lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
You do get that they direction they want to go in is to lead to a place where the 2nd amendment is either repealed, or made meaningless
It's been meaningless for about ten years now, since it became okay to just ignore the first half of it.
The first half has never meant what gun control advocates have claimed it meant. It didn't change. The ruling by the Court merely informed those people that, no, that's not what the 2nd amendment means. "Well regulated militia" never meant "government run military". A militia, somewhat by definition, is formed from a pool of private citizens and *not* on-duty soldiers. You can't have a militia if you don't first have armed civilians. Otherwise we call them "conscripts" (or, I suppose, "volunteers"). The key difference is that a military is made up of people who join the military and come directly under military chain of command. A militia is made up of people who form up on their own, usually with their own weapons, who may then choose to fight along side the regular military in time of need, or even, in the case of our War for Independence, fight
against the standing military if they disagree with the government's rule.
That was the entire point of writing the 2nd amendment that way. You know this. You're just pretending not to.
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gbaji wrote:
If they ban the bump stocks, they will decrease the likelihood of more shootings like this
So it isn't so much about saving lives as it is about an "unacceptably" high body count.
Decreasing the body count is about saving lives. Those two are not in opposition at all. Our gun laws have long outlawed weapons capable of extremely high rate of fire for civilian use (ie: fully automatic weapons, enabling multiple shots to be fired with a single pull of the trigger). The bump stock allows for that rate of fire, and is only legal because of a loophole, since it's not technically a modification of the firearm itself. The firearm isn't allowing more than one shot per pull of the trigger. The bump stock allows the user to use the weapons recoil to cause the trigger to repeatedly "bump" against the trigger finger to enable a fully automatic rate of fire.
Which is a distinction without any real difference.
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Okay, now we're getting somewhere. What is the acceptable number of victims then?
There is no "acceptable number of victims". That's an absurd argument. The issue is over the methodology, and whether that methodology is or should be legal. 50 victims killed by running them over with a truck isn't an "acceptable number" either, yet I don't think anyone's talking about making trucks illegal, right?
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Has to be over a fifty, since "you" didn't care enough after Miami to propose banning bump stocks. Or, any proposal really.
I didn't propose banning bump stocks after Miami because a bump stock was not used in that shooting. I also didn't propose banning a whole list of other things that also were not used in that shooting. I'm not sure what point you think you're making here.
"or any proposal really" is because the weapon used in that shooting was a normal semi-automatic rifle. You can't ban that without getting us into the same silliness that the assault weapons ban had. There's no way to define a set of banned weapons that would be sufficient to prevent a shooter from doing what he did in that case, without defining it so broadly as to run afoul of the 2nd amendment.
The death toll was so high in that case due to the environment of the shooting, not the weapon used. He could probably have killed just as many people using a pair of pistols rather than a rifle and a pistol (actually, might have been more effective in a close environment like that). He killed so many people, not because he had a weapon that had a super high rate of fire, or because it was super powerful, or anything, but because his victims could not escape. Those who could were out of the club in the first minute or two after he started shooting.
And that's ultimately the issue with shootings like this. The gun control folks want to ban the gun, but it's not that specific gun, with that specific set of capabilities that caused the death toll to be what it was. The Sandyhook shooting would have been just as deadly regardless of the specific firearms used. Same in this case. To prevent shootings like that with gun regulation would require regulations so broad that they could not pass constitutional muster. I get that many people want that not to be the case, but wanting it doesn't make it true.
This most recent shooting is the rare example where what he used did make a difference. But it wasn't about the rifles, it was about the bump stocks that allowed him to rain down a massive amount of fire into a large crowd in a relatively short amount of time. So yeah, in this case, the correct response is to ban the thing that made that possible. And that was the bump stock.
It's not like this is difficult logic or anything.