Well, the part of the overall system that produces science is clearly *not* Capitalism (rather, depending on specifics, somewhere along the socialist to communist spectrum of organizational principles). Seizing profits from private corporations to use for the public good (through non-profit-seeking institutions) isn't Capitalism --- though it does seem to be an awfully great way to get world-class research done that private industry has no interest in providing. Yes, major sectors of the US economy are Capitalistic --- but, so far as the research sector is concerned, accumulation and investment for private profit is not the force driving production --- only the *subversion* of Capitalism, to expropriate private wealth for the public good, generates the immense wealth of scientific knowledge produced through publicly-funded research.
Not for journal articles. For whole textbooks, a small pittance --- nothing remotely profitable compared to the thousands of hours that go into preparing such a text. The person I know who got an advanced graduate level text published through a major publisher earned ~$1 in royalties per copy, for a book that sold for $160 (and would, optimistically, sell a few thousand copies). He joined in with the lab's gray market overseas purchase (for about half the US price), because he sure as heck wasn't making any extra from the publisher's extortion. Only a few of the most common freshman introductory texts --- that will sell zillions of copies --- might be profitable; anything more advanced (that actually draws on the researcher's own particular area of expertise to advance a field) is done at a loss by the author --- typically only after getting tenure, since time spent writing a textbook isn't adding to annual publication counts.
I expect them to be paid the same way they already have been and are paid, which doesn't involve a cent coming from sales of their research articles. The for-profit journals don't funnel those billions of revenues back to scientists; they take them *away* from the scientific community (and into the pockets of profiteering investors). Replacing for-profit publishers with non-profit university and professional associations puts more money (and, more importantly, access to knowledge) back in the hands of scientists, without taking a single thing away from any scientist's paycheck.
Dear ball profferer, I'm glad to hear your GF enjoyed my performance enough to want me back for more. By the way, you should spend more time listening to her and learning how her body works --- you might find out that "ovaries" aren't the part you lick. Anyway, I'm perfectly happy with my education (public elementary and high school, followed by private college and gradschool), which puts me on the side of this terminological issue with Feynman, Hawking, and the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps with a more highly privatized education, I would instead side with the ranks of "the educated" internet AC trolls --- but such is life.
Key difference: food is not produced by non-profit farmers, who would love to give their food away for free to everyone in the world if only the grocery stores allowed it. Nor do the people who write scientific journal articles expect to earn royalties for every copy read. Scientists want their work to be read and shared *without the motive of earning a single penny per copy distributed.*
Dear Nobel Laureate, I'm guessing you got your "Nobel" in Economics? Because you're clearly completely delusional about how the real world works, and consider your "correct" definitions to establish the basis for all truth. Here's a clue: language is created by the people who use it. When a huge number of published physicists use a phrase in countless papers and textbooks, it is by virtue of that widespread use "correct" regardless of any other syntactical, etymological, or semantic arguments.
"Unable" is an awfully high bar. What if I said "everyone can vote, but, without a notarized doctor's order showing you can't, you have to hike ten miles on foot through a bog to get to the polling place" --- the vast majority of people are "able" to do that, but would probably choose to not vote instead. So yes, there are hundreds thousands of people who are technically "able" to lose a day's wages and the cost of a license to stand in line for six hours at the DMV and get an ID just to vote --- but won't be doing so. Imposing burdens that are trivial for people who would need a driver's license anyway for daily tasks, but mean that poor and elderly non-drivers would have to put in a lot of time/effort/money *just* to get to the voting booth, is highly discriminatory.
The burden of proof is on those claiming massive in-person individual voter fraud (of types that would be fixed by ID laws), contrary to all available evidence that such types of fraud amount to even 1/100,000th of the number of voters disenfranchised.
"Hi, I'm Jim Jones, and I'd like to withdraw all of the money out of my account."
"Hi, Mr. Jones. When you opened your account, we issued you an ATM card, a PIN, and a signed copy of your account holder agreement. Could we please see any two of those? Thanks." I doubt identity theft is that much worse of a problem than for my established-with-photo-identification accounts, from which I can also withdraw money (at, e.g., an ATM) without any visual identity confirmation.
