CDC: No Proof That Gun Laws Are Effective

You mean the mindless tyranny of progressive thought? Yep.

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That is the reason we have a Constitution protecting people from government. Giving up freedom for a false sense of security is nothing new.

 

friggin' martial law is Due Process. Listen bud, if you violate someone else's Rights through the use of a firearm, then you can lose that Right.
Two things. First off, the Bill of Rights are Individual, not collective.
Two, registration target lawful gun owners, not criminals.
How are you going to disarm them?
With registration we would be forced to surrender the 4th and 5th Amendments.
This leads to the question: Why disarm the lawful?

This government cannot just arbitrarily just write a law to circumvent the Bill of Rights.
and just a footnote, it would seem that you desire to see us disarmed.
only a criminal wants to see us disarmed.

 

Not true. There are news stories everyday that prove you wrong.

 

and I've pointed out plenty of stories where they haven't Please try again!

 

Well at least we can agree on something haha. If you ever come to Seattle, I will buy you a beer and let you shoot my guns (not at the same time.)

 

I

That seems rather unresponsive to the fact that clearly unstable people seem to be able to obtain high powered weapons under current law. I don't feel threatened in the slightest but the population at large should by now have been able to figure out that the current laws are ineffective in keeping guns out of the hands of mentally disturbed persons.

 

Its not easy to remove a persons rights based on their mental status. In the past (pre-1980's), mental wards were the lockup for undesirables who didn't fit anywhere else, and abuse was wide spread. In the 1980's, largely for political reasons (against Reagan), the ACLU led a fight to restore rights for homeless people which resulted in laws making it very difficult to force people into treatment. Privacy laws have also come into play.

The result is that today it is very difficult to identify and force treatment upon people. Even the extremes are not easy to handle. For example, the Newtown shooter was a known danger, his mother was even in the process of having him involuntarily incarcerated in a mental health facility but was having problems because he was an adult, and the threshold for involuntary treatment is very high.

There is an additional problem. The gun banners have poisoned the well with their 40 years of lies, banners repeatedly argue that they just want a "common sense" measure to improve public safety and don't want to prevent "rational" people from owning guns. Then when they have their gun control measure, they expand it into a de facto gun ban. They have done this with gun safety permits, purchase permits, ownership licenses, concealed carry permits - they make the costs and requirements so high that it acts a functional ban. I no longer trust anything the gun banners propose, no matter how reasonable it sounds on the surface.

When the banners claim we need to make mental health a factor in gun ownership, it might sound reasonable. It would have been great if Newtown had been prevented because the shooters mom had been able to get him involuntary treatment (locked up). But the banners will lower the threshold so that innocent people would be caught on the ban, as is happening in New York due to the rammed through "SAFE" act. Such as the veteran who had insomnia - no violence, he just couldn't sleep - and asked his doctor for medication, the MD reported him as required by law, and the veteran had his firearms confiscated by the NY cops.

 

A Constitution "protecting people from government"? Really? Is that its purpose?

 

Yes, our Constitution lays down the law protecting our rights from government suppression.

 

No, I don't want to see anyone "disarmed" as you put it. Disarming someone who is a threat, yes, the average law-abiding firearms owner who can own a firearm without accidentally shooting themselves or anyone else or who can carry, use, store a firearm without a kid getting hold of it and shooting someone, is fine with me. So I'm not a criminal. Anyway that's a ludicrous response.

Now, to substance - of a sort.

I would think that a declaration of martial law is a removal of due process. You know, habeas corpus removed and all that. I could be very wrong but it seems to me that the purpose of a declaration of martial law is to abandon any adherence to due process.

I'm not sure what you mean abou the Bill of Rights being individual and not collective. I don't see that they are either. They have a range of desired outcomes and I don't understand some sort of declaration of them being either individual or collective.

Registation is about lawful gun ownership, nevery said anything different. Criminal law is about criminals. Obvious.

Registration atttacks the 4th Amendment? It does? Then it can't exist anywhere in the United States then, can it? But California has gun registration. So it looks like your argument falls down there. Probably because gun registration has nothing to do with the 4th Amendment I'd suggest.

Fifth Amendment? No, not that one either. Registration is an administrative process, it doesn't involve self-incrimination.

 

Which bits of the Constitution do that?

 

That's a very kind invitation. Last time I was in Seattle for a week it didn't rain. The desk clerk said I'd brought a drought from home with me

Guns and pizza good. Beer and pizza good. Guns and beer not good - totally agree

 

Bill of Rights. Many believed the Constitution protected inherent rights, some did not so the Bill of Rights were added.

 

Good thing too. But the rest of it not so much eh?

