Why not stop griping and start the process to repeal the second amendment?

I agree, and have stated it is time to repeal. And I have written both Senators and my congressional representative to that effect. I started my efforts after Sandy Hook.

@zenvelo

Good enough and GA

Lots better than bitching that “we” need to do something about guns, instead of actually doing what needs to be done in order to achieve a goal.

I don’t gripe too much, but I am disgusted by the amount of gun deaths in America. I’m not gung-ho about repealing the second amendment, because I’ve lived in places with really high gun violence, and I understand why people feel they need a gun to protect themselves. It’s a horrible vicious cycle in these cities. It’s so incredibly different living in a place with lots of guns compared to cities that have very little gun ownership.

Plus, I wonder if Democrats who have been griping for years feel differently now that we had the neoNazis marching in Charlottesville in large numbers? Plus, a lot of Democrats seem to believe Trump might start rounding people up and compare him to Hitler.

I’ve proposed a slightly different tack, borrowing from something that I’ve seen attributed to Jefferson, to the effect that the Constitution – all laws, in fact – should probably be rewritten every twenty to fifty years.

We spend so much time arguing about what words and terms meant 240 years ago, what the Founders intended and would have wanted, whether their words and intent have meaning in today’s world, etc. (And then legislators, judges and presidents – and bureaucrats – take what they want and leave the rest, anyway.) So, figuratively, to hell with the Founders; perhaps we should re-found the nation and be our own Founders. I doubt that we could do half so well, but maybe we need to try.

The Founders aren’t here any more. Oh, and we should probably tear down all of their statues and burn their books, too. They were imperfect, so it’s only right.

“They” repealed the 18th amendment, let “them” repeal the second one as well. “They” are far more effective than I am.

Knock yourselves out!

We vote and it doesn’t always count. What else is the average hard working American supposed to do?

Because I’d rather we just stopped acting like “the right to bear arms” includes everything that can be made, with no qualifications on the weapon or the person.

If we stopped only talking extreme options, we could probably get somewhere eventually.

I always hear about how little people who don’t want guns know about guns. Great. Let’s talk goals then. I want to stop people from killing lots of other people really easily. How can I do that and still let people protect themselves and their home?

Certainly there is something between unlimited guns with unlimited bullets and no guns, right?

Let’s pretend I’m an idiot (I know, not hard)... educate me.

What’s a legitimate reason for more than 10 rounds in a rifle in civilian life?
Why does an individual need to have quick access to more than, say, 3 guns?
There is a system to track how much sudafed I buy, that keeps me immediately from getting more, is there a system like that for guns? If not, why? Would that keep anyone from living their life freely?

There’s got to be middle ground for most people. Not everyone, but most people. I’d rather find that than talk about a repeal that will simply never happen.

Because many don’t want a repeal of the 2nd, but simply want better, more sensible gun regulation. But perhaps that position is too nuanced for you to understand.

Ban them, repeal everything do you really think it will stop???
It will just drive it under ground and the black market will flourish.
Gun crimes in any form are horrible, innocent people hurt by some idiot with a firearm makes everyone take notice.
Tougher gun laws make sense,do the crime and the penalty will be intense but fanatics don’t care, hint that is why they are fanatics.
Hell you can take all the guns out of the picture,and fanatics just graduate to bombs, or using vehicles to inflict mass casualties , and don’t roll your eyes they have done just that in more than one case.
THERE HAS to be better mental health help for these fanatics, so they don’t grab a gun, or jump in a vehicle and mow down a bunch of innocent people.
But oh yeah providing mental health costs money better just to shove these people aside and be shocked when they do something horrible.
And keep bitching about guns.

You really have the wool pulled over your eyes, if you think the people actually have that power. The NRA is too powerful. People in power are either afraid of the NRA, support it, or don’t give a fuck. They’re only there to serve themselves.

The 2nd ammendment is there, in part, so that the government will have to respect/fear it’s citizens. The founding fathers new that men are capable of abusing power. They tried to prevent the future leaders of this country from having absolute power. In their reasoning, they wanted the citizens to be able to rise up against a tyrannical government, if need be, with force. I’m sure that despite their attempts at seeing possible problems in the future, they never dreamed that someone would simply kill as many people as they could. They made a mistake…

Much tighter gun control laws would be an achievable, more realistic goal. Couple that with improved mental health care, and we would reduce these mass shootings. I don’t see a realistic way to stop them all together…

The problem with guns, is the same problem with nuclear weapons. Our ability to hurt one another, has outpaced our ability to coexist. We are not advanced enough as society, to have such capabilities.