There have been plenty of strong efforts to crack down on instances of this, pushed for by political parties aghast at the fact that they aren't winning every election by a landslide. Over decades of hunting for voting fraud, a few dozen instances have been found. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of potential voters disenfranchised by voting restrictions, yes: "no one" is an approximately correct description for the level of voting fraud. Letting a handful of fraudulent votes through for every extra hundred thousand legitimate voters doesn't seem like a horrible thing (unless you're in the political party that loses elections when more voters vote).
Large-scale organized "show up at the voting place and cast a fraudulent vote" vote manipulation is simply *not worth it*. Where can you find tens of thousands of people willing to stand in line for an hour, and risk *being thrown in federal prison,* just to cast one extra vote --- for cheaper than bringing in additional votes by legitimate advertising/campaigning methods? If you want to steal an election, you hack the voting machines, or "lose" ballots from a district, etc. --- you don't show up en-mass in person to cast individual fraudulent votes (the thing that restrictive voter ID is supposed to prevent).
Well, Secret Agent Magnon, you appear to be trying extremely hard to keep a low profile. For the vast majority of folks, fifty identity witnesses might be difficult (if just for logistical reasons), but finding at least five long-standing friends/family/co-workers isn't particularly hard. If you're that seriously at risk of being left thoroughly unidentifiable by a lost wallet, I'd recommend renting a safe deposit box to keep backup copies of critical identifying information (birth certificate, social security card, passports, tax returns, etc.).
The problem with your "lets only hire good and responsible cops, then give them lots of extra authority (license to kill) because they are good and responsible" is exactly where *abuse of authority* starts from. Absolutely, we should be hiring "good" cops with a deep understanding of what their civic duty for protecting society is --- much like we should be electing "good" politicians. But in order to *keep* the system from degenerating into authoritarian, self-serving power center, having generally higher IQ cops with better training than before won't help --- in fact, it will only add to their sense of self-righteous impunity. Insisting on "absolute" safety against rather rare occurrences (people stabbing cops) while setting the stage for more common occurrences of cops murdering people "in the line of duty" is not the way to go.
"Deal with violent criminals" is what you have a SWAT team for --- I think cops can still have some fancy murder equipment locked up in storage (perhaps even in the trunk of patrol cars), ready to come out when an armed bank robbery is in progress. But what we don't need is cops, with an itchy trigger finger and (legitimately) afraid of being shot by abundant firearms in private hands, gallivanting around ready to pump you full of lead if you reach for your wallet with the wrong skin color. For ordinary duties --- when you aren't in hot pursuit of a known armed menace, but perhaps just busting shoplifters or ticketing speeders, police don't need to be 0.5 seconds away from applying deadly force.
Well, the rebels we armed tend to be ones who want to establish far-right authoritarian dictatorships. It's true, a tiny minority of heavily armed authoritarian thugs can do a lot to disrupt civil societies, even succeeding in installing murderous regimes of their own. However, given that the results of our armed "freedom fighters" tend towards results like Pinochet or the Taliban, there's little evidence that armed minorities are helpful for creating peaceful, democratic societies.
It's funny that you mention slavery, because firearm ownership is specifically intended as a hedge against tyranny, due to the lessons learned during the gaining of American independence.
And it sure helped the slaves, didn't it? Actually, the "well regulated militia" part of the clause was primarily referring to Southern "Slave Patrols" --- state militias used to suppress rebellions and hunt down runaways. Southern states didn't want to have to rely on the Federal Government to brutalize their slaves for them, thus needed assurance in that big bundle of compromises called "The Constitution" that they could maintain their State's Rights to violent oppression. Despite revisionist history pretending that gun laws were to help weak minorities, the original intent (and continuing function) has always been to empower the already powerful to stifle dissent. Whenever derided minorities have taken up arms and violent resistance, they've been brutally squashed, while the gun-lovin' majority cheers on.
If this were a democracy, Jim Crow laws would still be in effect.
