqi freedom. I have never claimed that I was personally getting shot at or whatever.

To which I say -- honestly I might add -- Thank You for your service! I served many years earlier than you did, but never the less you enlisted and you served and I thank you!!

 

[fskimospy]

That's what I figured.

Congratulations, you were able to figure out a fact that I have explicitly stated multiple times on this forum, hahaha.

 

[JEDIYoda]

That's what I figured.

So when did you serve? You forget quite a bit of the military is what is called support units, but that in no way takes away from the fact that somebody enlisted and they served! So when did you serve?

 

[JSt0rm]

That's what I figured.

You haven’t done shit. Call of duty doesn’t count.

 

[JEDIYoda]

I'm really very curious where and when it was that you "fought" for this country. What is your combat experience?

It does not matter what his service was, does it? Whether he was a pen pusher or an accountants or a lawyer or for thsat matter a cook.......if you served then you served! I thank everybody who served!!

 

[fskimospy]

To which I say -- honestly I might add -- Thank You for your service! I served many years earlier than you did, but never the less you enlisted and you served and I thank you!!

I appreciate the thought, thank you! Same goes to you.

 

[JSt0rm]

That's what I figured.

Look at this stolen valor traitor.

 

[IJTSSG]

Congratulations, you were able to figure out a fact that I have explicitly stated multiple times on this forum, hahaha.

I knew that you've posted that you were on active duty, I don't remember you ever saying that you "fought" while on active duty. There's a pretty significant difference between the two. People who fought earn things like Combat Action Ribbons, Combat Infantry Badges, etc. People that don't have those things and claim to have "fought" are . . . . well we know what they are don't we.

 

[Fenixgoon]

So when did you serve? You forget quite a bit of the military is what is called support units, but that in no way takes away from the fact that somebody enlisted and they served! So when did you serve?

If we limit service to combat duty, then very few people have actually served.

If you asked them though, I doubt they would agree with IJTSSG's assessment.

 

[JEDIYoda]

"Reasonable" is the intangible yardstick we must apply to all decisions, even as imperfect as it is. If we spend more on our roads they become safer and we have fewer road fatalities. What is a "reasonable" amount to spend? We can debate it all day, but it sounds like with respect to 2A rights, no cost is too high if it has the slightest chance of saving a life. Even if it costs us what others have bled and died to provide us with. Even if it only disarms lawful civilians and puts them at the mercy of criminals who ignore gun bans.

hahha more of your waxingh elowuently -- this is so amusing -- Even if it costs us what others have bled and died to provide us with. Even if it only disarms lawful civilians and puts them at the mercy of criminals who ignore gun bans.
Nobody in the US has ever died for what you are alluding do!

Constitutional Myth #6: The Second Amendment Allows Citizens to Threaten Government

The "right to bear arms" is not a right to nullify any government measure a "sovereign citizen" finds irksome

www.theatlantic.com

Constitutional Myth #6: The Second Amendment Allows Citizens to Threaten Government
The "right to bear arms" is not a right to nullify any government measure a "sovereign citizen" finds irksome

In 2008, the Supreme Court recognized--for the first time in American history--the "right to bear arms" as a personal, individual right, permitting law-abiding citizens to possess handguns in their home for their personal protection. Two years later, it held that both state and federal governments must observe this newly discovered right.

Curiously enough, the far-right responded to these radical victories as if the sky had fallen. During hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions direly warned that the two gun cases--Heller v. District of Columbia and McDonald v. City of Chicago--were 5-4 decisions. "Our Second Amendment rights are hanging by a thread," he said. The idea that the rights of ordinary gun owners are in danger is a fallacy.
A second, and more pernicious, fallacy is embodied by this quotation from Thomas Jefferson, America's third president:

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Wait a minute, Epps! Who could argue with Jefferson? Well, not me, to be sure. But there's a problem with this quote, as there is with so much of the rhetoric about the Second Amendment.

