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> No its not, if you have said experience then it should be damn easy to certify and re certify, you know for saftey and all that jazz.

Just because I can easily do it, doesn't mean I want to spend my time, and my life, going over the basics of using weapons all over again. I don't accept that we need to have a registration or certification process as a prerequisite to self-defense.

The right to self defense, and the requirement to self defense far predates the 2nd amendment. http://www.guncite.com/journal...

If bows, swords, clubs and knives didn't require certification and licensing, why should they now? Sure, training is important, but that should be at the option of the wielder, not enforced by a government in order to control citizenry.

> Just because you may have fired thousands of rounds does not mean that you understand all of the different types of guns.

Wrong. I have been trained in fully automatic heavy crew served weapons, grenade launchers, light machine guns of several types, handguns of several types, shotguns, and rifles.

> I mean if someone has driven an automatic for thousands and thousands of miles do they automatically know how to drive a standard? and while keeping on that analogy, how many people get lazy and over confident in their driving and end up being really unsafe drivers?

This is a bad analogy for those of us with military & police backgrounds, as we are qualified with several rifles and handguns, over many years, on a regular basis. The more combat arms oriented roles include not only above, but also foreign weaponry. As NATO members we do cross-training with our partners and it is common for militaries working joint exercises to qualify each other on their weaponry.

The founders of this nation distrusted standing armies, viewing them as inherent threats to liberty. The Second Amendment was primarily established as a way to secure the ability of the People to defend their Nation. The burning of the Capitol in 1814 might well have heralded the death of the civilian militia: the defenders, though vastly more numerous, were unarmed or poorly armed, and completely failed to impede the British Army. Even before the War of 1812, with the purchase of the original six frigates of the United States Navy, we turned away from the path of the citizen militia, and since then we have gone so far away from the ideals of our founding as to have amassed the largest and most expensive defensive force that the world has ever seen.

There have been a handful of examples where the U.S. Military has been used against its own citizens, but overall the threat to (domestic) liberty has been negligible, although the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII could be an important exception to the rule. The Founders' fears of standing armies were completely mistaken -- or were they?

Until the middle of the 19th Century, guns were expensive, time-consuming to maintain and to fire, and police forces when they existed at all were armed with swords and clubs. During the middle of the 19th Century, however, we see a great shift in American society and culture. The Civil War spread both arms and conflict, and men like Samuel Colt both popularized and enabled gun ownership on a wide scale. It was (as far as I am aware) during this era that police forces were instituted -- and armed.

Today we have a national crisis. The country resounds with gunfire, and daily we hear of new atrocities, of acts of brutality, and of ever-greater police powers. I believe that we have taken the idea of the citizen soldier to its ultimate bloody conclusion, and that we must disband this hostile Army which has set itself over us. I believe we also have a duty to disband the Gun Culture or perhaps even to disarm ourselves as well, given the failure of the purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the examples of other countries around the globe. We have badly strayed from our founding principles. We have a new Civil War which is escalating daily. We need to drastically revise our society, starting with our Police.

http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndpu...

Original Intent and Purpose of the Second Amendment:
http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndpu...

The Meaning of the Words in the Second Amendment
http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndme...

Original Intent and Purpose of the Second Amendment:
http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndpu...

The Meaning of the Words in the Second Amendment
http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndme...

I'm going to hope that this is just an unintentional lack of knowledge on your end. If you're actually open to reading facts, please keep reading. Otherwise, feel free to ignore this.

First, in response to the comment about people that keep "shooting up schools and other public places with automatic weapons." This is incorrect. The phrase "automatic weapon" refers to a weapon that can discharge more than one projectile due to a single action (pulling a trigger or actuating some other mechanism). As far as crimes with automatic weapons go, they are so low as to be lost in the underflow of the number of other assaults. In 1934, the National Firearms Act regulated automatic weapons, suppressors, short barreled rifles and shotguns, and "other weapons". Since that date, you have to pay a $200 tax just to be allowed to purchase the weapon. You also have to undergo a background check even more thorough than most class 3 Federal Firearms Dealers. The automatic weapon must be registered and kept at a known location at all times, and the Feds can knock on your door at any time of the day or night and demand that you produce that weapon immediately for their inspection. If you can't, it's a federal felony.

Since 1934, there have been 2 murders committed with registered automatic weapons. As far as unregistered automatic weapons go, numbers vary, but are again so low as to be statistically insignificant. According to GunCite ( http://www.guncite.com/gun_con... ), 4 police officers were killed between 1983 and 1992. And even when targeting groups that are thought to have large numbers of automatic weapons, virtually none of the firearms recovered in raids on drug houses, gangs, and so on were automatic. For all intents and purposes, automatic weapons are not used in crime.

And, since 1986 when the NFA was amended, only automatic weapons made before that date are now available for purchase by the public. This amendment ended out pricing most automatic weapons out of the reach of the standard consumer, and for those that do buy them, they're usually purchased as investments not, not with the intent to shoot them.