On what do you base this? Civil Rights legislation came about *after* this was a nationally popular stance --- *not* because some brave representatives stuck their neck out, against the majorities of their voting constituencies, to stand on principle for equality. In fact, Civil Rights were delayed because of those representatives working to sabotage reform to prevent their "States' Rights" to discriminate from being trampled. What evidence is there that being a republic particularly helped in this case? That equal rights regardless of skin color was not already a *democratically* winning stance when and where it was implemented?
On average, people spend a lot more hours using cars than using guns. Being eaten by grizzly bears also kills far fewer people than guns or cars, but that's a poor reason to encourage letting hungry grizzly bears loose in every public area. Per amount of use, guns are far more dangerous than cars. With little impediment to the socially beneficial uses of guns, additional safeguards can significantly cut down on damage (just like mandatory seat-belts dramatically reduced the rate of automobile fatalities per person-mile).
Well, I'm all in favor of disarming and disempowering cops, too. From my perspective, there seems to be a positive correlation between fans of private militias and folks who like Sheriff Joe Arpaio's goon squads to be given unlimited reign to harass folks for the crime of looking Mexican. The "moar guns!" advocates rarely seem to be big supporters of dismantling the prison-industrial complex, or cutting back on police violence against anyone not White Christian Male Real American. Given the abundance of evidence from programs where restricting regular patrol-beat cops from carrying guns *reduced* violence (since minor offenders wouldn't be lead into a "shoot first or be shot" mindset), coordinated public/private disarmament is a great way to go.
Why are you assuming a nation without guns is a nation without weapons?
A free and united people will be damn hard to conquer, guns or no. How could a gunless people survive when the gun-carrying Canadian Imperial Invasion Force pours down from the North? The better question is how the gun-carrying Canadian Imperial Invasion Force can survive when they start finding out that 100% of their vehicles have slashed tires and busted engines from sand in the gas tank; when the rations they commandeer have unusually high incidences of nasty food poisoning; when their field offices catch fire every night, and their power lines are down, and their water mains are busted. Without guns, but a willingness to resist occupation, Americans could easily fight an asymmetric sabotage war that would make the country entirely undesirable to take over.
And when your assailant has a gun, you're 0.1 seconds away from being dead (assuming they aren't polite enough to stop and chat first, instead of just shooting you before you realize what's happening). And, just as guns "empower" physically weak good guys, they also empower every scrawny punk-ass meth-head --- so now, instead of worrying about the one big burly evil dude, my chances of being murdered are multiplied to every cowardly little shit with a pistol (or being caught in the crossfire when a "good guy" goes paranoid vigilante).
I live unarmed, surrounded by unarmed people, several minutes away from armed response. I also live freely without cowering in paranoid fear. Billions of others on this planet do the same. Stopping crime is far better done by assuring equality and opportunity and decent conditions to all, than by gun-totin' vigilantes patrolling their little violent fiefdoms. When no one's life is so miserable that shooting up a liquor store for $42 looks like an upward career move, there's far less crime. I wish to live in a world where people respect one another out of shared humanity, not fear they'll end up on the wrong end of a gun --- and I'm living my wish.
Nothing like a little revisionist victim-blaming wild-ass historical speculation to "prove" your point. Let's consider an actual historical counterpoint, where an oppressed minority *did* have guns: the armed factions of the Civil Rights movement in the US, that promoted stockpiling guns for armed resistance against racist authoritarianism. You remember what happened to them? They mostly got murdered by FBI assassins, or thrown in jail for life --- and generally used as a propaganda tool by racists to legitimate the (ongoing) criminalization of being a black male. We didn't see the creation of well-armed enclaves of racial unity and justice. Jews with guns would just have been used as further propaganda by the Nazi leadership to speed up public acceptance of the idea that Jews were such a dangerous threat to the very fabric of civil society that they needed to be removed at all costs.
Uh, I don't know where you got the idea that it's legal to operate a firearm while under the influence
Maybe from the wingnuts lobbying to allow concealed carry in bars. Also, the standards for "under the influence" are a heck of a lot looser for firearms than cars --- no one's losing their right to have a gun and going to jail for surprise checkpoint breathalyzer tests indicating BAC over 0.05. True, if you're belligerently stumbling drunk and lurching around town flailing a pistol, you might get in trouble.
