Yo. I don't normally come out of the woodworks but I'll make an exception for today. If people are going to keep talking about the 2nd amendment, then the conversation almost always turns into a two sided argument. One side can't make sense of the other. Like there's something that doesn't make sense to either side. Personally speaking it's probably because of language and cultural barriers. So to get around those barriers we need another way to think of guns and the 2nd amendment. More importantly we need to stop thinking in terms of normative politics, or just what policy ought to be. Instead we should be talking about the metapolitics, or the theoretical background. The answer is simple really- stop talking about guns and start talking solely in terms of rights. That is, unalienable and inalienable rights to start with. Unalienable and inalienable rights are two different kinds of rights. Unalienable rights are rights you can never give up, under any circumstance. For example, every person has a right to life, liberty and property/happiness. This is in comparison to inalienable rights. We can give up these rights if needed. For example, freedom of speech, right to a trial, and of course the 2nd amendment. But why is the second amendment an inalienable right? Because inalienable rights are what is granted by the government to give you you're unalienable rights. You have a gun to protect yourself, because it's a way to bond with people, or just to have fun. But notice, what we want to say here is that when the government provides an inalienable right, it is to protect an unalienable right. Inalienable and unalienable rights then can serve as a variables in scientific analysis. This is what we are testing for. Obviously the unalienable rights would be dependent variables, they're what we're testing for. But to get our independent variable, we need something more, a framework to do it. So now we have to talk about two different kinds of rights, negative and positive. Negative rights are things the government can't do. For example, the government can't discriminate on political message. On the contrast there are positive rights, or things the government has to do for you. A right to a fair trial or the right to vote are good examples. When it comes to the 2nd amendment we want to frame it as a positive right. For example, the government must support the sale of bullets, silencers etc. But the 2nd amendment is not a positive right. It's a negative one. The government can not stop you from owning a firearm. What this shows is we think about things in terms of both positive and negative rights, it's a spectrum of allowable actions that are granted by the government. So we can take the values of this spectrum as an independent variable for analysis. Thus we have a scientific framework based on rights. Hopefully this can help cross the existing barriers. Notice we don't have to talk about guns anymore, it's only needed to make the framework. Once we're there, we can start talking about the right to life and that is much less partisan. More importantly it doesn't assume any side is better than the other. So there is no inherent risk for any side to use this model. So maybe next we talk politics, you think about how we can talk together and start thinking bigger.
