Edit: I guess my initial comment was more about a cultural/legal framework for reasonably reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in the general populace.
So that's how we end up with people calling hunting rifles "assault rifles/weapons" or "military grade weaponry". It's like dude a freaking blunderbuss is military grade weaponry. The most popular hunting rounds in the USA were originally designed for military use.
That said, the lethality advantage of semiautomatic weapons over manually operated is obvious.
Assault rifles have automatic (or select-fire) capabilities. One trigger pull can produce many bullets.
Semi-automatic rifles, which were later called "assault weapons," can only produce one bullet per trigger pull. What makes them semi-automatic is that they automatically reload after firing. Many other types of guns also do this (eg double-action revolvers) and many take minimal movement to reload (eg lever-action and bolt-action rifles).
This is a very big difference. A commercial semiautomatic rifle is only slightly more lethal than a bolt-action rifle. An assault rifle is much more lethal than both.
Also, if you watch videos of actual military operations, you will find the 3-round burst used very frequently because it is a lot more lethal than semiautomatic mode. Only special ops troops tend to use semiautomatic mode for fighting (since they are better marksmen and are concerned about noise). Police also only use semiautomatic weapons, because they don't have access to automatic weapons.
It's pedantic but while regular officers don't deploy full-auto weapons, police departments certainly have them.
For your average soldier a automatic gun is just a waste of bullets. Which is why elite soldiers never use full auto mode: it is never a useful mode for them. It is still useful, but you don't need much training to run a gun in full auto mode, so generals put the non-elite troops on the automatic guns. (though sometimes an elite soldier will volunteer for the automatic duty - it is kind of fun to chew threw tens of thousands of bullets in one trigger pull)
(Hasn't the US military actually moved away from fully-automatic weapons for regular troops in favour of three-round-burst? So it ends up as a very close convergence)
The actual story here is that regular hunting calibers tend to be significantly more powerful to maximize the probability of a humane (one-shot; ideally, instant) kill. In fact, many states don't allow hunting deer with .223 on the basis that it's not lethal enough. For similar reasons, most jurisdictions require hunters to use some kind of expanding bullet, whereas ARs are far more typically used with cheap military-style FMJ ammo.
I use .308 Win, probably the most common calibre for red deer hunting here, but you meet people using fancy powerful rounds like 7mm Rem Mag or .338 Lapua.
The damage to this country's social fabric done by the feds due to the Ruby Ridge and Waco massacres really cannot be understated. A LOT of people looked at that and said "ain't gonna be me, we'll kill em if they try that shit" and went and armed themselves, their families, and their neighbors to the teeth.
As they say, it's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you.
I’m not sure what changed, maybe the ar15 patent expired, they’ve always been around just not that popular. Then, all of a sudden, they were everywhere.
Military weapons also generically have the advantage of having been tested for ruggedness, and not having to worry about being able to find parts or ammo in a decade.
Are you expecting a WW2 French Revolution style situation where the moral resistance will be stronger because of the unregistered firearms?
Most of these guns are bought on credit or debit cards, so the information about big ticket gun buyers probably unregulated available through Palantir or whoever.
And if FOIA is really the problem (not the government knowing) then the registry could be made legally exempt from FOIA. The government keeps databases including all of your income (IRS) and your religion (the Census) but random journalists can't get the information.
It seems like evidence that a registry is fine: apparently even when a registry is public it didn't result in the owners being "targeted", so a private registry visible only to law enforcement would be surely even safer than that.
Imagine whatever opinion you might have that is controversial, even mildly so. Now imagine that a new story about how that opinion makes you dangerous to society also includes your name and address in it. I think the harm here need not be a physical attack on someone, intentional intimidation is a mild form of violence itself.
I reread the cnn link again and I still don't know about the article you're referring to; from the text of the CNN article it sounds like it was solely a map and all of the other quotes are from people worried about the potential harm like burglaries. The CNN article doesn't actually even say the names or specific addresses of the gun owners was published, it only describes a map with dots.