Therein lies the problem: How do we move forward intelligently on this subject, when the people in charge of that movement are acting with anything but intelligence?
Well, that's a general problem with virtually every area of policy. Perhaps one approach is to also push back strongly against idiots like the NRA leadership, who oppose even the most *sensible* solutions (that even an overwhelming majority of NRA members support). Gun advocates need to step up and prove the NRA does not represent them --- support useful regulations like training and basic criminal background checks, instead of rallying behind extremist paranoid nutbags.
If firearms stop working, every human being is at the mercy of larger and stronger people.
Fortunately, 100% of larger and stronger people aren't vicious muder-rapist psychopaths just waiting for the chance to rampage over society. I think there are plenty of perfectly nice large and strong people to handle the tiny few who suddenly decide to go rogue. Hey, I already walk around unarmed --- a short, flabby weakling --- and yet don't regularly get beset by burly bandits. With guns, I'm still at the mercy of those better armed, with better marksmanship, and more willingness to initiate violence with the element of surprise (no matter how well-armed a sharpshooter I am, I'm still screwed if a stranger decides to shoot me in the back of my head).
Indeed, not much, and woefully inadequate. I suppose this varies by state -- when I first got a driver's license, you had to submit a certificate from a certified drivers' ed provider that you had completed ~16 hours of training. That's still ~16 hours more than required to grab a gun, which you're also allowed to carry around and/or operate after/while knocking back a few beers.
You do have a Constitutional right to own and carry a firearm
Just because it's in the Constitution (possibly with scope limitations to indicate use within "a well regulated militia") doesn't mean it's a great idea for (today's) society. Slavery was also institutionalized in the Constitution.
Interestingly, we as a society permit a huge amount of inconvenience to regulate car use. You've got to be licensed, trained, registered, tracked, and taxed to operate a car.
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Well, the part of the overall system that produces science is clearly *not* Capitalism (rather, depending on specifics, somewhere along the socialist to communist spectrum of organizational principles). Seizing profits from private corporations to use for the public good (through non-profit-seeking institutions) isn't Capitalism --- though it does seem to be an awfully great way to get world-class research done that private industry has no interest in providing. Yes, major sectors of the US economy are Capitalistic --- but, so far as the research sector is concerned, accumulation and investment for private profit is not the force driving production --- only the *subversion* of Capitalism, to expropriate private wealth for the public good, generates the immense wealth of scientific knowledge produced through publicly-funded research.
Not for journal articles. For whole textbooks, a small pittance --- nothing remotely profitable compared to the thousands of hours that go into preparing such a text. The person I know who got an advanced graduate level text published through a major publisher earned ~$1 in royalties per copy, for a book that sold for $160 (and would, optimistically, sell a few thousand copies). He joined in with the lab's gray market overseas purchase (for about half the US price), because he sure as heck wasn't making any extra from the publisher's extortion. Only a few of the most common freshman introductory texts --- that will sell zillions of copies --- might be profitable; anything more advanced (that actually draws on the researcher's own particular area of expertise to advance a field) is done at a loss by the author --- typically only after getting tenure, since time spent writing a textbook isn't adding to annual publication counts.
I expect them to be paid the same way they already have been and are paid, which doesn't involve a cent coming from sales of their research articles. The for-profit journals don't funnel those billions of revenues back to scientists; they take them *away* from the scientific community (and into the pockets of profiteering investors). Replacing for-profit publishers with non-profit university and professional associations puts more money (and, more importantly, access to knowledge) back in the hands of scientists, without taking a single thing away from any scientist's paycheck.
Dear ball profferer,
I'm glad to hear your GF enjoyed my performance enough to want me back for more. By the way, you should spend more time listening to her and learning how her body works --- you might find out that "ovaries" aren't the part you lick.
