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NRA Joins ACLU Lawsuit Against NSA
cold fjord writes with this excerpt from The Hill: "The National Rifle Association joined the American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit on Wednesday to end the government's massive phone record collection program. In a brief filed in federal court, the NRA argues that the National Security Agency's database of phone records amounts to a 'national gun registry.' 'It would be absurd to think that the Congress would adopt and maintain a web of statutes intended to protect against the creation of a national gun registry, while simultaneously authorizing the FBI and the NSA to gather records that could effectively create just such a registry,' the group writes. ... In its filing, the gun-rights group claims that the NSA's database would allow the government to identify and track gun owners based on whether they've called gun stores, shooting ranges or the NRA. 'Under the government's reading of Section 215, the government could simply demand the periodic submission of all firearms dealers' transaction records, then centralize them in a database indexed by the buyers' names for later searching,' the NRA writes."
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
If the NRA already collects names, who's to say they don't share them with the government already, willingly or unwillingly? Seems like a pretty easy nut to crack... and oh boy they have a lot of nuts in that org.
Except that it wouldn't actually succeed at that, and we can plainly see through critical examination of numerous other countries that arms ownership has exactly zero relationship with rights actually possessed by the populace.
Most modern liberal democracies that protect individual freedom do so in conjunction with gun control. And many barbaric shitholes with extremely corrupt, poor governance have absolutely massive numbers of guns. One simply does not cause the other.
That's aside from the more practical argument that you couldn't even remotely take down an M1 with any of the weapons officially protected by the 2nd amendment.
Let's not be disinenuous. I think we all know that the NRA is quite a bit more than a meer club, and is in a whole different class than the ACLU.
The closest analog really is the ASL (anti-saloon league) from a century ago. This organization didn't meerly lobby for its point of view, but organized its members (small in number, but very zealous) to surgically target specific close congressional races with emotion-laden propaganda to take out any congressman in all but the safest wet districts who didn't brainlessly toe the current ASL line. The result was that nearly every elected representative lived in mortal fear of them, and Prohibition was put into the freaking Constitution, even though a majority of the country opposed it. They were practically a political terrorist organization.
Sound familar?
Which, grammatically, isn't explanatory not operative. The operative part of the 2nd Amendment is, in full, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." In modern construction and words (based on Supreme Court decisions, specifically Heller and Miller) the full amendment would be something like, "Because a well-trained militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of individuals to keep and bear arms of military usefulness shall not be infringed." The first clause only explains why it's not be infringed; it doesn't impose a limit upon it.
Well, Miller did somewhat limit it based on the militia clause, by saying a firearm which wasn't demonstrated to be militarily useful was not protected, implying that if it had been demonstrated to be militarily useful it would be protected. So, under Miller, an assault rifle (obviously of military usefulness) would be protected but maybe not a break action shotgun. It's an odd case, at any rate, since Miller had died before it reached the Court and his side didn't argue before the Court.
The ACLU has argued an incredible number of cases in the Supreme Court and won a good number of them. Brown vs board of education, roe v wade, miranda, scopes, etc. I would put them on the "good" side of all of those cases but your opinion might differ.
The ACLU has argued an incredible number of cases in the Supreme Court and won a good number of them. Brown vs board of education, roe v wade, miranda, scopes, etc. I would put them on the "good" side of all of those cases but your opinion might differ.
I would put ACLU on the "good" side, but not good enough. Historically, their position has been that the Second Amendment does not deserve the protections due all the others.
If they dumped that single, grossly hypocritical position, I would support most of their efforts. (Though not all... there have been a few times when they backed ridiculous ideas in the name of "rights" that are nowhere to be found in the law or the Constitution.)
What makes you think the US Military, Cops, Sheriffs, etc. would attack their own people?
I was talking with a friend from Serbia about this a while back; for obvious reasons, he has a perspective on such matters that most Americans don't. I expressed my opinion that at least half, maybe more, of the US military would refuse to go along with an imposition of martial law against the US population, which would make such an action difficult or impossible. His answer gave me a lot of food for thought:
"When Milosevic cracked down, half the Army deserted overnight. Of those who were left, about half were too dumb to know what was going on, and the other half were the assholes, you know, the crazy ones who just wanted to kill people and they didn't care who. So Milosevic shipped the dumb ones off to border areas where they wouldn't get in the way, and then had the crazy ones go out and recruit more crazy ones, petty criminals and psychopaths who just didn't give a shit. And those were the ones who did the killing."
He was firmly of the opinion that the same thing would happen here. I really, really hope he's wrong ... but I can't say I'm as confident as I was before having that conversation.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.