You're assuming that a) semi-automatic weapons would be useful in a civil war, and b) it would be so quick nobody could rig up a machine to convert weapons from single-fire to semi-auto.
Those are pretty big assumptions.
Honestly if I was fighting the US Army I;d prefer a Garand to an AR-15. The AR-15 is inherently inferior to the M-4, and can only be used the same way one would use an M-4; therefore it is suicide. A Garand is still quite serviceable as a sniper rifle.
So if the paper or the state sues the County it can be challenged in Court.
But if the paper and the state don't want to spend the money it will not be challenged, and the other 61 Counties of New York will continue to honor these FOIAs.
Note that it's extremely unlikely that either will sue if they think the law is actually unconstitutional because by not suing they get compliance in 61 Counties, whereas by suing the get it in zero. Even if the number goes up to 15 or 20, if the law is clearly unconstitutional then they will not be sued because the other 41 or 46 counties will still follow it.
If you are an official of the state government in the United States refusing to do your job on the basis of your interpretation of the Constitution is only justified in truly extreme circumstances, and those do not apply.
So the newspaper is against guns and publishes a list of gun owners... and then hires a bunch of folks armed with, yes, guns. When push comes to shove, the reality is clear. Guns are effective as a defense measure. Criminals do not care about laws so outlawing guns will not take the guns from the criminals. This mean that all gun laws are for the explicit purpose of making law abiding citizens defenseless against criminals.
The logic doesn't really hold. Criminals like Adam Lamza will steal from lawful citizens, therefore if you make it illegal to own AR-15s and high capacity ammo clips and do a mandatory buyback criminals will no longer be able to find AR-15s with high capacity clips.
Should citizens be allowed the same weapons that the government has access to? (therefore assuring we could actually revolt)
That's the wrong question.
The correct question is, if The Revolutionary War was fought with M16's, would our Founding Fathers have been okay with civilians owning them?
Or, phrased another way, is there any weapon that our Founding Fathers would have insisted NOT be allowed to civilians and ONLY be kept by the government?
That's really hard to say because to the Founders nobody was a civilian. Everybody was in the militia, drilled on weekend a month, personally bought a milspec musket which was registered with his state and inspected annually by a state official, etc.
That said to my knowledge no private citizens ever operated cannons on land. If you got a land-cannon you'd also get a commission as it's commander in the local militia. Ships operated cannons privately, tho.
A regular Army which operates on every continent just would not fit into their definition of the US Government, so it's hard to see how they'd react to the change. Some would probably say the militia was obsolete, therefore dump the Second Amendment. Others would say we need a militia to fight DC therefore anybody can buy nukes.
People tend to be a lot less likely to get impatient and impolite when there are actual consequences.
In small towns people are heavily armed, but they're polite because they know everyone. But I'm from the City, and in the City we have the same rights small towners do. And arms leading to manners just doesn't work.
Because if I was in a dispute with a neighbor who had a temper problem, I'd want the ability to go to the police station and find out whether his next outburst could be lethal.
If I was considering a court order against an ex I'd want to know whether he or she was armed.
Ideally I'd want to be able to do these things without creating a paper trail that allows my neighbor/ex to find out why I'm asking, because if I'm asking I'm clearly not sure they're rational.
And the way the state does that is it people to see many/most CCW permits with minimal restrictions. Which means if you;re the local paper you can print the entire list.
That's like asking why they require the registration of a marriage. The answer is because that's how it's always been done, and everything is set up to work with registration.
And if you don;t believe me about always research the Militia Act of 1792.
It is still hypocritical. So, going by your Prius example, regardless of what I need in a vehicle, it's okay for the government to force me to use a Prius? If I need to move a refrigerator, I better buy a shitload of tie-downs and hope the roof of my Prius holds up? If I need to move a few dozen 2x4s and some plywood, I should just pop open the back hatch and drive with some giant wood between my legs? I can't drive a pickup truck that's much more suited to the things I need to do, because the government says I can't... yeah, that holds up great. That sounds totally practical.
Keep in mind the specific way the government would mandate Priuses would probably be by vehicle weight or gas-mileage.
