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33,000 Sign Online Petition Promoting Guns At Republican Convention (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "An online petition on Change.org claims that constitutional rights are being denied to those who want to bring a gun to the fight for the Republican Party's future," reports CNET. "Though Ohio is an open carry state, which allows for the open carry of guns, the hosting venue — the Quicken Loans Arena — strictly forbids the carry of firearms on their premises." Citing a quote from the National Rifle Association that gun-free zones are "the worst and most dangerous of all lies," the petition has already attracted more than 33,000 signatures, though CNET reports that the whole petition is a satire they're attributing to the Hyperationalist blog. The petition appears to have attracted its last 8,000 signatures within the last 18 hours, shortly after its URL appeared on a web site for young conservatives.
If conservative gun lovers are right, it will be a peaceful convention.
If liberal gun haters are right, it will result in a massive shoot our and conservatives will kill each other.
So why does anyone object?
There are no alternative explanations to "shall not be infringed".
You can quibble all you want about what a regulated militia means, but the conclusion was as clear as day: The right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
BUT... ...private property is a whole other ballpark -- in this case quite literally.
It *is* the right of a private venue to set forth rules as they see fit.
So from one confirmed constitutionalist who believes strongly that the right to defend one's life can never be taken away by the State -- quit your whining folks -- this ain't public property.
Not really.
If there is anything held in as high esteem with conservatives as gun rights, it is private property rights. Their property, their rules, as much as the hypocrites may grumble.
What this does do however is alienate even more people from the left. As the must defeat Trump at any cost rally cries reaches fever pitch, talk of open assassination increases as it looks likely he will get the Republican nod.
You won't find the same discussions on the right with regards to Sanders, even though he is the antithesis to conservative ideas.
It's bizzaro world when Trump supporters are more reasoned than their detractors.
It is a bad idea - which is why the petition is a good idea. It forces the candidates to go against their own rhetoric about second amendment rights and publicly admit that the government does have the power to dictate when and where you are permitted to carry a gun.
I've lived in the US all my life - I've shot targets in my backyard when living in Alabama... and I've also looked into a lot of history.
There's a lot of powerful ways to view history - the romantic iconography of a school curriculum, the spectacle and drama of television history, the open bias of newspaper history (seriously, old newspapers are hilarious), and the random suppositions and conclusions of academic history at various levels and locations.
The version I find most compelling probably Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature - where it follows a trail of evidence I always saw hinted at the various levels of history presentation, but almost never really followed through on. That despite our large number of massive deadly conflicts, we really are getting less violent at every level of society. It's not some weak trend either - it's overwhelming and fascinating. But it's not a storyline that gels with most methods of conveying history, so it's something almost no one gets presented.
With that in mind, I find the whole song-and-dance we always go through with guns and appeals to history in our gun culture to be more than a little beside-the-point. Guns in private hands don't ruin everything, and they don't really statistically save that many people either, they just multiply the effect of the crazy people that exist in every society, but all societies seem to be getting measurably less crazy and (Flynn effect) better at abstract thought/problem solving over time anyway. Both the restrictions and the problems of guns are more a sideshow that we will continue to bounce across over time, until they're increasingly meaningless.
Tragedies will continue to happen, and we will continue to over-react to them, but they're all increasingly noise in the overall picture.
It's why I find little jabs like this pretty funny - we at large don't really want to push wild-west sensibilities as much as it might seem to the rest of the world, we just have partisans that want to push their ideals at any cost, as they realistically see their vision of their nation indelibly falling away from their ideals.
So cool - if some of these folks want to march with guns as an expression of their freedom - good on you, have a fun time of it, I suppose. The moment you use that freedom as anyone might fear, however, even your own partisans will come down on you like a mountain of bricks. Even in any events of pure violent fantasy made manifest came about - the society we've grown into at it's most 'conservative' won't support the same things our history allowed, and we're all far too unwilling to give up what our shared peace has given us so far.
I could certainly be wrong - but it's my best view on history/violence/guns I've seen so far.
Ryan Fenton
It's pretty disingenuous to assert that the prefatory clause of the 2nd amendment is the only part of the "Bill of Rights" that grants a power to the federal government in the guise of asserting a right, when all of the powers delegated in the original constitution were done so in the articles. Especially since the ninth amendment makes it clear that the point of listing rights in the Constitution isn't to put limits on them:
So where in the Articles is the power to decide what training is sufficient for a person to own a firearm?
Especially because today's guns can do substantially more damage than the guns did when the amendment was written.
Fixed artillery and ships equipped with cannon, capable of sustained bombardment on a city, were privately owned in that time. The weapons (long rifles) owned by private parties in the Revolutionary War were also significantly better than those used by the English soldiers. The concept of private ownership of powerful weaponry was not exactly a new concept back then.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
So many people always forget the first half. The amendment specifically states "well-regulated", meaning it is within the powers of the federal government to regulate militias and arms. Taken in context in the 18th century, "well regulated" probably means something closer to "well trained", but still, it is obvious that arms are meant to be regulated and dispersed through trained militias, and not just any random jerk has a gun. Especially because today's guns can do substantially more damage than the guns did when the amendment was written
I would invite you to read the federalist papers, which explain exactly what their intentions were.
It almost seems like you're arguing that since "well regulated" used to mean "In good working order", but doesn't anymore, we should disregard the intention and go with the current meaning that it wasn't intended to be used.
That isn't right. You would be subverting laws by changing language.
If anything would horrify our founding fathers, it would be our large standing Army and the general lack of self-reliance.
I don't know, I suspect for many of the founding fathers, it would be that we've allowed women and blacks to vote.
Which is why I don't think America should automatically hew to 200+ year old principles held by the founding fathers.
"A well balanced breakfast, being necessary to the health of the nation, the right of the people to keep and eat cereal, shall not be infringed.
Who has the right to eat cereal: a well-balanced breakfast, or the people?"
Quote from a slashdot Anonymous Coward in an older comment thread.
I'm constantly amazed that avowed National Socialists[1] who tried to forcefully dispossess the 1%ers of their day[2] are somehow no longer far enough left for people today. Not to mention the anti-historical belief that even recasting the Nazis as right-wing would somehow make up for Mao, Stalin and the rest. Or are the founders of Communism no longer left enough? I really can't keep track of history any more as quickly as it's being rewritten.
One would think that if you look out and the entire world is to the "right" of you that maybe, just maybe, you'd realize that you're at the far loony fringe? Then again, the leftward movement has always reminded me of lemmings, including the role of media fiction[3], with the film crews deliberately herding people right off the cliff.
[1] Better known by the German abbreviation, Nazi.
[2] Then, as now, the Jews are well represented in this population. Deservedly so, given how hard they've worked in spite of all the oppression they've faced from those who hate them, to achieve success on their own merits. Which, in retrospect, shows one why that minority ethnic group could be so hated by leftists as their mere existence is such a strong contradiction of leftist propaganda.
[3] Normal lemmings do not, in fact, run off of cliffs. This fact did not stop film crews from forcing them to do so on video.
Liberals object precisely because they know it will be peaceful, setting a precedent for wider lawful use of guns.
Liberals are only prone to promoting or allowing guns when they know they will be used for ill purposes, like Obama's Gunwalker program which made sure mexican drug cartels got fed lots of nice automatic weapons which were then used to kill people. That's the kind of gun use liberals are all too happy to promote because the few dead border guards or what have you serve a useful purpose in restricting guns for everyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, I read most of them. Politifact is entirely correct in that it relies on official sources and not on discredited Reagan era advisers' opinions.