It’s obvious that the commitment required to repeal the amendment does not approach the fervor of the gun huggers. Our country presents some interesting lessons on the more obtuse aspects of democracy. As with health care, the gun issue is another one of those tests on just how ridiculous the suffering must become before the obvious is acknowledged. And @SQUEEKY2 is correct. In a land where guns outnumber people the slaughter will accelerate for years, ban or no ban. And while it is true that mental health receives particularly short shrift in the United States, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the glut of lethal weaponry in country renders it a simple matter for any one of us with stress or a bad day or any random thorn in our personna to let the rest of us feel our pain.

Politicians who wish to do so will go up against the huge lobbying budget of the NRA and other gun lobbying groups:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/taking-on-the-n-r-a

@SQUEEKY2 That is not what happened in Australia. we have a paradigm for banning private ownership of guns.

@Darth_Algar We have a sitting Supreme Court that views the 2nd Amendment as meaning any attempt at controlling gun ownership as unconstitutional. Until the 2nd Amendment is repealed or modified, any attempt at gun control will be in vain. Repealing the 2nd Amendment does not make guns illegal, it means they can be controlled.

So the problem is guns, not people?

@kritiper – how about people with really easy access to lots of guns?

@funkdaddy The problem is people, not guns. Guns do not infuse owners/users with the desire to kill.

Of course the problem is people—people with guns. Guns may not infuse users with the desire to kill, but they certainly make it easy to kill great numbers of people at great distances. They render killing both imperssonal and trivial. The gun makes it easy—TOO EASY

@kritiper – Everyone has the desire to kill at some point, most of the time they cool off.

When someone doesn’t have the means to kill readily available, they’re a lot more likely to cool off.

Put it to an extreme example, just bear with me. Imagine every adult has a button that would kill the closest 50 people instantly. Whatever method you want to imagine, the end result is 50 people die if someone decides to make it happen.

Of course society would be against people using their button, and the person would make the choice, but how many people would die because it’s simply too easy to kill others? Do you trust the people around you to make that decision?

Right now someone has proven they can kill 50+ people pretty easily and it keeps getting easier. Will the second amendment apply to weapons available 50 years from now? 100 years? When are we far enough removed from the original intent?

I’m not against you having a weapon, just realize it’s a weapon and what it was made for. If it was made to kill a lot of people quickly, then we need to talk about that.

@funkdaddy and @stanleybmanly Please don’t shoot me, I am only the messenger. And I’m just stating the facts…
If I want to kill somebody, I can find MANY different ways. I don’t need a gun to do it.
There are over 7.5 billion people on this planet when it can only handle 500 million. For the time being, what better way is there to get rid of the excess?? And why not make it easy??
People kill people. They always have. They always will. They will find a way! ANY way!Guns or no guns! (Not saying I like it anymore than you, just sayin’ ...)
Humanity will snuff itself out without guns soon enough, so no reason to talk about any distant (250 years or more) future.

@kritiper
“People kill people. They always have. They always will. They will find a way! ANY way!Guns or no guns! ”
Not all would be killers have the motivation to go through all the hoops.
And most then settle for a much less effective tool.
Recently a guy in Marseille stabbed to women to death. Sure, in theory, if he had put in the effort, he could have gotten an AK47, dozens of magazines of ammunition, hand grenades, and body armour. But he didn’t. Because it was too difficult, too much of a hurdle.
He settled on a knife, and managed to kill only 2 victims.
Which is pathetic compared to your white old guy’s 586.

Because I am using my first amendment right to bitch & moan. It makes me feel better. It’s like my thoughts and prayers. Plus I vote and sign petitions, but politicians care most about money and I do not have much of that.

How about just defining “militia” better? Currently, any single US citizen qualifies as a militia. It would be much harder for a real militia (e.g. police force, deputized citizen group, private security group, etc.) to go nuts and shoot up a bunch of people. Join a militia, learn gun safety, go patrol the streets – great.

Yes, yes, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Then why do so many more people kill people with guns in the US than any other country?

Are we just a particularly ill country? What are we going to do about that? Your party is trying to gut mental health care while also refusing to consider any stricter regulations on obtaining firearms.

Some percentage of the population is always going to be ill. Why are we making it so easy for them to commit murder?