As far as the second half of your comment goes, I'm going to assume you're talking about so called "assault weapons", or what are more accurately termed modern sporting rifles (MSRs). And when people think of an MSR, they think generally of an AR-15 variant (go Google what the AR in AR-15 stands for. Hint: it does NOT stand for Automatic Rifle). What is so bad about them?

1: You say "their only real purpose seems to be for killing lots of people efficiently." First, the caliber of most AR-15 variants (5.56x45 NATO, or .223 Remington (and yes, the specs are not completely equivalent between those to calibers, but for the sake of argument, we'll assume they are)) is small enough (and fast enough) that the rounds tend to not do all that much damage to a man-sized target. In fact, in many states, it's illegal to hunt deer with a .223, as it's likely to only wound and not kill it. So, no, an AR-15 is not a particularly efficient killing machine. If you don't believe me on this, go find an Iraq/Afghanistan vet. If they're willing to talk to you about their experiences, ask them about how effective the M-4 was at killing the enemy. Or use Google. The stories are out there. The only reason the US Military uses 5.56x45 instead of 7.62x54 (the old .308 Springfield cartridge that got your (great)grandfather through World War II) is that you can carry 70% more 5.56 than you can 7.62 for the same weight and size of package.

2: Because the AR-15 platform is so modular, my wife and I can shoot the same rifle. My arms are a little shorter than hers. I can adjust the stock. Because it has a pistol grip, I can hold it more comfortably. If you take a look at the definition of an assault rifle from the 1994 US ban, it involved a rifle that could accept a detachable

The Kellerman study was badly and tendentiously designed.

The worst flaw: that study only counted uses of a firearm that resulted in a dead body. If some guy kicked in the front door of a home, and the woman inside pointed a gun at him and he left, then Kellerman's study would not count that as a "use" of a firearm. Because most defensive uses of a firearm do not result in the weapon being fired, let alone anyone dying, this structurally stacked the deck against defensive gun uses.

That study also lumps in suicides with homicides. I have not seen any honest study that shows that a gun in the home causes an increase in the suicide rate.

The study started with people killed by firearms, which meant there was a 100% chance of a firearm being present, but then guessed whether there was a firearm in the home of a "matching" person. We have no way of knowing how many of the "guesses" were correct, and each case where they guessed wrong would lower their result. We literally cannot put error bars on the result.

Kellerman's own data showed much higher correlations: having an adult in the home who has a previous felony conviction for a violent crime is a much better predictor of the chance of violence.

There are plenty of articles on the flaws in the Kellerman study.

http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kellerman-schaffer.html

http://guncite.com/gun-control-kellermann-3times.html

Professor Gary Kleck's research shows that firearms are used effectively for defensive purposes many times per year.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/defensive-gun-ownership-gary-kleck-response-115082

And I just posted links showing that the number of shootings (both accidental and intentional) has dramatically fallen at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA has dramatically risen. If the Kellerman study's conclusions were accurate, the number of shootings should have risen when the number of guns rose so much.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8501517&cid=51151345

It is a mistake to base any decisions on dishonest research.

You do realize you just found an article by Kellermann, right? His findings have been widely discredited. See http://www.guncite.com/gun-con... . And note that "owns a gun and was killed at home" does *not* mean was killed with the gun from the home, and that "killed at home" is only a small portion of all homicides. He also failed to control for being a drug dealer or gang member, which are associated with both being killed at home and owning guns.

Victims are harmless, armed or not; you take them by surprise and you take them down. If they have weapons, you take them away before they can use them--this is hilariously easy when you attack someone and they turn out to have a firearm. A knife is actually more of a difficult proposition.

Citations, please. You have stated as fact that nobody ever successfully uses a firearm to prevent a violent attack, and that a knife is more likely to work for this purpose.

There is solid research estimating that firearms are used in the USA about two million times each year to prevent a violent crime. Most of these "defensive gun uses" do not involve anyone being killed or even anyone firing the gun; the defender deterred the assailant just by having a gun.

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

If you think a knife is a better defensive weapon, please read through this discussion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/knives/comments/3alo5f/why_is_a_knife_for_self_defence_a_bad_idea/

A society of armed loners who only care about themselves is a society of targets.

You seem to be arguing that the average person is a sociopath who is willing to just watch others be hurt.

I suggest to you that a larger problem is that the majority of people have no idea how to handle a violent situation. The news media, and many of our celebrities, push a meme that ordinary people should never be armed for self-defense, and by extension shouldn't even train for self-defense. The same people who would like to ban all firearms in civilian hands would tell you that people shouldn't fight back against assailants; they should let the police handle the situation. (As the old saying goes, though, "When seconds count, the police are just minutes away!" There is no guarantee that the police will arrive in time to save lives.)