Anyway, I'm perfectly happy with my education (public elementary and high school, followed by private college and gradschool), which puts me on the side of this terminological issue with Feynman, Hawking, and the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps with a more highly privatized education, I would instead side with the ranks of "the educated" internet AC trolls --- but such is life.
Key difference: food is not produced by non-profit farmers, who would love to give their food away for free to everyone in the world if only the grocery stores allowed it. Nor do the people who write scientific journal articles expect to earn royalties for every copy read. Scientists want their work to be read and shared *without the motive of earning a single penny per copy distributed.*
Dear Nobel Laureate,
I'm guessing you got your "Nobel" in Economics? Because you're clearly completely delusional about how the real world works, and consider your "correct" definitions to establish the basis for all truth. Here's a clue: language is created by the people who use it. When a huge number of published physicists use a phrase in countless papers and textbooks, it is by virtue of that widespread use "correct" regardless of any other syntactical, etymological, or semantic arguments.
Looks like you need some GPU acceleration to handle realtime first posting.
"Unable" is an awfully high bar. What if I said "everyone can vote, but, without a notarized doctor's order showing you can't, you have to hike ten miles on foot through a bog to get to the polling place" --- the vast majority of people are "able" to do that, but would probably choose to not vote instead. So yes, there are hundreds thousands of people who are technically "able" to lose a day's wages and the cost of a license to stand in line for six hours at the DMV and get an ID just to vote --- but won't be doing so. Imposing burdens that are trivial for people who would need a driver's license anyway for daily tasks, but mean that poor and elderly non-drivers would have to put in a lot of time/effort/money *just* to get to the voting booth, is highly discriminatory.
The burden of proof is on those claiming massive in-person individual voter fraud (of types that would be fixed by ID laws), contrary to all available evidence that such types of fraud amount to even 1/100,000th of the number of voters disenfranchised.
"Hi, I'm Jim Jones, and I'd like to withdraw all of the money out of my account."
"Hi, Mr. Jones. When you opened your account, we issued you an ATM card, a PIN, and a signed copy of your account holder agreement. Could we please see any two of those? Thanks."
I doubt identity theft is that much worse of a problem than for my established-with-photo-identification accounts, from which I can also withdraw money (at, e.g., an ATM) without any visual identity confirmation.
There have been plenty of strong efforts to crack down on instances of this, pushed for by political parties aghast at the fact that they aren't winning every election by a landslide. Over decades of hunting for voting fraud, a few dozen instances have been found. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of potential voters disenfranchised by voting restrictions, yes: "no one" is an approximately correct description for the level of voting fraud. Letting a handful of fraudulent votes through for every extra hundred thousand legitimate voters doesn't seem like a horrible thing (unless you're in the political party that loses elections when more voters vote).
Large-scale organized "show up at the voting place and cast a fraudulent vote" vote manipulation is simply *not worth it*. Where can you find tens of thousands of people willing to stand in line for an hour, and risk *being thrown in federal prison,* just to cast one extra vote --- for cheaper than bringing in additional votes by legitimate advertising/campaigning methods? If you want to steal an election, you hack the voting machines, or "lose" ballots from a district, etc. --- you don't show up en-mass in person to cast individual fraudulent votes (the thing that restrictive voter ID is supposed to prevent).
Well, Secret Agent Magnon, you appear to be trying extremely hard to keep a low profile. For the vast majority of folks, fifty identity witnesses might be difficult (if just for logistical reasons), but finding at least five long-standing friends/family/co-workers isn't particularly hard. If you're that seriously at risk of being left thoroughly unidentifiable by a lost wallet, I'd recommend renting a safe deposit box to keep backup copies of critical identifying information (birth certificate, social security card, passports, tax returns, etc.).
The problem with your "lets only hire good and responsible cops, then give them lots of extra authority (license to kill) because they are good and responsible" is exactly where *abuse of authority* starts from. Absolutely, we should be hiring "good" cops with a deep understanding of what their civic duty for protecting society is --- much like we should be electing "good" politicians. But in order to *keep* the system from degenerating into authoritarian, self-serving power center, having generally higher IQ cops with better training than before won't help --- in fact, it will only add to their sense of self-righteous impunity. Insisting on "absolute" safety against rather rare occurrences (people stabbing cops) while setting the stage for more common occurrences of cops murdering people "in the line of duty" is not the way to go.
