This is sort of trite but this welfare queen crybaby running his mouth after this **** happened in his state is just beyond the pale, so I got to:

renodoc, are you claiming that totalitarian genocidal dictators would've been stopped by THE LAW? My understanding was that criminals and bad people are completely unconstrained by writing down legal words, but like, the law would've stopped Pol Pot?

Is weird how Pol Pot can stop people from having guns by making them illegal even though we know outlawing guns doesn't stop people from getting guns.

step 1: spend time and money acquiring firearms
step 2: wait until the army or police come to my house to take me to one of the camps
step 3: shoot at a cop or US soldier as large group of them kills me immediately

wow thanks. definitely worth it.

Quickest way to go

Yeah, people have a strange romantic notion of essentially becoming terrorists.

Good call. Not turning people into ICE causes men to go on murdering sprees. Might as well blame homosexuality and lax women while you're at it.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...hooting-inhofe

LOL! Guns don't kill people, sanctuary cities kill people!

Inhofe might be the worst Senator in Congress. For those who may not recall the name, he's the one who chessmated climate change by throwing a snowball on the Senate floor.

This is the kind of history lesson we usually got in p7 even though reno wasn't from there.

why do both sides of the gun debate insist on ignoring the integral "militia" aspect of 2A?


I get it that it's currently mostly yokel larpers decked out in camo that are the popularized face of private security organization. Why does this have to be the case, though?

right, that word is dangerously arbitrary and exploitable

any regime, no matter how unjust, could consider its violent opposition to be "terrorist"

Right wing ignores it because they think guns are an individual right. If they admit the militia part is vital, they admit the 2nd amendment is no longer needed. The left ignores it because it's outmoded.

A militia was needed in the infancy of this country because we had no standing army and if we were attacked, the citizens would have to come together to defend the country. Once we had an army (and the other branches), a militia was no longer needed.

it's bonkers to me how all you guys are so quick to besmirch the police, but then you turn around and demand that they are our only legitimate recourse for personal security

are state militias allowed to own anti-aircraft firearms? cause if not they're useless in any attempt to fight any kind of military. they're drone targets. another huge waste of time

The right to self-defense, defending your community from crime, violent revolution, and sport are all completely separate. The violent revolution one is the only one that should have a problem with even fairly strict gun control.

you cannot always wait around for the army or the police

even assuming they are actually on your side

What do you envision a 2nd ammendment certified militia should look like in 2017?

I think most liberals ignore it because no right winger ever stops at justifications for a well armed militia. If they do then they connect it to individual gun ownership and the right to carry.

If someone wanted to say that there should be some kind of organized militia that kept all their guns locked up and only took them out to practice and/or in case of totalitarianism then that'd be a way different conversation than is had 99% of the time.

i think bad police shouldn't be allowed to be police but good police are good. i think they should all get more conflict resolution training than gun range training.

renata already pointed out the durability of asymmetrical insurgencies


when you ask about what's "allowed", you kind of beg the question of gun control to begin with: we can't allow guns, because it is useless, because we don't allow guns

this should be the substance of the gun control debate


I don't have a ready-to-implement proposal

Matt Yglesias made probably the most coherent argument in this regard on the most recent episode of the Weeds. Paraphrasing: there are lots of vices (sugar, alcohol, drugs) where we seem willing to balance people's desire to consume those things with the potential harm. You don't see a lot of calls for outright bans on sugar, even though it would probably save/extend many lives. And obviously prohibition was a disaster. But many liberals aren't willing to accept that there's any consumptive value to owning/using guns, so they don't entertain the same kind of balance.

Ezra Klein kind of laughed that argument off.

I understand Matt's argument, and I probably fall in the camp that he's criticizing - I'm not a gun person and I'd be perfectly fine if all guns were banned. But I am a beer guy and I'd be super pissed if they passed prohibition again.

yes. the conversation isn't going anywhere - so let's change it.

If we could go back to no standing army some of this makes sense. The founders didn't want a standing army.