If a person is totally untrained, and suddenly face to face with horrible violence, it is unlikely that the person will swiftly and decisively come up with a plan to counter-attack and take out the assailant. I don't blame the victims the way you seem to, but I do wish more people would train in self-defense.

I agree with Larry Correia: our society would achieve a net reduction in violence if more people got trained in the use of weapons for defense, and more people carried concealed firearms.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/

P.S. I once, in an online discussion, commented that if people shouldn't defend themselves but rather should rely purely on the police to protect them, maybe people shouldn't have fire extinguishers in their homes and should rely purely on the fire department to protect them. A person I was debating agreed with this proposition. I didn't agree with her but I give her props for intellectual consistency.

However, it seems reasonable that in a population of 320 million, there would be a few hundred who truly are dangerous, for whom there is enough evidence that _I_ wouldn't want to be on a plane with them.

I think that's a lot like firearms though. As something of a philosophical point, if you're unable to trust somebody with a firearm, shouldn't they be in some sort of protective custody/supervision, at the least? I mean, I can probably kill more people with a 5 gallon can of gasoline than I can with a pistol.

That being said, we also can't afford to lock up everybody, so I think we need to take a long hard look at our country and what we're doing to generate dangerous people. The first one that comes to my mind is our very justice system. Studies have shown that the majority of murderers have criminal records, often extensive ones, BEFORE they commit their murder. At least one study found that 54% of defendents had at least 1 felony conviction, and 81% had been arrested before. Alternatively, your best DEFENSE to being murdered, in the USA, is pretty simple: Don't be a criminal or associate with them. The average prior criminal record for a murder victim is only slightly less than the killer.

This is false. Violent crime is on a downward trend in the UK.

Not false; you just can't seem to understand simple statements. The original claim is: "in the decades since England banned guns, violent crime has gotten much worse."

The big gun ban in the UK was passed in 1968. Violent crime has risen greatly since the ban. Another law was passed in 1988, and crime continued to increase. Violence in the UK peaked a few years ago and is on a downward trend now, but no gun bans have been passed recently. Conclusion: it would be stupid to claim that gun bans caused a decrease in crime in the UK... correlation does not prove causation, and you don't even have correlation on your side.

Look at the graphs in the link you yourself posted: do you seriously want to claim that this shows that crime went down after the gun control law was passed in 1968?

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/13/violent-sexual-crime-statistics-england-wales-2013

You are arguing that the USA is more violent than the UK for cultural reasons

Yes... maybe you can understand simple sentences?

and yet you think the answer is to make lethal weapons more available in this violent society. That doesn't make sense at all.

Nope, false alarm, you aren't tracking after all.

Let's try again. The bad guys will be armed no matter what you do. We can't even stop druggies from buying drugs every week, hell, maybe every few days. Unless you can wipe all drugs from the streets, I'll never believe that you can get all the guns off the streets. Thus, the bad guys will be armed.

So yes, I think "the answer" as you put it is to let the law-abiding have guns as well. I would hate to see the bad guys armed and the good guys disarmed and helpless.

Citizens with legal firearms use them defensively up to two million times per year, usually with nobody even harmed. Do you want the crimes that were prevented by this to occur? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

Ban guns, or at least put restrictions on where they can be carried and how they must be stored and you will at least see several hundred fewer people being shot accidentally each year.

According to this link, accidental gun deaths are at an all-time low. The most recent year in this paper, 2001, had only 800 accidental firearms deaths; cars are 51 times more likely to kill you accidentally than firearms.

So let's ban cars, yeah? Or at least make it much harder to get them and drive them, yeah?

Swimming pool accidents are also much more likely to kill you than firearms accidents. You want to ban swimming pools? No-one really "needs" a swimming pool.

Okay, you asked for a citation and here it is. From GunCite.

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

The citation does not specify your first argument - that there are good odds that your gun will be 'grabbed and used against you'.
Second, it uses a disingenuous definition for a defensive use of a firearm - requiring not only that it be fired, but that it hit the suspect to be considered a defensive use. We already know that the vast majority of defensive firearm use doesn't involve shooting, thus the actual numbers are far higher.
Third, it included the illegal possession of guns - having a felon in the house is far more indicative of violence than a firearm.

Why, when analyzing the 2nd Amendment, do these so-called "scholars" mince commas and words explicitly in the text as written in the Constitution to derive the intent of the authors?

Why do they not read the Federalist papers, in which the founding fathers mention an individual right numerous times? (28, 29, 46, which I won't quote because you can find a much better summary here.)

Why do they not read the state constitutions written around the time, that reflect, in similar language, also an individual right?

1776 Pennsylvania: That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination, to, and governed by, the civil power.

1777 Vermont: That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State -- and as standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power.

1792 Kentucky: That the right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.

See the entire timeline here.