And you could actually make a pickup that light, with Prius-style gas mileage unloaded. Just cut out the back seats and pt a pick-up bed. You're probably saving enough weight to reinforce the structure of the vehicle some. It would be incredibly slow loaded, but it would actually work.
The problem with the analogy is that it's hard to see how an AR-15 is actually more useful then a bolt action rifle for the things you actually have to use a rifle for. It's less accurate, the bullets too small to kill deer, they both suck at self defense because they're too big, etc. It's clearly a lot more fun then a Garand, but if the government couldn't ruin fun Heroin would be legal.
The thing about mass shootings is they're really easy to prevent. Much easier then other gun crimes. If we'd banned large-capacity magazines, they would not exist.
Now I don't know how much an Australia-style buy-back program would cost, and I doubt we can get a new Brady Bill and high capacity magazine ban through Congress, but that doesn't mean that a couple billion and trivial restrictions on gun rights are not a small price to pay to reduce death by 80-90 a year.
Australia's law was not intended to eliminate gun crime. It was intended to eliminate mass shootings. It has done that.
Your argument is analogous to saying "clearly buying aircraft carriers has not stopped the Taliban, therefore we should fire the entire Navy." Yes carriers and fighting the Taliban are somewhat related in that they're both done by the military, and carrier-based aircraft are sometimes used against the Taliban, but the argument just does not follow.
Actually, there's a county trying to stop the release of the information with which I have a bigger problem. Fix the law if it's bad, but I don't expect county officials to violate state law on their own discretion.
How is that any different than the people that refused to sit on the back of a bus in the south during the 60's? Sometimes the only way to get a law changed is to openly oppose it and violate it. If your case has merit, then the Supreme Court can make a valid ruling on it. I am all for any agency or person who puts their money where their mouth is and stands up for what they believe to be is right. Now they may be taking this stance to garner votes, but that's okay with me too. They are still challenging something that their constituents think is wrong.
Those protesters weren't government officials whose entire job is to enforce state law. They were ordinary citizens. A county official, OTOH, has a job to do. If the job is release CCW permits that is what they have to do. They can do it reluctantly, or they can resign. But keep your job and not do it are not acceptable options.
BTW, keep in mind that under the American legal system a County-level official who flat-out refuses to implement a state-level policy is actually supporting that policy. To sue to get a policy over-turned you generally need something called "Standing," and the easiest way to get Standing to Sue is be damaged by a law. If the Kansas City School Board had said "we dislike segregation, so we'll let this kid go to school," Brown vs. Board of Education probably does not happen.
In this case it may not matter because other counties did release the info, and the Paper may sue the hold-out. But in general a County-Level official who flat-out refuses to enforce an Unconstitutional policy is protecting that policy from the Courts.
Personally, I would be upset with both the Newspaper and the State. The only reason the State knows legally that you have a gun is by registering, which is frankly unconstitutional in itself. The State acted irresponsibly with the information releasing it to a Public source. I hope they get sued.
Dude,
If the Second Amendment banned firearms registration then the Militia Act of 1792 would have been unconstitutional. Not only did you have to have your gun on a list in the archives of the state government, it had to be a specific model, and you had to show it o a state official every years so he could verify it was still in working order.
But tell me, when in U.S. history has there been Sarin gas attacks in a subway system? Who has more knife violence?
Fair point.
But given that I can do math it's not terribly convincing. Japan's murder rate is lower. It's accidental firearms death rate is zero. Which means the logical conclusion is not that everyone has crime, but crime plus guns equals corpses; therefore guns should be very difficult to get.
I've never heard of a gun crime in Detroit carried out with an illegally imported weapon. They're almost all carried out by stolen weapons originally purchased legally.
I think you need to reexamine the history here. Based on historical writings, as well as years of SCOTUS rulings it was very much the intent of the founding fathers that gun ownership, above all else is to prevent the tyranny of the government over the populous.
I can name you several times a populace has tried to resist the US government. The South lost the Civil War. After Reconstruction those same Southerners seized control of their state governments (in one case by actual coup de etat), and local blacks fought back. They lost. The Whiskey Rebellion was crushed by George Washington himself.
...A gun is what makes the difference between a blowhard you can ignore and a real threat of death.