Overall I'm not sure that that map is actually more risky than a map of where the atheists live, and we don't stop collecting that info on the census. The census data has never been leak published to my knowledge.
So even if it is true that example of a published map was a horrible safety violation, that only means that the data shouldn't be available to journalists, which is different than saying the data shouldn't be allowed to be known by anyone in government. The census and IRS are examples of the government being able to maintain secrets, so I don't buy the idea that it would be inevitably leaked if a gun registry had similar legal protections.
And it doesn't seem to support some risk of evil powerful people who are going to do something nefarious with this data once they get into power, which is what the thread above is about.
It's the same reason why some European countries don't include race or religion in their national IDs. When the Nazi's took over, the existing governments registry of individuals made is real easy to track down all the people they wanted to eliminate.
(The registry was eventually scraped because of non-compliance, less than 25% of estimated guns were never registered).
https://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/25/us/new-york-gun-permit-ma...
At least in the United States, sadly that ship has sailed as SCOTUS precedent repeatedly emphasizes the 2nd Amendment as a purely individual right. The so-called preamble discussing states and militias is now formally a dead letter.
With the current court, yes, but that interpretation only dates back to 2008. It would be much less of a reversal than we just saw for a future court to find that Heller was decided in error, and unlike Alito’s pretense of research there’s far more historical precedent supporting the collective interpretation going back at least as far as what the people drafting the second amendment discussed when they did so, as well as two centuries of general agreement on that point.
And, also, the prefatory clause of the text of the Amendment itself.
So that actually aligns with it being an individual right.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-well-regulated-mil...
Your argument sounds like “we denied black people rights in the past so there for the 2nd amendment right doesn’t apply to everyone.”
Weird argument.
You are focussing on what the militia is (and erroneously pretend that it has changed over time; it still essentially the same thing, see, e.g., the codification in Title 10 of the US Code.)
But my point is about what the second amendment says the militia is necessary for, not what the militia is. Because that's the part that is relevant to the claim that the 2nd Amendment provides a right of the type that should be applied by the 14th Amendment to be protected against the states or rather than that explicitly has a role for the benefit of the states and to which the incorporation logic of the 14th Amendment does not apply.
Incorporation of rights protected against federal encroachment by the Bill of Rights against the states isn't universal (the requirement of indictment from the 5th Amendment is not incorporated, for instance), even for rights that are expressly individual rights. Incorporation is a separate question.
Stare decisis is critically important, but when it comes to substantive law the fact is that historically decisions don't have staying power unless there's some internalization of the underlying legal logic. Liberal justices walked away from Douglas' phrasing almost immediately and were never able to replace it with anything.
I never had a problem with penumbras. It's as apt a description as anyone could conjure to refer to positive rights which exist by implication. And in fact usage of that term goes back to jurists far more esteemed than Douglas. Conservatives have long tried to use the 10th Amendment for similar effect, but that likewise has failed, and frankly as an analytic device "penumbras" works much better.
I used to think Kennedy's "dignity" reasoning in Obergefell v. Hodges was awkward, but upon closer inspection of broader legal theory he's actually drawing upon a vein of jurisprudence that could become a cornerstone of American legal theory in this area. It's much more well developed outside the U.S., but that doesn't mean it's not consonant with American jurisprudence. Yet I haven't seen many law review articles, let alone case decisions, try to further develop this principle. I think like penumbras, liberal jurists are inclined to roll their eyes at it, even though they haven't yet got to the point where they literally roll their eyes at it. I suspect Hodges will fall quickly, unless Gorsuch is able to refashion a theory based on sex discrimination much like he did for Title VII in Bostock v. Clayton County. (But that's a stretch as Gorsuch claimed to be using a plain text approach to statutory interpretation.)
Thing is, we have the constitutional amendment process for a reason - it is supposed to be a living document, true enough, but it's supposed to be updated through political process, not judicial. The problem, of course, is that the bar for amendments is so high that they become impossible in practice; but it's also impossible to fix that without an amendment. Thus, so long as enough political forces believe that the status quo is preferable to other options, it'll remain that way, and we'll see increasingly contorted Supreme Court decisions to reach goals of whatever party controls it at any given moment.