Listen, I get it. Stevens wants to amend the Constitution to revoke the explicit ordained right to possess firearms. Why lie about it and claim that it was never intended for individual protection?

But the what study indicates that the presence of the guns is the cause for that?

There are several. A famous one is the Kleck study. There's also the 1994 report prepared by the US Department of Justice. Instead of asking rhetorical questions, why not actually Google this issue and see what you find.

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/165476.pdf

There is no evidence that gun possession is a net positive and while there's plenty of evidence that fewer firearms means fewer homicides internationally, there's no evidence that taking the guns away would solve America's violence problem, either.

The first two points are incorrect, but I agree with the third point.

Remember, we live in a world where people get shot, or stabbed, or clubbed, or stomped, or beaten to death with fists. And most times an armed citizen is able to defend him/her self with a gun, nobody gets shot. The bad guy stops the attack, the cops take the bad guy away, nobody dead. This suggests a possible mechanism by which legal firearms lower the homicide rate.

The people who want to ban all firearms lie about firearms, all the time. One of the lies is that allowing ordinary people to own and carry guns will increase the murder rate, when the evidence is clear that it does the opposite.

There are many places in the USA (and in the world) where guns were banned and violent crime rates increased. Correlation does not prove causation... maybe the guns were banned due to the increases in crime, and the gun bans failed to stop the increases? But there are absolutely no places where guns were banned and violent crime went down.

England had a low murder rate. Then England banned guns. Then England had a low murder rate. (And then the murder rate increased in England...) There is absolutely no evidence that banning guns reduced violence in England.

People will tell you that more people are shot in the USA than in England. However, more people are beaten to death by fists in the USA than are murdered by all causes combined in England.

Banning guns does not lower violent crime.

I'm a firm believer in individual gun rights, and therefore I am most assuredly not speaking against our shared core beliefs on this topic, but I believe that historical accuracy is critical when discussing these matters. The term "well regulated" does not imply a standing army. Instead, in the context of the language of the period, it means "disciplined" or "well trained."

Whether or not you're safer with a gun in the home is controversial and heavily written about, the risks of being shot by your gun vs the likelihood of you shooting a would-be-attacker. I don't have an opinion on the subject as I'm not prepared to wade into the literature, but it seems like this tech would avoid the chance of the former while still giving you the chance at the latter.

I'm not disagreeing with your post, quite the opposite. I just want to point out that the Kellerman study (which you allude to) that claimed a gun was 2.7 times more likely to be used against a resident of the house than against a non resident was horribly flawed.

The claim of the paper was that people who have a firearm in the home are more likely to die from their own guns. Don Kates proved that most of the victims in the study were shot by guns from outside the home, which makes the presence of the homeowner's gun independent of the death.
Kellerman also "proved" X -> Y, using data that actually proves Y -> X, by introducing a selection bias. Most of the victims in the study regularly engaged in criminal behavior. Criminals have a much higher probability of meeting a violent death, so murder victims are predominantly criminals, or their friends, family, or other associates. Criminals are also more likely to have guns in the home (which is strange given that it's illegal...).
What the study actually showed was a high correlation between being a murder victim and having a gun in the home. It did not sample gun owning households at random and determine how many suffered a shooting with a gun from that household.
Some Data

His and your assertions that having a firearm makes you less safe lies in the face of empirical evidence.

just enact reasonable measure to ensure only appropriate guns are available for appropriate means

and then what ends up happening is every few years, they decide to change what constitutes "appropriate" until nothing is appropriate.

the anti-gun agenda is total disarmament, full stop, end of discussion. that may not be your personal opinion or goal, but it IS the goal you are being used for.

open your eyes

From the same web site you cited: http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_bellesiles.html Seems your expert is not very well respected...

Are hunting and target practice really the intended purposes of guns? Let me argue against it from the litmus test of scarcity. One way to consider scarcity is assuming the price is high. In face of scarcity, the intended purpose of the good is the use that extracts the most utility from it. For the test to work, let's also not consider people who collect the good with no intention to extract utility because there is no purpose without utility.

Suppose a gun costs $100,000 and each bullet $100 to make in today's currency. You are definitely not going to use it for target practice. Even using it for hunting is elusive. The only remaining use that extracts utility is when you use it as a weapon, either for the purpose of self-defense where the opportunity cost is to lose personal property if you don't use the weapon, or for aggression where the weapon serves to extract more utility wrongfully from other individuals.

Applying the same test to other items you mentioned, you will quickly see that your argument holds no water.

Radio controlled airplane that costs $100,000 each are still useful for exploration and surveying places that are hard to reach, or for rescue missions where the recovery of human lives outweighs the cost. You don't use it fly bombs into a building because there are cheaper ways to bomb, not to mention the bombing would destruct the plane. The target must worth the $100,000 if you were to do that and there are no cheaper alternatives.

If a kite costs $100,000, then you could still use it to carry a scientific instrument, for example weather observation. Reaching high places is also useful for surveillance purpose.