Yes. Exactly this. If you read the constitution and the words of our forefathers about it one of the fundamental reasons behind gun ownership being a right in the USA is to allow citizens to FORCE the government to listen. It's to ensure the citizens have a voice and a means to ensure that voice is not only heard, but acted on.
And in the long history of US Government oppression against various groups, has it worked even once?
And the tolerant left shows itself once again. One of the reasons the USA is a great country is because we allow close minded people like you to have a voice. Gun owners who have legally obtained their firearms are far less likely to break the law.
You're great at strawmen.
Very few liberals fear licensed CCW-holders or law-abiding citizens. What scares us shitless is their cousins, kids, grandkids, roommates, etc.
They think their weapons are magical things that will only ever work for them, personally, and never fire accidentally.
I don't worry about Nancy Lamza. I worry about the kid who stole her guns. I don't worry that Joseph Loughrey is an Evil Person who Wants to Do Murder. I worry that he'll forget whether he has a round chambered. I haven't even mentioned suicides, which dropped precipitously when Israel made it basically impossible for soldiers to bring their firearms home.
It was the newspaper's right to publish the data they published. It was still a bad thing to do. The first amendment would also protect their right to publish lists of suspected communists or records of purchases of prophylactics and pregnancy tests. The first amendment protects their rights to publish that information. It doesn't make it not a violation of privacy and all around dick move. The second issue, of course, is the existence of the list to begin with. They got the list from the government, which compiled it through fairly straightforward violations of the 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments.
Dude,
You do realize that the Militia Act of 1792 required everyone to not only own a gun, they also had to own a specific model, and present it to a State Official once a year for inspection?
You can credibly claim the founders wanted lots of milspec guns on the streets as abalance against DC, you cannot credibly claim they did not want the government to have a list of all those weapons.
Gay people are proud of themselves too, but you don't see gay pride parades being used as an excuse to publish a list of the names and addresses of every known gay person in the neighborhood.
That's probably because sexual orientation is not considered the government's business. It would probably be illegal to make such a list in most states, due to privacy laws; and releasing it as public information through a FIO would definitely be a no-no.
Gun ownership status, OTOH, has been the government's business since 1776 because the government needed to know who could fight in the militia, and to fight in the militia you needed a gun. And if the government has a list, and it has not made release of such info under FIO illegal...
... (like the mentally ill who btw have no higher risk of violence than the general public)
That is plain wrong!
Depends on the specific illness of course, but both the paranoid, the schizophrenics and the bipolars have a significantly higher risk of violence than the population in general. As these also are the types that are most likely to go off their meds and thus become 'active', the result is that the police spend way too much time dealing with 'lunatics' going bananas somewhere, endangering others. Firearms, machetes, heavy objects... doesn't matter. They will use whatever to satisfy their inner demons.
Keep in mind risk is a fraction with a denominator. Most of the people in the mental illness denominator are depressed or developmentally disabled, not schizophrenic or bipolar.
I assume you are not from the U.S. so perhaps a quick US Civics lesson is in order.
Perhaps a quick lesson in grammer is in order.
Words are not defined by the government. They are defined by common usage.
When Americans use the word 'right' they almost always mean the legal ability to do something. Some of these rights are the rights you're talking about --universally protected Constitutional rights -- but others are the exact opposite. You only have the right to be a Doctor in Ohio if the other Doctors, through their Medical Association, say so. You don't have the right to sell StarWars DVDs unless you are Disney.
That's exactly how ZANU-PF komissars understand the word. They are not alone in this interpretation - victors are usually merciless. In the USA the victorious left is already laying claim on your income and your guns - the stuff that separates a free man from an indigent.
And if the other guy had won he'd be laying claim to your retirement and your medical care; which are also things that separate a free person from being indigent.
Slashdot Mirror
And where'd they be smuggled from?
Nobody in the hemisphere has an arms industry but us. If AR-15s are banned here then there is no new place to make them in this hemisphere.
There's a reason Australia doesn't have a mass shooting problem after banning assault rifles.
You're assuming that a) semi-automatic weapons would be useful in a civil war, and b) it would be so quick nobody could rig up a machine to convert weapons from single-fire to semi-auto.
