How a Democratic House will affect gun rights

Mass confiscations just dont happen in democracies.

 

And if we lived in a democracy I wouldn't be worried.

 

That's a debate for another forum. But these fears of large scale confiscations are overblown

 

If I am wrong I still have my guns and you still have free speech.
If you are wrong I have nothing and you have nothing.
How do we handle the decision?

 

You could say the same thing for the dozen other ways you are registered with the government. And yet you freely register yourself with the government all the time

 

True again. I served in the military. I am registered to vote. I have a drivers license. I have a SSN. I have my car licensed. The government knows my bank account number and my credit card number. I don't see Uncle Sam coming for those items. If he did and I had guns I could protect myself from unreasonable search and seizure. Maybe I'm paranoid but to use an old military term, I see my arms as a last line of defense.

What actual good do you see coming from documenting and registering guns and their owners? Do you really think it will reduce over all crime, murder and suicide? Or will it just burden honest gun owners with additional time, money and paperwork?

 

No rich. What they could come for is you...like they did for Japanese Americans except they wont need census data like they did last time.

I believe registration could save lives

 

It's interesting that gun ownership has traditionally gone hand in hand with gun control under Anglo-American law. People were comfortable with their guns being regulated. They didn't think that gun control was the path to a complete ban on all guns.

"Although gun rights advocates have conjured up a right to peaceable armed travel, such a right would have been incoherent under English law: traveling with offensive weapons in public was by its very nature an affront to the King’s Peace. After the American Revolution, such actions continued to be an affront to the peace and could be punished by disarmament and fine....

"One of the many historical ironies of the Heller decision is that it affords the greatest protection to handguns, the modern heirs of Alexander Hamilton’s dueling pistols, and not the military style arms that would have been the main weapon of the eighteenth-century well-regulated militia inscribed in the Second Amendment.....

"Pistols in the age of the Second Amendment constituted no more than 10 percent of the weapons stock owned by Americans. Moreover, they were generally not very reliable. It was not until the market revolution of the nineteenth century, with some assistance from the marketing genius of Yankee entrepreneurs such as Samuel Colt, that handguns became both plentiful and deadly.....

"It does seem a bit odd that modern American jurists, including a diehard originalist like Scalia, would take their moral and legal cues from slave-owning judges in the antebellum South, but that is the world Heller has bequeathed to us.... Outside of the slave South, a different, more restrictive tradition regarding the conveyance of arms in public took hold. Starting with Massachusetts in the 1790s, this tradition, which became the dominant model in nineteenth-century America, limited armed travel to those cases where one faced an imminent danger. In other words, the idea that one had to have a good cause to be armed in public is as old as the Founding era.

"In Heller, Scalia dismissed the idea that courts ought to engage in a form of ad hoc interest-balancing to arrive at a reasonable trade-off between public safety and the rights of gun owners. The problem with Scalia’s argument is that both common law and the Second Amendment itself affirmed such an approach. The right of individuals to arm themselves under common law was always balanced against the need to preserve the peace. The Second Amendment itself reminds us that the right to keep and bear arms must serve the goal of preserving a free state. The havoc wrought by gun violence saps the vitality of a free state. And in the wake of the mass carnage in Las Vegas, even ardent gun advocates would be hard pressed to plausibly contend that our current balance is what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment."
https://thebaffler.com/latest/gun-anarchy-and-the-unfree-state

 

And if they come for me and I don't have a gun then what? Do I just go quietly?

What actual good do you see coming from documenting and registering guns and their owners?
How do you see it working? How will it save lives? How many lives? Do lives have a top limit on value? Is it worth it if it only saves one life?

 

If you have a gun and use it you are soon going to be dead. Your only hope in such a situation is to go into hiding.

I am off to bed rich

 

Have a good night Vegas.

 

Appears you edited that rather quickly. Didn't even give me a chance to comment on guns in 14th century England.

 

Why should someone feel particularly motivated to be in support of something that has proven to be an abject failure, and incapable of doing what it was sold as capable of doing?

 

Who was it that advocated using nuclear weapons against firearm owners who did not surrender their legally owned property?

 

Except such is not actually the case. This supposed "recognition" mentioned in the Heller ruling was actually made under duress, due to the admitted meddling of John Stevens during his tenure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/us/politics/john-paul-stevens-memoir.html

On the phone, he singled out three decisions as grave errors, noting that he had dissented in all of them. The first was District of Columbia v. Heller, the 5-to-4 ruling in 2008 that recognized an individual Second Amendment right to own guns.

“The combination of its actual practical impact by increasing the use of guns in the country and also the legal reasoning, which I thought was totally unpersuasive,” he said, “persuaded me that the case is just about as bad as any in my tenure.”

He said he had taken an extraordinary step in trying to head off the decision. Five weeks before Justice Antonin Scalia circulated his draft opinion for the majority, Justice Stevens sent around a draft of what he called his probable dissent. He said he could not recall ever having done anything like that.

“I thought I should give it every effort to switch the case before it was too late,” he said.

The effort failed. But Justice Stevens wrote that he helped persuade Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was in the majority, to ask for “some important changes” to Justice Scalia’s opinion. A passage in the opinion, which Justice Scalia had plainly added to secure a fifth vote, said the decision “should not be taken to cast doubt” on many kinds of gun control laws.

 

All of which is irrelevant and immaterial now, as the Heller ruling has been made, as well as the more recent McDonald and Caetano rulings, which reimburse and reaffirm the established precedent. Even if the Heller ruling is wrong, it is not going anywhere, and no amount of complaining is going to change such.

 

Yes Scalia knew the importance of gun control

 

This is suppoeted by the fact the anti-gun left will never tell us what level of gun control is "enough" - it only speaks in terms of "more".

 

Enough is when it is done and all privately owned firearms are banned and those used by law enforcement are strictly controlled.

 

"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those 'in common use at the time' finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons."
- D.C. v. Heller

Yes, the federal government can pass and enforce gun laws in order to protect the security of a free state.

 

The left seeks a state monopoly on force; this cannot happen so long as the citizenry remains armed.
Thus, the 2nd Amendment and the reason the left hates it.

 

Can they pass laws without limits?

 

All due to the meddling actions of John Stevens, as he has himself admitted to such.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/us/politics/john-paul-stevens-memoir.html

On the phone, he singled out three decisions as grave errors, noting that he had dissented in all of them. The first was District of Columbia v. Heller, the 5-to-4 ruling in 2008 that recognized an individual Second Amendment right to own guns.

“The combination of its actual practical impact by increasing the use of guns in the country and also the legal reasoning, which I thought was totally unpersuasive,” he said, “persuaded me that the case is just about as bad as any in my tenure.”

He said he had taken an extraordinary step in trying to head off the decision. Five weeks before Justice Antonin Scalia circulated his draft opinion for the majority, Justice Stevens sent around a draft of what he called his probable dissent. He said he could not recall ever having done anything like that.

“I thought I should give it every effort to switch the case before it was too late,” he said.

The effort failed. But Justice Stevens wrote that he helped persuade Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was in the majority, to ask for “some important changes” to Justice Scalia’s opinion. A passage in the opinion, which Justice Scalia had plainly added to secure a fifth vote, said the decision “should not be taken to cast doubt” on many kinds of gun control laws.

 

These guys hare your first sentence. Lol

 

true, the neighbors will take them out first. I live on the top of a hill with a long driveway. One of the neighbors at the bottom is a retired Green Beret. The other guy was a Marine in the first Gulf war.