 

A signature on a government document is the same as a testament, signed by the individual. Our courts rely on the fact that our Bill of Rights are individual in nature and design.
California is a fine example of slow encroachment leads to confiscation. Might was well say they have no Rights to firearms. The state has more firepower, now, than the citizens. Over here, we call that tyranny. Governments come and go. Most of them quite violently. It is always the citizens that actually bear the cost for their own tyranny.
You realize they could just leave the rest of us law-abiding citizens alone and go after the real criminals.
Why make us criminals while we sit at home, doing nothing.
We're not that bunch. We're not sitting on the couch. We defend our Rights, we were warned it would cost to remain in a state of Liberty.
There's only two sides to this issue. Fight or surrender.
Go read this. This is the cost of surrender.
http://www.politicalforum.com/gun-control/392387-never-surrender.html

 

Our forefathers came to America to escape government tyranny. They wrote the bill off rights to limit government over reach.

 

It is certainly a balancing act like almost all laws. I guess in the longer run it will be up to society to decide the balance between innocent lives lost from gun violence and the possible improper confiscation of some guns in cases e the law is not properly applied or defined.

 

If it was just a balancing act in which a few honest mistakes are made, then that is understandable and resolvable. But when the laws are deliberately "unbalanced" to act as a broad firearm confiscation program, then that's something to be strenuously opposed.

 

There are usually more than two sides to everything, except a coin and a politician, both are inexorably two-faced.


Your Bill of Rights is a good invention. I think I understand that the clauses appear as a form of negotiated outcome during the creation of the Constitution but I'll be educated on that. I only have a faint understanding of the debates. Anyway, as I said, a good invention. I can read each clause and link it to what was happening in Britain at the time immediately prior to the War of Independence/Revolutionary War. The average Brit under King George III's government could have done with a bill of rights.


Is it tyranny for the state to have superior firepower? I'm not referring to the military, that's a given. If you're referring to the firepower that lies with the police then remember that the US, possibly more than any other nation, has highly localised policing which, theoretically, is responsive to local needs. I can't think of any other nation that elects its senior local law enforcement official (Sheriff). Is that tyranny, to have your local law enforcement better armed than the local crooks? When it's the other way things can get nasty in a real hurry (refer North Hollywood shootout).


The police go after crooks as well as less habitual lawbreakers, I know you know that. It's not an either-or. If firearms control laws are passed by the usual means and the law stands the constitutional test then that means law-abiding citizens, by definition, will obey those laws. And they do. When we had our two (ridiculous) gun buybacks here in Australia there were no bloodbaths, no seiges, no shoot-outs. Law-abiding gun owners, some admittedly a bit grumpy, not that I blame them, lined up to surrender their formally legal, now illegal, weapons to be compensated for the loss.


This is where you see the stark difference between the attitudes of crooks and those of decent people. The crooks had no need or motivation to surrender their illegal weapons. As crooks they actually break the law, whatever it is. The decent people complained but complied. I was totally opposed to both gun buybacks even though they didn't affect me. I'd sold my slide-action shotgun and my Colt Diamondback some years before when I had no use for them. But the buyback still irked me because it was stupid, populist politics. I wouldn't call it tyranny though, although others, of course are free to do so.


On the reference to the Bakersfield murder in the article in the thread you linked to. I suggest you read Joe Wambaugh's "The Onion Field". The thesis is that the LAPD drove the surviving cop to a mental breakdown because it blamed him for what happened. There's a paragraph in the book where Wambaugh describes the feelings of a "red-faced Irish cop" towards what was happening and the injustice of the LAPD management towards the survivor. The "red-faced Irish cop" is Wambaugh himself and the LAPD reaction was one of the things that made him want to write. Just an aside, but worth bearing in mind when reading the link to the item on the issueof surrender. The article itself has no authority, it's far too generalised and is basically taking on an impossible task to try to analyse the concept of surrender without it becoming a mere polemic - which it is.

 

Indeed. As I mentioned, the bill of rights didn't appear without a decent debate, but it was a good move. As for government tyranny. Too right it was. That tyranny didn't disappear in Britain until the early 20th Century and there's some that would love it back.

 

if tyranny should rear it's ugly head, and it will eventually as it does in all countries and cultures, you may wish differently, but will be unable to resist.
Did you read that section about not surrendering?

 

Yes I did.

 

outstanding. Now as you read about disarming or reducing any of our Rights, please bear in mind that once lost, it can never be retaken.
As you post, feel free to ask yourself, what have you surrendered?

 

If tyranny rears it's ugly head civilians will have Absolutly zero chance against our paid army. If you are really worried about government tyranny you should be fighting tooth and nail to return to a citizens army rather than a semi mercenary army backed up by paid contractors.

 

If we're still focused on registration then no right has been taken away. If you are telling me that everyone in a democracy (constitutional monarchy or republic) has to be on guard to ensure that our rights aren't traduced, then I agree entirely. I think where you and I part company is on the interpretation of a right. I think your position is that an imposition on a person that affects their right to lawfully own a firearm without conditions is an attack on that right. I don't agree with that position. My point is that to balance the right to lawfully own a firearm with the right to live free from harm then it might be necessary - necessary, not some sort of ideological position - to impose regulation on the lawful ownership of firearms. For me that isn't surrendering, it's accepting a necessity.

And yes, I do realise that incremental intrusions on rights need to be carefully scrutinised. That's why we can boot out governments that go too far.