Those are pretty big assumptions.
Honestly if I was fighting the US Army I;d prefer a Garand to an AR-15. The AR-15 is inherently inferior to the M-4, and can only be used the same way one would use an M-4; therefore it is suicide. A Garand is still quite serviceable as a sniper rifle.
So if the paper or the state sues the County it can be challenged in Court.
But if the paper and the state don't want to spend the money it will not be challenged, and the other 61 Counties of New York will continue to honor these FOIAs.
Note that it's extremely unlikely that either will sue if they think the law is actually unconstitutional because by not suing they get compliance in 61 Counties, whereas by suing the get it in zero. Even if the number goes up to 15 or 20, if the law is clearly unconstitutional then they will not be sued because the other 41 or 46 counties will still follow it.
If you are an official of the state government in the United States refusing to do your job on the basis of your interpretation of the Constitution is only justified in truly extreme circumstances, and those do not apply.
So the newspaper is against guns and publishes a list of gun owners... and then hires a bunch of folks armed with, yes, guns. When push comes to shove, the reality is clear. Guns are effective as a defense measure. Criminals do not care about laws so outlawing guns will not take the guns from the criminals. This mean that all gun laws are for the explicit purpose of making law abiding citizens defenseless against criminals.
The logic doesn't really hold. Criminals like Adam Lamza will steal from lawful citizens, therefore if you make it illegal to own AR-15s and high capacity ammo clips and do a mandatory buyback criminals will no longer be able to find AR-15s with high capacity clips.
That's the wrong question.
The correct question is, if The Revolutionary War was fought with M16's, would our Founding Fathers have been okay with civilians owning them?
Or, phrased another way, is there any weapon that our Founding Fathers would have insisted NOT be allowed to civilians and ONLY be kept by the government?
That's really hard to say because to the Founders nobody was a civilian. Everybody was in the militia, drilled on weekend a month, personally bought a milspec musket which was registered with his state and inspected annually by a state official, etc.
That said to my knowledge no private citizens ever operated cannons on land. If you got a land-cannon you'd also get a commission as it's commander in the local militia. Ships operated cannons privately, tho.
A regular Army which operates on every continent just would not fit into their definition of the US Government, so it's hard to see how they'd react to the change. Some would probably say the militia was obsolete, therefore dump the Second Amendment. Others would say we need a militia to fight DC therefore anybody can buy nukes.
People tend to be a lot less likely to get impatient and impolite when there are actual consequences.
In small towns people are heavily armed, but they're polite because they know everyone. But I'm from the City, and in the City we have the same rights small towners do. And arms leading to manners just doesn't work.
They lead to firefights.
Because if I was in a dispute with a neighbor who had a temper problem, I'd want the ability to go to the police station and find out whether his next outburst could be lethal.
If I was considering a court order against an ex I'd want to know whether he or she was armed.
Ideally I'd want to be able to do these things without creating a paper trail that allows my neighbor/ex to find out why I'm asking, because if I'm asking I'm clearly not sure they're rational.
And the way the state does that is it people to see many/most CCW permits with minimal restrictions. Which means if you;re the local paper you can print the entire list.
That's like asking why they require the registration of a marriage. The answer is because that's how it's always been done, and everything is set up to work with registration.
And if you don;t believe me about always research the Militia Act of 1792.
It is still hypocritical. So, going by your Prius example, regardless of what I need in a vehicle, it's okay for the government to force me to use a Prius? If I need to move a refrigerator, I better buy a shitload of tie-downs and hope the roof of my Prius holds up? If I need to move a few dozen 2x4s and some plywood, I should just pop open the back hatch and drive with some giant wood between my legs? I can't drive a pickup truck that's much more suited to the things I need to do, because the government says I can't... yeah, that holds up great. That sounds totally practical.
Keep in mind the specific way the government would mandate Priuses would probably be by vehicle weight or gas-mileage.
And you could actually make a pickup that light, with Prius-style gas mileage unloaded. Just cut out the back seats and pt a pick-up bed. You're probably saving enough weight to reinforce the structure of the vehicle some. It would be incredibly slow loaded, but it would actually work.