If an accordion costs $100,000, then your neighbor should better be a good accordionist, with the intended purpose to make more music using this prized accordion. Again, we do not consider collectors who do not intend to extract utility from the accordion.

Why am I using scarcity as a litmus test for intended purpose? That's because if a good is "free good" then you are free to use it for anything ridiculous. Using guns for target practice and hunting is a result that firearms have become so affordable that they are basically free goods, so you cannot argue that target practice and hunting are the intended purposes of guns.

You might also be interested to take a look at this interview with Bellesiles who did some research of historical gun ownership. He likened the cost of gun in the 18th century to buying a Lamborghini today, so my figure of $100,000 isn't actually too far fetched.

Yes, these laws/bans would almost be amusing (in a surreal way) if they didn't carry the threat of 10 years in federal prison.

Here's an example. The ATF has decided that on the AR-15 platform the lower receiver is considered the registered firearm. It is this part (less the pistol grip).

That means that all other components of an AR-15 are freely available: you only have to get a background check to buy the lower receiver from the FFL dealer. When you buy it, the lower receiver is legally designated on the form with its type (regular rifle, short-barreled rifle, pistol, AOW, etc).

The upper receiver on AR-15's (the rest of the firearm, less the stock) simply plugs into the lower receiver and is held in place with push pins.

Let's say you legally own this regular rifle and also owned this pistol (both normal, non-NFA firearms). Furthermore, let's say you decided to clean them both at the same time, and when you were done you accidentally plugged the pistol upper into the rifle lower.

Congratulations, you've just committed felony construction of a short-barreled rifle.

I can understand the ban on machine guns

Since the NFA became law in 1934 there have been approximately two (2) homicides that have been committed using a legally-owned machine gun. One of those was a police officer murdering his informant. There's no reason for the current ban on new machine gun production for civilians.

Please read the entire second amendment. It mentions the need for a "well regulated militia"

I don't think it means what you think it does.

There are roughly the same number of road deaths as gun deaths in the USA each year.

Annual motor vehicle traffic deaths: 33,687

Murders committed using a firearm, 2011: 67.7% * 14,612 = 9,892

Lowest estimate of number of defensive firearms uses per year: 108,000

Highest estimate of number of defensive firearms uses per year: 2,500,000

There are roughly the same number of road deaths as gun deaths in the USA each year.

Annual motor vehicle traffic deaths: 33,687

Murders committed using a firearm, 2011: 67.7% * 14,612 = 9,892

Lowest estimate of number of defensive firearms uses per year: 108,000

Highest estimate of number of defensive firearms uses per year: 2,500,000

one is the aforementioned fantasy of killing evil gang members or whatever. I'm going to dismiss this one, it's been argued to death and I think it's ridiculous so I'm not going to go any further with that.

In other words: "I don't have a cogent reply".

Perhaps you are too young to remember the LA riots, and the dramatic footage of gun battles with looters. Obviously that's an extreme and highly unlikely sort of event, and if shots are fired at all in a defensive situation (quite often showing a gun in enough to discourage an attacker) it's usually only a few. But preparing for the worst is a valid strategy.

More importantly, though, you're asking the question backward. It is not up to someone who wishes to own a "high capacity" magazine to justify his or her choice; it's up to those who want to stop him or her to demonstrate that having such an item is a threat to someone's rights and that a ban would be an effective and minimally-invasive counter to that threat.

but handguns are the biggest killers in the US by far and away.

Never, ever, has a handgun gotten up, pointed itself at someone, and pulled its own trigger. If handguns are "killers", so are cars (which are involved in far more deaths), knifes, axes, fists, gasoline...

It says right there in the second amendment: well regulated.

..which mean "well-trained and disciplined", not "subject to heavy legal regulation"; and it says that because such a militia is important, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. It does *NOT* say that the rights of some state-designated official militia shall not be infringed, it say the right of the people.

Here's some information on that concerning the militia acts of 1792 and current federal law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792
http://www.adl.org/mwd/faq4.asp

Note that the militia exists whether or not it has been called to duty. Simply by existing as an able-bodied male citizen, you are part of the "unorganized militia". (And note that by the definition of "well-regulated" at the time the Constitution was drafted, "unorganized" does not imply "not well-regulated".)

Correction: there are 240,000+ legal assault rifles (meaning: select fire rifles) in the US.

With a question like this, anecdotes are pretty much worthless, just a way of distracting people from thinking rationally about the real issues of risk and benefit. For every anecdote of somebody whose life or the life of a loved one was saved because a gun was in the house, there is another anecdote of somebody who died in an accidental shooting or shot a loved one by mistake.

No there aren't. There are about 20,000 accidental gun deaths per year. There are possibly 2 million defensive usages.