"Deal with violent criminals" is what you have a SWAT team for --- I think cops can still have some fancy murder equipment locked up in storage (perhaps even in the trunk of patrol cars), ready to come out when an armed bank robbery is in progress. But what we don't need is cops, with an itchy trigger finger and (legitimately) afraid of being shot by abundant firearms in private hands, gallivanting around ready to pump you full of lead if you reach for your wallet with the wrong skin color. For ordinary duties --- when you aren't in hot pursuit of a known armed menace, but perhaps just busting shoplifters or ticketing speeders, police don't need to be 0.5 seconds away from applying deadly force.
Well, the rebels we armed tend to be ones who want to establish far-right authoritarian dictatorships. It's true, a tiny minority of heavily armed authoritarian thugs can do a lot to disrupt civil societies, even succeeding in installing murderous regimes of their own. However, given that the results of our armed "freedom fighters" tend towards results like Pinochet or the Taliban, there's little evidence that armed minorities are helpful for creating peaceful, democratic societies.
It's funny that you mention slavery, because firearm ownership is specifically intended as a hedge against tyranny, due to the lessons learned during the gaining of American independence.
And it sure helped the slaves, didn't it? Actually, the "well regulated militia" part of the clause was primarily referring to Southern "Slave Patrols" --- state militias used to suppress rebellions and hunt down runaways. Southern states didn't want to have to rely on the Federal Government to brutalize their slaves for them, thus needed assurance in that big bundle of compromises called "The Constitution" that they could maintain their State's Rights to violent oppression. Despite revisionist history pretending that gun laws were to help weak minorities, the original intent (and continuing function) has always been to empower the already powerful to stifle dissent. Whenever derided minorities have taken up arms and violent resistance, they've been brutally squashed, while the gun-lovin' majority cheers on.
If this were a democracy, Jim Crow laws would still be in effect.
On what do you base this? Civil Rights legislation came about *after* this was a nationally popular stance --- *not* because some brave representatives stuck their neck out, against the majorities of their voting constituencies, to stand on principle for equality. In fact, Civil Rights were delayed because of those representatives working to sabotage reform to prevent their "States' Rights" to discriminate from being trampled. What evidence is there that being a republic particularly helped in this case? That equal rights regardless of skin color was not already a *democratically* winning stance when and where it was implemented?
On average, people spend a lot more hours using cars than using guns. Being eaten by grizzly bears also kills far fewer people than guns or cars, but that's a poor reason to encourage letting hungry grizzly bears loose in every public area. Per amount of use, guns are far more dangerous than cars. With little impediment to the socially beneficial uses of guns, additional safeguards can significantly cut down on damage (just like mandatory seat-belts dramatically reduced the rate of automobile fatalities per person-mile).
Well, I'm all in favor of disarming and disempowering cops, too. From my perspective, there seems to be a positive correlation between fans of private militias and folks who like Sheriff Joe Arpaio's goon squads to be given unlimited reign to harass folks for the crime of looking Mexican. The "moar guns!" advocates rarely seem to be big supporters of dismantling the prison-industrial complex, or cutting back on police violence against anyone not White Christian Male Real American. Given the abundance of evidence from programs where restricting regular patrol-beat cops from carrying guns *reduced* violence (since minor offenders wouldn't be lead into a "shoot first or be shot" mindset), coordinated public/private disarmament is a great way to go.
Why are you assuming a nation without guns is a nation without weapons?
A free and united people will be damn hard to conquer, guns or no. How could a gunless people survive when the gun-carrying Canadian Imperial Invasion Force pours down from the North? The better question is how the gun-carrying Canadian Imperial Invasion Force can survive when they start finding out that 100% of their vehicles have slashed tires and busted engines from sand in the gas tank; when the rations they commandeer have unusually high incidences of nasty food poisoning; when their field offices catch fire every night, and their power lines are down, and their water mains are busted. Without guns, but a willingness to resist occupation, Americans could easily fight an asymmetric sabotage war that would make the country entirely undesirable to take over.