As others said, someone with a knife cannot kill and injure 500+ people from the safety of their hotel room.

@kritiper You’re not actually arguing that murder is good because of overpopulation, are you?

Yes, I believe he is actually arguing that.

tongue in cheek (sarcasm)

@zenvelo You compared Australia to the states and it doesn’t have the horrific gun crimes the states do.
You know what else it has that the states do not?
1 A living minimum wage, shock even the low end workers can actually live on what they earn.
2 Universal health care for it’s citizens, people can actually get medical help and not be forced into financial ruin .
I totally agree that obtaining a gun is far to easy in the states, and stricter screening should start but these people will just buy the gun on the black market instead.
Hard drugs have been illegal for years and people have very little problem obtaining them.
The states have to start with providing mental health care to these people (but again that costs money, and we can’t have that)
And bring the low end workers up to a wage they can live on,( again that costs money and heaven forbid that might cut into the profit margin for the people at the top and we can’t have that can we?)
You know what else it has it doesn’t have nearly the population the states have.

@SQUEEKY2 Australia passed strict gun control after the Port Arthur massacre.

I don’t disagree that the US needs a decent minimum wage or universal healthcare. But we are not talking about that, we are talking about the rampant availability of guns in the US, and a strong lobby that thwarts any attempt to control it.

Don’t deflect the discussion. Guns are designed to kill. Gun Safety experts always say, “don’t point a gun at someone unless you intend to kill them”. They need to be regulated.

@Mariah Who said anything about murder?? I’m talking about killing. Humanity is a vermin, a pestilence, a germ, a virus. And we kill those, do we not??
@ragingloli Generally speaking, I was. With over 7 billion people too many on this planet, desperate times call for desperate measures. Of course, we could just let them starve to death. Would you prefer that??
“Oh, the humanity!”

@kritiper I guess you’re being serious, and not simply trying to be controversial… If so, please read opinions from scientists before declaring that 7 billion people exceeds the Earth’s carrying capacity. It doesn’t.

And the “humanity is a virus we all deserve to die” argument is so willfully myopic it’s absurd.

@Soubresaut A famous group of well known, intelligent scientists (whose group name I can’t remember at the moment) have erected a stone monument near Atlanta, Georgia, that states just exactly what I have repeated here. That 500 million people are the maximum amount of people that should be allowed on the planet.
So long as any human exists, ANY, the problem of (mass) killings will continue to exist. It is the nature of the beast. It is who and what we are.
Do you have a better idea? One with a 100% success outcome like mine?

If you google “amount of people the planet can sustain” you’ll see all kinds of answers by various groups (for example the Brookings Institute).

@kritiper _” A famous group of well known, intelligent scientists (whose group name I can’t remember at the moment) have erected a stone monument near Atlanta, Georgia, that states just exactly what I have repeated here. That 500 million people are the maximum amount of people that should be allowed on the planet.”

Good lord….

You’re referring to the “Georgia Guidestones” (in Elbert County, nowhere near Stone Mountain incidentally). And no, it was not a “famous group of well-known scientists” who built them. It was a lone kook with money to burn. Nothing more.

And sure, a massive killing off of a significant portion of the human populace would result in a lower number of mass killings (1 is indeed a lower number than hundreds). But claiming that as successful would be about like killing every homeless person then boasting that you’ve reduced homelessness to 0.

Hey @kritiper I actually agree that the Earth is overpopulated. But because I’m not a fucking psychopath, I’m in favor of reducing population by having fewer kids, not by killing existing people off.

I’m going to have a thousand children and raise them all to be kind and creative.

If I believe we aren’t viruses, or vermin, or a pestilence, then I have to believe there are enough good people to counter the evil we do. It’s suddenly popular to believe children are a problem. I disagree.

Focusing on children (whether “yours” or not) is the only way to solve the problems we don’t know about yet. Raise kind, creative people who understand our problems and the world improves with each generation.

The alternatives are all worse.

^Well said. @Mariah has a decent strategy too though. Whether people are good or not, they still use resources…

I’m with @funkdaddy. Raise all the children you want as long as they are kind and productive.
The problem is not too many people. It is too many people who are crazy and/or useless.

I think it should be repealed too, but I don’t think gun ownership should be illegal, just very restricted.

You should see the hoops I have to jump through in Canada to have firearms, especially handguns.

^It’s not just Canada. Some states have much stricter laws…

I don’t think Kansas has ANY laws any more.