You wanted numbers, here you go. Decent numbers are anywhere from 800,000 to 2.5 million defensive usages in a year. Firearms prevent crime at a rate that utterly dwarfs all the killings, even including the racial and drug fueled violence in our inner cities.

The paper says that approximately 90% of murderers have felony records

Indeed, not only that, but in reading that paper I found that it was implied that victims are often criminals as well.

Searching the internet, I found several sites that are estimating a 60-90% figure as well for the victim normally having a felony background as well.

Matter of fact, the biggest variation I saw was 80-60 - 80% of suspects had felony arrest/conviction background, and 60% of victims did. Most had them about even at 70-70. Combined with the low rate of 'stranger murder', If you aren't a criminal and don't associate with criminals, you should be fine.

"A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

It's only one comma:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=144

http://www.guncite.com/second_amendment_commas.html

For some reason, I cannot get to this page while logged in... whatever...

Your views are all fine and good, but "machine guns" are just that: fully-automatic firearms. One pull of the trigger = continuous fire, until release of the trigger or an empty magazine. These fully-automatic rifles are also referred to as assault rifles, in the correct sense. There are semi-automatic variants of AK-47 rifles. Those are not machine guns, nor are they assault rifles. They function just the same as a semi-auto rifle designed for hunting, they just look different. One pull of the trigger = one bullet. So the fact that they look scary is a reason to ban them, label them with a false name, and fear them more than the "hunting" style of rifle? We should spread FUD and panic, simply because they look scary?

Almost no one has a fully-automatic assault rifle. They're extremely expensive, hard to find, require jumping through hoops with the BATFE, fees, extensive background checks, fingerprinting, and long waiting periods to get them. Machine guns, true assault weapons, are almost never used in crimes. (Though rappers surely want us to think otherwise...)

Let's get this terminology straight, and educate people about what truly is and is not an assault weapon and machine gun. A gun may have the same look and feel as a machine gun, but it certainly does not function the same way in the least.

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

Also, read the book More Guns Less Crime, by Professor John Lott.

Statistics aside, I have the moral right and duty to protect myself from unwarranted aggression. This right was recognized in the middle ages as existing independently of any government, and was codified in the English Bill of rights, which was one source of inspiration for our own Second Amendment. That a gun helps me in that effort is indisputable.

There is no actual evidence that this is true. It sounds pretty truthy, but where's the evidence?

There is plenty of evidence. What you should have said is that you have never seen it, not that it doesn't exist. A quick Google found this:

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

In reality-land there are plenty of weapons in the hands of people with no training. In reality land these well trained people with firearms live with people who aren't well trained, kids, and outright idiots.

Also, in reality land, most of those people with firearms take reasonable precautions to secure them. I don't even have children in my home, and I keep my firearms in a gun safe.

Not to mention the number of firearms stolen from well trained people now in the hands of the idiots the government would have refused to sell them to...

Did you just imply that we should take all the legal firearms away from law-abiding citizens to keep them out of the hands of "idiots"? I think you did! Tell me, on your planet are the streets completely free of all illegal drugs such as cocaine? If not, then why do you think that you can get all the guns off the streets? Disarming the law-abiding will not disarm the law-breakers.

The only people who were outraged were the people who had their houses identified as being "extra safe and secure". Funny that.

Good grief. If I posted your address along with information about valuable stuff inside your home, you'd be pretty outraged too. So why is it funny? What exactly do you think you just demonstrated?

And how is it that you can speak for all the readers of the newspaper? Some of the non-gun-permit people in the area might have been outraged.

You counter your own argument with some of those examples. We have ALL kinds of restrictions on cars. You need to pass tests, you need to renew a license to operate one, they are all registered to there owners, and you are even required to have insurance before it can leave your property. We are seeing graduated licensing introduced with additional restrictions on new drivers. And your permission to operate one can be revoked for all kinds of reasons.

And there are something like 20,000 to 30,000 laws on firearms already. There are restrictions on how you can transport them, who can buy them. Unlike cars, when you buy a firearm, the "instant check" system looks you up to make sure you aren't a felon or something.

http://keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?ID=2023

I was talking about outright banning of cars. Some people are proposing outright banning of firearms. Can you comprehend this simple idea?

If you think "gee, firearms ought to be heavily regulated" then great news! They already are! We're done!

If you think "gee, firearms ought to be banned" then I'm arguing that you are wrong.

But if all gun owners were all so well trained and conscientious America wouldn't be rubbing shoulders with 3rd world countries run by despots for its gun related violence statistics.

America is safer than those 3rd world countries. America is safer than Mexico, which has strict gun-control laws (there is only one gun store in all of Mexico that sells to civilians; it's so hard to get a legal gun that one is all they need... yet the drug gangs seem to have plenty of guns to kill people).

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/214667.php

I could show you numbers that demonstrate that areas with strict gun control have high violence. (New York City and Washington, D.C. and Chicago are all far more violent than where I live.) If I then tried to claim that gun control laws cause violence, you would say: Correlation doesn't prove causation! And you would be right.