It's false.
As far as scholars can tell, Jefferson never said it. Monticello.org, the official website of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, says, "We have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote, 'When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny,' or any of its listed variations." The quotation (which has also been misattributed to Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and The Federalist), actually was apparently said in 1914 by the eminent person-no-one's-ever-heard-of John Basil Barnhill, during a debate in St. Louis.
As bogus as the quote is the idea that the purpose of the Second Amendment was to create a citizenry able to intimidate the government, and that America would be a better place if government officials were to live in constant fear of gun violence. If good government actually came from a violent, armed population, then Afghanistan and Somalia would be the two best-governed places on earth. As we saw from the 2010 shootings in Tucson, Arizona, the consequences for democracy of guns in private hands, without reasonable regulation, can be dire--a society where a member of Congress cannot meet constituents without suffering traumatic brain injury, and where a federal judge cannot stop by a meeting on his way back from Mass without being shot dead.

But that image of a Mad Max republic lives on in the fringes of the national imagination. It is what authors Joshua Horwitz and Casey Anderson call "the insurrectionist idea," the notion that the Constitution enshrines an individual right to nullify laws an armed citizen objects to. Its most prominent recent expression came from Senate candidate Sharon Angle, who predicted that if she was unable to defeat Democratic Sen. Harry Reid at the ballot box (which she couldn't), citizens would turn to "Second Amendment remedies"--in essence, assassination. Rand Paul also likes to hint that the remedy for rejection of his libertarian policies may be hot lead. Deathandtaxesmag.com quotes him as saying, "Some citizens are holding out hope that the upcoming elections will better things. We'll wait and see. Lots of us believe that maybe that's an unreliable considering that the Fabian progressive socialists have been chipping at our foundations for well over 100 years. Regardless, the founders made sure we had Plan B: the Second Amendment."

The history and meaning of the Second Amendment are a murky subject. A fair reading of the entire text of the Constitution suggests that the most prominent concern of the its framers was protecting states' control of their militias. Under Article I § 8 of the Constitution, the states transferred to Congress the power "to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel Invasions" and "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia." This was one of the most radical features of the original Constitution; under the Articles of Confederation, states had complete control of their militias. Opponents of ratification suggested that the new federal government might proceed to disarm and dissolve the state militias and create instead a national standing army. The Second Amendment most clearly addresses that concern; and that has led a number of historians to suggest that the Amendment really has no relation to any personal right of individuals to "keep and bear arms."

History is rarely that clear, however, and the notion of personal gun possession as a right is also deeply rooted in American history. UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler, author of the forthcoming Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, notes that since before the Amendment was proposed, many citizens have discussed the right to bear arms as a guarantee against tyranny as well as a feature of a federal system. Indeed, Winkler's reading of the history finds more support for this anti-tyranny idea than for the Supreme Court's current doctrine that the Second Amendment supports a right of personal self-defense. But the protection against tyranny was a long-term structural guarantee, not a privilege of individual nullification, he says. "I don't think there's any support for the idea that government officials should be afraid of being shot."

It would be odd indeed if the Framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had written an amendment designed to give individuals the right to liquidate the government they were setting up. In fact, having been through a revolution, they had few illusions about the virtues of violence. When they gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, the original Framers were very aware that armed bands of farmers in Massachusetts had revolted against the state government only a few months earlier. Washington, in particular, found the news of Daniel Shays's rebellion in that state so disturbing that it contributed to his decision to come out of retirement and help frame a new national charter to prevent such outbreaks.

At Philadelphia, Gouverneur Morrison of Pennsylvania warned the delegates that failure would precipitate new outbreaks of rebellion. "The scenes of horror attending civil commotion can not be described, and the conclusion of them will be worse than the term of their continuance," he said. "The stronger party will then make traitors of the weaker; and the gallows & halter will finish the work of the sword."
After becoming President, Washington himself led a national army into Western Pennsylvania to suppress a rebellion against the new federal tax on whiskey. (This is the only time in American history a President has served as Commander-in-Chief in the field.) In a subsequent message to Congress, he showed precious little sympathy for "Second Amendment remedies":
There is more....

 

[JEDIYoda]

I knew that you've posted that you were on active duty, I don't remember you ever saying that you "fought" while on active duty. There's a pretty significant difference between the two. People who fought earn things like Combat Action Ribbons, Combat Infantry Badges, etc. People that don't have those things and claim to have "fought" are . . . . well we know what they are don't we.

That does not take away from the fact that he served!! Nice try! Only a scum bag would try to claim that if you have not fought that you did not actually serve!!
I bet you were one of those who spit on our service members when they arrived back from serving in Vietnam......figures!@!

 

[JEDIYoda]

That's an inherently flawed and invalid argument.

