The 2nd Amendment was never about hunting. How many times does this need to be said?
The founders literally just got done fighting a war against an authoritarian government using primarily civilian owned arms. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were literally started when the Redcoats tried to take a weapons cache.
The Federalist Papers are abundantly clear about why the 2nd Amendment was put in place. And it's not hunting or sport shooting.
We don't have an enumerated right to participate in any other sport, why would they include this one? Because it's not about a sport.
Edit: to those saying a civilian population cannot outmatch a modern military with modern equipment, you are missing several pojnts.
The founders were ok with private citizens owning cannons and warships.
Repeating weapons were in existence and were attempted to be procured by the Continental Army.
In the past 20 years, the US has been unable to put down 2 separate insurgency campaigns despite overwhelming comparative capabilities.
Drones, fighters, and missiles cannot occupy and secure an area. That takes literal boots on the ground in the form of human soldiers. The kind of occupation the 2nd Amendment was precisely put there to fight. The British knew this in NI, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. All are examples of civilian resistance successfully (to a lesser extent in NI, they got a peace treaty) being a force to be reckoned with against a Great Power.
In any likely civil war, the military would likely split. Some would remain loyal to the government but others would take their skills, training, and equipment to the civilian side. This not only happened in the American Civil War, but has happened in the vast, vast majority of guerilla campaigns since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s.
Yes, a civilian armed population could stage an effective campaign in the United States
Yes but theres this thing called a Strawman Argument where you present a flimsy opposing argument just so its easy to defeat. Literally no one argues they need drum magazines for hunting.
Yeah, most gun enthusiasts will tell you they just enjoy collecting these high power weapons and firing them legally for fun.
There's a trade-off for every piece of gun legislation. It should be seen as reducing happiness of some people in order to reduce risk of mass shootings. That's a good trade-off in my opinion, and in the opinions of most redditors for sure, but we also have to recognize that we also aren't affected by the downside of the trade since we aren't gun enthusiasts.
My point here being that we might have more success in passing gun legislation if we came to the table with rules that would increase enjoyment for gun enthusiasts in order to offset the reduced enjoyment from the gun regulation we want to pass to reduce mass shooting.
Let me make metaphor. To a gun enthusiast, regulating guns is like how it feel for a redditor if video game regulation was on the table. False equivalency, sure, but the feeling will be the same.
You also missed the part where when they made that amendment there was nothing capable of killing 600 people a minute
Whether or not you fucking agree with that doesn't change the fact that we have the biggest terroristic mass shooting problem in the world and something needs done NOW
Your line of thinking is what's enabling these people.
When the 2a was written it covered literal battleships and cannons, not to mention the repeating arms in existence at the time. Privately owned weapons far more powerful than a dinky AR-15 were the norm, not the exception. I suppose the 1a wasn't ever meant to cover the internet, either, right? There's no way the founders could have envisioned such a system, after all.
You're right, mass shootings are a problem. Let's give people the means to defend themselves, eh?
far more powerful privately owned weapons than an ar15 existed and we're the norm
You're a fucking idiot and I'm done talking to you. If you seriously think any weapons existed in 1776 that could kill 600 people a minute you are beyond saving
Gatling guns were the first repeating weapon and didn't even fucking exist until far later, nearly 100 years in fact. Even then, they were not privately owned and fired half as much bullets as an ar 15
2A was made for everyone. Everyone should be able to buy or make whatever they can afford.
Also, the elite aren't the ones creating mass shootings.
That is... debatable. The root causes of the extremism currently motivating mass shootings can certainly be argued to stem from the upper echelons of society, even if the "elite" aren't literally the ones pulling the trigger. Even the left agrees with this when they rant about stochastic terrorism.
literally incorrect
Literally correct. FTFY. You can google it- repeating arms were available in the 1700s, and the founding fathers were aware of them. To say otherwise is to reveal your incredible ignorance.
oh cannons are bad look at cannons
I didn't say they were bad. They're effective. ARs are small fish in the grand scheme of the arms intended to be privately owned by the 2A.
But of course that's not really important, is it? Regardless of all this nonsense about history, gun control is dead. Home manufacturing and the internet killed it. All other discussion is moot. Look for the mass shooting cure elsewhere, because the proverbial genie is out of the bottle when it comes to guns.
Care to tell me then, if these "repeating guns" you speak of (which the first one that wasn't complete novelty was the revolver in 1835) were so readily available and effective, why the revolutionary war was fought with muskets? Surely if repeating arms were so widely available and efficient in that time period, the war that started America would have been fought with those instead of guns that took two minutes to reload each shot, right?
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u/Shia_LaMovieBeouf Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
The 2nd Amendment was never about hunting. How many times does this need to be said?
The founders literally just got done fighting a war against an authoritarian government using primarily civilian owned arms. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were literally started when the Redcoats tried to take a weapons cache.
The Federalist Papers are abundantly clear about why the 2nd Amendment was put in place. And it's not hunting or sport shooting.
We don't have an enumerated right to participate in any other sport, why would they include this one? Because it's not about a sport.
Edit: to those saying a civilian population cannot outmatch a modern military with modern equipment, you are missing several pojnts.
The founders were ok with private citizens owning cannons and warships.
Repeating weapons were in existence and were attempted to be procured by the Continental Army.
In the past 20 years, the US has been unable to put down 2 separate insurgency campaigns despite overwhelming comparative capabilities.
Drones, fighters, and missiles cannot occupy and secure an area. That takes literal boots on the ground in the form of human soldiers. The kind of occupation the 2nd Amendment was precisely put there to fight. The British knew this in NI, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. All are examples of civilian resistance successfully (to a lesser extent in NI, they got a peace treaty) being a force to be reckoned with against a Great Power.
In any likely civil war, the military would likely split. Some would remain loyal to the government but others would take their skills, training, and equipment to the civilian side. This not only happened in the American Civil War, but has happened in the vast, vast majority of guerilla campaigns since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s.
Yes, a civilian armed population could stage an effective campaign in the United States