Now, you are arguing that America has many guns

So is it better for an accountable person to kill an innocent due to negligence, indifference, or malice, or for an unaccountable armed "nutjob" (although I consider the threat of death row and civil suits pretty damn accountable) to not kill someone?

It is perhaps also significant that a comparison of police to civilian shootings of alleged criminals shows police to be 5.5 times more likely to have shot an innocent person in the belief that he was a criminal .

The USA banned automatic rifles in 1934, and they have been illegal ever since.

It would be more accurate to say that the federal government put very tight restrictions on the ownership of fully-automatic weapons.

It's a bit of a myth that citizenry of Nazi Germany was disarmed.

Unfortunately for them, one of the first laws that Hitler passed even BEFORE seizing full Dictatorial power was to outlaw private gun ownership.

It is a myth.

TL;DR version: the law long predated Nazis, but it didn't preclude citizens from owning any weapons whatsoever (and they did own plenty hunting rifles and such). By the times Nazis tightened it down (which still didn't prevent people from owning hunting rifles, except Jews), they already had their power well established.

... the cases where someone has stopped an incident by having a concealed carry weapon is minimal vs the times a lot of people have gotten killed or injured by a crazy person that is armed."

Estimates for the number of Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) in the United States, per year, range from a low of 50,000 through two million (Gary Kleck, 1993, see Guncite.com), up to more than 4 million in 1994 (National Survey of the Private Ownership of Fireams, a study commissioned by the Police Foundation). Even the low-end estimates are higher than the number of people who "have gotten killed or injured by a crazy person that is armed."

Care to cite that one?

The Militia Act of 1792. It required every able-bodied white male citizen (interesting distinction) above the age of 18 to be registered within the militia. It also specified what equipment they should have.

There are also records from Philadelphia showing how many firearms were owned by private citizens.

You could also reference this article done by Playboy in 2001 which talks to a person who is an avid trapshooter who found, during the research for his book, that the States regularly took a census of who owned a gun, what condition and so forth. Do a search for 'registered' to get to the relevant section.

So yes, guns were registered, in the broadest sense, by the Colonial government for the reasons I stated.

Arthur L. Kellermann

That name alone means your study is worthless. The is especially true for the study in question.

http://guncite.com/gun-control-kellermann-3times.html

Do try again.

"I got my first gun back when most Americans, and most conservative Americans, rightly believed that the Second Amendment was not about personal gun-toting at all."

Constitutional scholars have disposed of your asserted conclusion.

http://www.guncite.com/journals/reycrit.html

Constitutional scholars have done research studies in the 1970s identifying that only a minority of Americans believed the Second Amendment was about bearing arms as part of a militia? Because that's all he asserted.

Constitutional scholars may have indicated an error in those beliefs, but your linked article says nothing about percentage of the population. Furthermore, your linked article makes a leap to an unsupported conclusion: that the second amendment guarantees a right to self-defense against criminals. The article provides plenty of citations - which I agree with - that the 2nd Amendment is about preventing the government from rounding up arms to prevent a rebellion, as the British government was doing in the pre-Revolutionary era. However, the 2nd Amendment does not guarantee a right to use those weapons. Obviously, in fact, using them against the government would be an act of treason, just as the Revolution itself was treason, and thus barred by the Constitution.

No, as your cited article correctly notes, the 2nd Amendment is about the right of the people to keep arms as a deterrent to a tyrannical government. It says nothing about using them, or using them against criminals. The latter right is more properly found in the 5th Amendment.

"I got my first gun back when most Americans, and most conservative Americans, rightly believed that the Second Amendment was not about personal gun-toting at all."

Constitutional scholars have disposed of your asserted conclusion.

http://www.guncite.com/journals/reycrit.html

That statistic is one of the most widely quoted among the RKBA crowd. And no, most gun owners that I know don't exaggerate about these sorts of statistics. This is simply because most of us don't see the point of winning an argument by lying. Now group size on the other hand. Well, I threw away the target, but...

Anyway, back to the point. The statistic is not Wayne LaPierre's nor does it belong to the NRA-ILA. It comes from a paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association by Gary Kleck, PhD titled "What Are the Risks and Benefits of Keeping a Gun in the Home?" In it he cites a study by himself and Marc Gertz which estimated as many as 2.55 million defensive uses of firearms each year in the US. This includes situations in which merely displaying a firearm stopped the confrontation.

The paper may be obtained from the JAMA website:
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/pdfaccess.ashx?ResourceID=3329130&PDFSource=13

A copy of the original study is here:
http://www.guncite.com/gcdgklec.html

Incidentally, in 1994, a year after the Kleck/Gertz study The Department of Justice conducted their own survey and estimated only 1.5 million defensive uses annually.