It assumes that the realities of gun ownership, technology and society are set in stone, and that the only acceptable stance on gun rights is an absolutist one.

Do you believe people should have the right to own machine guns with no restrictions? No? Then you have to throw out that argument. And it's trite to say, but gun rights in the US were established at a time when single-shot rifles were the best you could get and the main concern was fielding resistance to foreign invasions. If you told people amending the Constitution that rifles nearly 250 years later could kill dozens of people, and that guns were involved in tens of thousands of murders and suicides per year, would they have been absolutist in defending it? I wouldn't count on it.

Remember, while the 2nd Amendment did grant individual rights, it did so with a specific purpose; it was not meant to be a catch-all for people who feel like they 'need' an AR-15 to shoot deer (but really just want a toy) or don't like waiting a day or two for a background check. And you know full well that an absolutist approach would lead to some pretty horrific outcomes. Like it or not, "compromise" is necessary in a world where observable evidence matters.

nobody wants to listen to a voice of reason......lol

 

[JSt0rm]

That does not take away from the fact that he served!! Nice try! Only a scum bag would try to claim that if you have not fought that you did not actually serve!!
I bet you were one of those who spit on our service members when they arrived back from serving in Vietnam......figures!@!

IJ didn’t serve. He wouldn’t have that view if he did. Fake news

 

[fskimospy]

I knew that you've posted that you were on active duty, I don't remember you ever saying that you "fought" while on active duty.

I’ve explicitly stated multiple times that I was in the Persian Gulf for the invasion of Iraq but didn’t personally participate in combat.

So again, congratulations on cracking the case on something I’ve said repeatedly, haha.

There's a pretty significant difference between the two. People who fought earn things like Combat Action Ribbons, Combat Infantry Badges, etc. People that don't have those things and claim to have "fought" are . . . . well we know what they are don't we.

Lol. You can save your fake outrage.

 

[fskimospy]

IJ didn’t serve. He wouldn’t have that view if he did. Fake news

Wait, this clown didn’t even serve?

LOL.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Sorry, my point is that we don't ban constitutional rights just because a tiny minority of criminals/sick/evil people abuse those rights. Claiming that gun rights are abused to such a level that it's time to put unreasonable restrictions on them is basically a lie. Gun violence is on the decline, and criminal violence from semi-auto "assault weapons" is not even a drop in the bucket. So seeking to ban them is unreasonable.

The problem is this is all your opinion -- the opinion of a GunNutter......there is no rationality in what you are saying....

 

[JEDIYoda]

I thought perhaps you would be able to have an interesting conversation on the topic of guns as some of your other posts made it sound like you could. This though is the same kind of rationalizing I though you would be able to avoid.

who are you??? I don`t see you having or inserting anything intelligent into this conversation??

 

[IJTSSG]

I did the math with 2013 statistics from the FBI for crime rates and some neutral and even anti-gun sources for the causality rates from gun violence about two or three years ago. Lots of math. And lots of giving the opposition the benefit of the doubt trying to find out what percentage of guns in civilian hand were used in a year to hurt someone. I included all injuries, deaths, suicides, accidents, justified and unjustified injuries and deaths with a gun. I even assumed each one of those events was done with a separate gun.

My result, and this is only for the year 2013 which was the latest FBI statistics I could find at the time, was that a bit more than 99.92% of civilian owned guns didn't hurt anyone that year. And that's assuming each shooting was with a different gun, and included even lawful and justified uses of a firearm in self-defense in the numbers.

I Posted my calculations and sources many, many times in many, many threads. I begged for feedback, for folks to find any mistakes I may have made or dispute my findings if they could. All I heard back were basically *crickets*.

Additionally, I've posted links to some of those early threads over the years, so if you want to find them please feel free to look at my history. I no longer have the link, sorry.

And it's not a case of confirmation bias. I worked as a newspaper journalist for a long time and it was part of my job to see if actual numbers supported sources claims. In this case they did not support the idea that guns are only used to kill. In fact, only about .08% of those in America were used so that year.

The worthless gun grabbing bitch brigades current argument is that owning a gun makes you less safe. What they always fail to mention is how much less safe. We know that if the odds increased more than even a fraction of a percent they'd be running their sucks about it non-stop.

There are guns in 100 million households in this country. There are 35k gun deaths. The math is simple.