Originally Posted by Jim in CT
Agreed. But another cornerstone of our society, is the belief that your freedom to swing your arms in the air, ends where the tip of my nose begins. It's very clear that the founders never meant for any of the freedoms expressed in the Bill Of Rights, to be limitless.
The Founders meant, in fact clearly expressed in other documents, that the Constitution as a whole was created for a virtuous people. Freedom, as a foundational principle for a virtuous people, can only be achieved with the responsibility of all to respect all other's freedom. Their is no constitutionally prescribed limit to the freedom they envisioned. The Second Amendment basically limits government, not the people. The freedom to keep and bear arms is implied by that limitation on government to be without prescription, not to be granted but naturally inherited. The only limitation on any such natural right is not against the freedom as practiced by a virtuous people, but, obviously, only limitations against the corrupt persons who don't respect natural and virtuous freedom, but abuse it to their own ends to deprive others of their unlimited right. Those who break that natural compact, obviously, are not part of it.
I would never, ever support a ban on handguns, hunting rifles, or things that can reasonably be argued are for personal self defense. When we start talking about things that I think that's a different conversation.
As I said in my previous reply to you, the end goal is the elimination of the Second Amendment (as well as the Constitution itself). Your comment here is a perfect example of denying what the amendment is about. As uncomfortable as it is to you, it is precisely about the people being able to defend themselves against government which would, no doubt, require weapons that you say 'bring the killing potential to military-level numbers".
I concede that any bans are a limitation on freedom, there's no way to deny that. But the pro-gun side is refusing to concede that bans can have any value whatsoever. I don't get that argument. If you want to claim that it's not worth giving up the tools of war to save a few lives, well I disagree with that, but at least it's intellectually honest. To say out loud that bans won't help? I mean, we know that some bans are essentially worthless, especially in reducing garden-variety gun crime in urban areas, where handguns are available everywhere, so it's very easy to acquire the tools to kill a person or two.
Mass-shootings are a completely different problem, requiring a completely different fix. The body count will be very much driven by the tools that are available, which is why the Vegas shooter didn't choose to open fire with the Marlin .22 that my Dad taught me to shoot with. If that was all he had available to him, he could not have possibly shot 600 people. It's not possible.
Mass shootings are, indeed, a different problem. They occur far, far, more rarely than "garden variety gun crime." And that garden variety accounts, overall for far, far greater numbers of deaths than mass shootings. And the garden variety types have had the opportunities to use the big bad weapons. But the shock of killing lots of people at one time stuns us into thinking that the "gun problem" is about the type of weapons used. If you're intellectually and objectively honest, you would realize that the hand gun, in terms of numbers killed (which seems to be your criteria), is far more responsible for numbers killed. So if we use that Socratic Method, and keep asking on how to fix the "problem" of numbers killed by guns, eventually we'll have to admit that hand guns should be banned to the public. What would be left of the Second Amendment after that would be . . . nothing.
I'm not saying we ban everything except the Marlin .22. I'm saying, at the very least, we need to be able to say out loud that if certain things were banned, it might make it harder to kill huge numbers of people in a short span of time. But we can't agree on that. So a conversation isn't possible.
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