The problem with the analogy is that it's hard to see how an AR-15 is actually more useful then a bolt action rifle for the things you actually have to use a rifle for. It's less accurate, the bullets too small to kill deer, they both suck at self defense because they're too big, etc. It's clearly a lot more fun then a Garand, but if the government couldn't ruin fun Heroin would be legal.
OTOH people actually need pickups sometimes.
The thing about mass shootings is they're really easy to prevent. Much easier then other gun crimes. If we'd banned large-capacity magazines, they would not exist.
Now I don't know how much an Australia-style buy-back program would cost, and I doubt we can get a new Brady Bill and high capacity magazine ban through Congress, but that doesn't mean that a couple billion and trivial restrictions on gun rights are not a small price to pay to reduce death by 80-90 a year.
Dude,
Australia's law was not intended to eliminate gun crime. It was intended to eliminate mass shootings. It has done that.
Your argument is analogous to saying "clearly buying aircraft carriers has not stopped the Taliban, therefore we should fire the entire Navy." Yes carriers and fighting the Taliban are somewhat related in that they're both done by the military, and carrier-based aircraft are sometimes used against the Taliban, but the argument just does not follow.
By state law, it is public information. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/01/local-government-refuses-give-local-newspaper-data-its-gun-owner-map/60498/
Actually, there's a county trying to stop the release of the information with which I have a bigger problem. Fix the law if it's bad, but I don't expect county officials to violate state law on their own discretion.
How is that any different than the people that refused to sit on the back of a bus in the south during the 60's? Sometimes the only way to get a law changed is to openly oppose it and violate it. If your case has merit, then the Supreme Court can make a valid ruling on it. I am all for any agency or person who puts their money where their mouth is and stands up for what they believe to be is right. Now they may be taking this stance to garner votes, but that's okay with me too. They are still challenging something that their constituents think is wrong.
Those protesters weren't government officials whose entire job is to enforce state law. They were ordinary citizens. A county official, OTOH, has a job to do. If the job is release CCW permits that is what they have to do. They can do it reluctantly, or they can resign. But keep your job and not do it are not acceptable options.
BTW, keep in mind that under the American legal system a County-level official who flat-out refuses to implement a state-level policy is actually supporting that policy. To sue to get a policy over-turned you generally need something called "Standing," and the easiest way to get Standing to Sue is be damaged by a law. If the Kansas City School Board had said "we dislike segregation, so we'll let this kid go to school," Brown vs. Board of Education probably does not happen.
In this case it may not matter because other counties did release the info, and the Paper may sue the hold-out. But in general a County-Level official who flat-out refuses to enforce an Unconstitutional policy is protecting that policy from the Courts.
Personally, I would be upset with both the Newspaper and the State. The only reason the State knows legally that you have a gun is by registering, which is frankly unconstitutional in itself. The State acted irresponsibly with the information releasing it to a Public source. I hope they get sued.
Dude,
If the Second Amendment banned firearms registration then the Militia Act of 1792 would have been unconstitutional. Not only did you have to have your gun on a list in the archives of the state government, it had to be a specific model, and you had to show it o a state official every years so he could verify it was still in working order.
Yeah, Japan has less gun deaths that the U.S.
But tell me, when in U.S. history has there been Sarin gas attacks in a subway system? Who has more knife violence?
Fair point.
But given that I can do math it's not terribly convincing. Japan's murder rate is lower. It's accidental firearms death rate is zero. Which means the logical conclusion is not that everyone has crime, but crime plus guns equals corpses; therefore guns should be very difficult to get.
I've never heard of a gun crime in Detroit carried out with an illegally imported weapon. They're almost all carried out by stolen weapons originally purchased legally.
Hi,
I think you need to reexamine the history here. Based on historical writings, as well as years of SCOTUS rulings it was very much the intent of the founding fathers that gun ownership, above all else is to prevent the tyranny of the government over the populous.
Here's a great read on the subject:
http://ia601204.us.archive.org/14/items/Pre-revolutionaryOriginsOfTheSecondAmendment/Pre-revolutionaryOriginsOfTheSecondAmendment.pdf
So that was the intent. BFD.