That leads to another problem, which is that SCOTUS, and the system as a whole, rapidly lose legitimacy. At this point, it already doesn't matter much whether any given decision is legally sound or not - it will be supported or opposed consistently along partisan political lines. The same people will castigate the judges for "inventing" rights in one decision, then blame them for not buying into the rights "invented" by other judges. I don't know how much longer we have left, but this passage from Federalist Papers (#22) comes to mind:
"... two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third."
Given the ages of quite a few justices, the current court will remain mostly unchanged for decades to come.
It's a non-starter.
I think it’s quite plausible that there’d be significant public support for a reform package: pin the number of justices to the number of lower courts (we have 9 because that’s how many there were the last time that changed), add term limits for new justices, and adopting the ethics rules which other federal judges are required to follow.
You’re telling me the situation is more contentious than the 30’s when FDR was trying to pass his New Deal during the greatest economic collapse the US has ever known?
No. Your reply and your hyperbole suggest you don’t know much about the court’s history.
If you want to do better, note that I was talking about the legitimacy of the court itself, which is critical to an institution with a great deal of inferred power which is not explicitly spelled out. The FDR-era court did not have a justice whose legitimacy was dubious. Similarly, you could look at the various New Deal rulings for examples which completely broke with long-standing precedent or relied on cherry-picked history if you want to argue that those rulings were not unusual.
If it was legitimate why would you need to stack the court. A legitimate court’s decisions would be accepted, not changed by adding judges.
And the reason why the idea to stack was defeated was because it was viewed as a run around judicial independence (e.g. making it less legitimate).
New Deal proponents didn’t like those rulings but there was no question that any of the judges hadn’t been properly appointed, nor was there a huge break with past precedent on the same issue.
We’re living in a time where a majority of the court are acting in blatantly politicized ways, interfering on behalf of their party to prevent fair elections and flipping alleged legal theories whenever necessary to produce their desired outcome.
That is incredibly risky for an institution which has considerable power on the grounds that it not play games like that.
The same can be said today. Supreme Court appointments have always been political. Hell being "Borked" got its name from political games during Reagan.
Just because you don't think the process was "proper" doesn't change the fact they were all confirmed by the senate, as per the "proper" process.
Funny how many people complain about the politics of Supreme Court nominees only when it works against their own political views.
Jpow: Hold my beer.
But, conversely, the very notion that the federal government would even be able to ban state citizens individually from possessing arms would be just as alien to the authors - the constitution simply didn't grant that kind of power to it back then, not even close.
OTOH the notion that the right to keep and bear arms was widely perceived as individual by the American society as a whole has solid historical basis. Here's one simple thing anyone can do to verify this: go look up the list of 2A-like clauses in state constitutions, along with dates they were adopted:
https://gun-control.procon.org/state-constitutional-right-to...
You might notice that the earliest examples often specifically talk about individual rights, e.g.:
“The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned” (Pennsylvania, 1790; Kentucky, 1792)
Such language becomes rarer over time, though, until we get to the end of the last century.
Here are two books which cover the period discussion and the structure of the militia in early America. It’s a surprisingly under-covered part of our history.
https://www.amazon.com/Citizens-Arms-Militia-American-Societ...
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-well-regulated-mil...
The other thing we have to remember is how much more powerful modern weapons are. At the time this was written there was no concept of some lone wolf being able to mow down a crowd - they’d be limited to a first volley with the loaded, not especially precise or long-ranged, weapons they brought with them before getting subdued. The founders were thinking in terms of armies because period firearms were most effective in large coordinated groups.
There are some firearms part manufacturers that utilize 3d printing for part production. The company that made the first fully printed .45 1911 handgun uses printers to produce parts for sale.
I grew up in the rural midwest so my firearm experience goes back to the single digits of age. It was expected I would take the firearms and hunter safety courses that the state provided. I believe that such courses should at the very least be the minimum required for anyone purchasing a gun.