I would also add anecdotally, a few years ago I was part of the 2.5 million (or more?) for that year, when the display of the full-size 1911 that I had holstered under my jacket that day dissuaded an urban youth from using his knife to collect my wallet. He approached. I told him to stop. He pulled his knife. I pulled back my jacket. He smilled and went the other way. I walked on.

LaPierre is deserving of criticism on occasion, but this is not one of them.

You say you support the right to bear arms, yet you suggest that civilians do not need military style weapons. This betrays a misunderstanding of the purpose of the second amendment. Unfortunately this is entirely too common, its probably not even your fault and I'm glad you are asking this question. I hope that I can answer it adequately.

Let's start with the text of the second amendment shall we? It is:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The amendment consists of two parts, the introduction which states the reasoning for the amendment and the actual right to be protected. "To keep and bear arms" is relatively straight forward, it means people have the right to own and carry weapons. Note that it doesn't say "The people shall have the right to keep and bear arms." That would imply the government is granting the right to the people. Rather it says "shall not be infringed," implying that the right to arms is a preexisting right that no government can legitimately take away.

That aside, typically people get hung up on the "well regulated militia" part. They argue that this means the army should have the right to arms, but not the people. The amendment clearly states that it is the people whom have the right to keep and bear arms though and the SCOTUS acknowledged this in DC vs Heller and again in Chicago vs McDonald. The second argument that is typically made is that the word "regulated" implies that the government has the right to restrict how people may exercise their second amendment right. However, there is two problems with this argument. The fist is that this statement takes place in the introduction of the amendment. The legal aspects of the second amendment can be completely understood by everything after the comma. "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." That's all we need, but the framers decided to include the WHY not just the WHAT.

The second problem is that "regulated" doesn't mean the same thing today as it did in 1787 when the Constitution was adopted. In that time, "well regulated" in regards to a militia or a military unit would have meant "properly disciplined." It also helps to remember the context. The revolutionaries had just fought a war against a regular army, the most powerful army in the world at the time, with "untrained civilians." They had no idea what would happen with the new government they were creating, but they knew that most often governments used their armies against the people. Ensuring that the people were able to keep and train in the use of arms was another check on the power of the government. Consider Jefferson:

And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Which brings us to the conclusion of the matter. The purpose of the second amendment is not to protect the rights of hunters, target shooters, or the right to self-defense. It is to protect the people from the government. Consider Madison:

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

So if the purpose of the second amendment is to defend the people from the government, and the government controls the military, then m

Try this article first published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 86, issue 1, 1995.

At some point the US will start to realize police don't need that kind of force in most part of the civilized world - and realize that this ties with your liberal gun laws.

The U.S. has had the Second Amendment and high rates of private firearms ownership since the start; yet the militarization of policing, and our high rate of violent crime, is a recent phenomenon. Furthermore, it is in areas where gun control laws are strongest that violent crime tends to be highest. I live just outside Baltimore, the city "celebrated" in the TV series Homicide and The Wire, and we have some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation here. They don't help.

If you eliminate all firearms deaths, we still have a higher murder rate than most developed nations -- about three times that of Denmark. Meanwhile, Switzerland has hundreds of thousands of homes with assault rifles, and has a low crime rate. Canada has a firearms ownership rate that's just 10% lower than ours, but about half our murder rate.

Our problem is not our guns. It's our endemic poverty, our lack of socio-economic mobility, our racism, our prison-industrial complex, and our "War on Drugs".

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_obama.html
Read more.

"I am not in favor of concealed weapons. I think that creates a potential atmosphere where more innocent people could (get shot during) altercations. "

That's just one snippet. There are plenty to be found, including within his voting history while in the Senate. Even his most recent speech about gun control has plenty of language indicating he'd like much stricter legislation.
No tinfoil hat required.

So many on Slashdot claim to be science brains, yet just talk out of their asses instead of citing research.

Professor Gary Kleck's findings on defensive gun uses.

"Just where the fuck do you live that it's acceptable that someone can't leave a party alone?"

Nobody said that, nice strawman. There a lot of unacceptable realities in the world. One of them is that there are sick, violent farks in the world who need a needle full of cyanide. Unfortunately, they must first commit their horrors before they get said needle. Is it "acceptable" that I have to lock my front door? Is it "acceptable" that so many people get murdered, that every large city must have dedicated homicide investigators? Sometimes reality is hard to accept.

"All more likely to be used against the woman than by her on a rapist. Actually, all more likely to be used against an innocent man than against a rapist - women are remarkably unlikely to get raped, while men are comparatively likely to get assaulted."

There is absolutely no empirical evidence to support this nonsense, which is endlessly repeated by the anti-gunners. Justice Dept stats show resisting violent crime leads to better outcomes for victims, and Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State has done numerous studies that show millions of self defense uses of firearms per year, and only a tiny fraction of gun users ever have their guns "taken away." You think you could pull a pistol out of my hand? Good luck with that.