Has it ever actually worked?
I can name you several times a populace has tried to resist the US government. The South lost the Civil War. After Reconstruction those same Southerners seized control of their state governments (in one case by actual coup de etat), and local blacks fought back. They lost. The Whiskey Rebellion was crushed by George Washington himself.
Yes. Exactly this. If you read the constitution and the words of our forefathers about it one of the fundamental reasons behind gun ownership being a right in the USA is to allow citizens to FORCE the government to listen. It's to ensure the citizens have a voice and a means to ensure that voice is not only heard, but acted on.
And in the long history of US Government oppression against various groups, has it worked even once?
How many people have access to your house?
Because Nancy Lamza did all the right things too.
And the tolerant left shows itself once again. One of the reasons the USA is a great country is because we allow close minded people like you to have a voice. Gun owners who have legally obtained their firearms are far less likely to break the law.
You're great at strawmen.
Very few liberals fear licensed CCW-holders or law-abiding citizens. What scares us shitless is their cousins, kids, grandkids, roommates, etc.
You know what's most fun about gun guys?
They think their weapons are magical things that will only ever work for them, personally, and never fire accidentally.
I don't worry about Nancy Lamza. I worry about the kid who stole her guns. I don't worry that Joseph Loughrey is an Evil Person who Wants to Do Murder. I worry that he'll forget whether he has a round chambered. I haven't even mentioned suicides, which dropped precipitously when Israel made it basically impossible for soldiers to bring their firearms home.
It was the newspaper's right to publish the data they published. It was still a bad thing to do. The first amendment would also protect their right to publish lists of suspected communists or records of purchases of prophylactics and pregnancy tests. The first amendment protects their rights to publish that information. It doesn't make it not a violation of privacy and all around dick move. The second issue, of course, is the existence of the list to begin with. They got the list from the government, which compiled it through fairly straightforward violations of the 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments.
Dude,
You do realize that the Militia Act of 1792 required everyone to not only own a gun, they also had to own a specific model, and present it to a State Official once a year for inspection?
You can credibly claim the founders wanted lots of milspec guns on the streets as abalance against DC, you cannot credibly claim they did not want the government to have a list of all those weapons.
Gay people are proud of themselves too, but you don't see gay pride parades being used as an excuse to publish a list of the names and addresses of every known gay person in the neighborhood.
That's probably because sexual orientation is not considered the government's business. It would probably be illegal to make such a list in most states, due to privacy laws; and releasing it as public information through a FIO would definitely be a no-no.
Gun ownership status, OTOH, has been the government's business since 1776 because the government needed to know who could fight in the militia, and to fight in the militia you needed a gun. And if the government has a list, and it has not made release of such info under FIO illegal...
... (like the mentally ill who btw have no higher risk of violence than the general public)
That is plain wrong!
Depends on the specific illness of course, but both the paranoid, the schizophrenics and the bipolars have a significantly higher risk of violence than the population in general. As these also are the types that are most likely to go off their meds and thus become 'active', the result is that the police spend way too much time dealing with 'lunatics' going bananas somewhere, endangering others. Firearms, machetes, heavy objects... doesn't matter. They will use whatever to satisfy their inner demons.
Keep in mind risk is a fraction with a denominator. Most of the people in the mental illness denominator are depressed or developmentally disabled, not schizophrenic or bipolar.
I assume you are not from the U.S. so perhaps a quick US Civics lesson is in order.
Perhaps a quick lesson in grammer is in order.
Words are not defined by the government. They are defined by common usage.
When Americans use the word 'right' they almost always mean the legal ability to do something. Some of these rights are the rights you're talking about --universally protected Constitutional rights -- but others are the exact opposite. You only have the right to be a Doctor in Ohio if the other Doctors, through their Medical Association, say so. You don't have the right to sell StarWars DVDs unless you are Disney.
That's exactly how ZANU-PF komissars understand the word. They are not alone in this interpretation - victors are usually merciless. In the USA the victorious left is already laying claim on your income and your guns - the stuff that separates a free man from an indigent.
And if the other guy had won he'd be laying claim to your retirement and your medical care; which are also things that separate a free person from being indigent.