And when your assailant has a gun, you're 0.1 seconds away from being dead (assuming they aren't polite enough to stop and chat first, instead of just shooting you before you realize what's happening). And, just as guns "empower" physically weak good guys, they also empower every scrawny punk-ass meth-head --- so now, instead of worrying about the one big burly evil dude, my chances of being murdered are multiplied to every cowardly little shit with a pistol (or being caught in the crossfire when a "good guy" goes paranoid vigilante).
I live unarmed, surrounded by unarmed people, several minutes away from armed response. I also live freely without cowering in paranoid fear. Billions of others on this planet do the same. Stopping crime is far better done by assuring equality and opportunity and decent conditions to all, than by gun-totin' vigilantes patrolling their little violent fiefdoms. When no one's life is so miserable that shooting up a liquor store for $42 looks like an upward career move, there's far less crime. I wish to live in a world where people respect one another out of shared humanity, not fear they'll end up on the wrong end of a gun --- and I'm living my wish.
Nothing like a little revisionist victim-blaming wild-ass historical speculation to "prove" your point.
Let's consider an actual historical counterpoint, where an oppressed minority *did* have guns: the armed factions of the Civil Rights movement in the US, that promoted stockpiling guns for armed resistance against racist authoritarianism. You remember what happened to them? They mostly got murdered by FBI assassins, or thrown in jail for life --- and generally used as a propaganda tool by racists to legitimate the (ongoing) criminalization of being a black male. We didn't see the creation of well-armed enclaves of racial unity and justice. Jews with guns would just have been used as further propaganda by the Nazi leadership to speed up public acceptance of the idea that Jews were such a dangerous threat to the very fabric of civil society that they needed to be removed at all costs.
Uh, I don't know where you got the idea that it's legal to operate a firearm while under the influence
Maybe from the wingnuts lobbying to allow concealed carry in bars. Also, the standards for "under the influence" are a heck of a lot looser for firearms than cars --- no one's losing their right to have a gun and going to jail for surprise checkpoint breathalyzer tests indicating BAC over 0.05. True, if you're belligerently stumbling drunk and lurching around town flailing a pistol, you might get in trouble.
Therein lies the problem: How do we move forward intelligently on this subject, when the people in charge of that movement are acting with anything but intelligence?
Well, that's a general problem with virtually every area of policy. Perhaps one approach is to also push back strongly against idiots like the NRA leadership, who oppose even the most *sensible* solutions (that even an overwhelming majority of NRA members support). Gun advocates need to step up and prove the NRA does not represent them --- support useful regulations like training and basic criminal background checks, instead of rallying behind extremist paranoid nutbags.
If firearms stop working, every human being is at the mercy of larger and stronger people.
Fortunately, 100% of larger and stronger people aren't vicious muder-rapist psychopaths just waiting for the chance to rampage over society. I think there are plenty of perfectly nice large and strong people to handle the tiny few who suddenly decide to go rogue. Hey, I already walk around unarmed --- a short, flabby weakling --- and yet don't regularly get beset by burly bandits. With guns, I'm still at the mercy of those better armed, with better marksmanship, and more willingness to initiate violence with the element of surprise (no matter how well-armed a sharpshooter I am, I'm still screwed if a stranger decides to shoot me in the back of my head).
Training, not so much.
Indeed, not much, and woefully inadequate. I suppose this varies by state -- when I first got a driver's license, you had to submit a certificate from a certified drivers' ed provider that you had completed ~16 hours of training. That's still ~16 hours more than required to grab a gun, which you're also allowed to carry around and/or operate after/while knocking back a few beers.
You do have a Constitutional right to own and carry a firearm
Just because it's in the Constitution (possibly with scope limitations to indicate use within "a well regulated militia") doesn't mean it's a great idea for (today's) society. Slavery was also institutionalized in the Constitution.
Interestingly, we as a society permit a huge amount of inconvenience to regulate car use. You've got to be licensed, trained, registered, tracked, and taxed to operate a car.