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It's more that absolutely nothing is done at all. Not even Sandy Hook produced any change whatsoever. A prominent argument was that the entire thing was a fake for the purpose of banning guns, tacitly admitting that reality did merit some kind of change.
So at this point it's more of an indicator that politics has utterly broken down. We can't meaningfully discuss a limit case such as you bring up, because the answer is predetermined. Between a Supreme Court composed two-thirds of candidates vetted to allow no gun restrictions of any kind ever, and a set of checks and balances in the Congress that requires a super majority for any legislation, the argument is permanently decided in favor of "doing nothing". Not just on this issue but on every issue.
Compared to that worrying about Zombie George III reimposing the Stamp Acts doesn't seem much like worrying about.
Its unfortunate that you are left with only reactionaries to offer alternatives, because by nature they are predisposed to telling you to pound sand. We could have a more healthy relationship with guns, I think it starts with acknowledging the role pharmaceutical drugs and investigating their effects more publically. I would also support any kind of community work in teaching responsible firearm operation, and more generally promoting high ethical standards of conduct in everyday life.
That said, the safest place I inhabit is work, with its fences, badge readers, and security guards. The second safest place is at home, with cameras, alarms and locks. Paying administrators over security guards is a gross mismanagement of government money.
Except they have great sway over definitions. They dictate what "arms" actually means. They dictate whether that word includes entire classes of weapons. The court currently protects only guns, but a small reinterpretation of "arms" could easily expand it to include bladed or explosive weapons, both of which are not currently protected. Does the 2nd cover flamethrowers? SCOTUS gets to make that decision.
The paperwork required is the trivial part. I have friends that, essentially for a laugh, filed for and received every Federal approval required to acquire basically the entire range of conventional weaponry. It had a similar level of scrutiny as applying for Global Entry at the airport. If you exercised this, you still need to comply with all the industrial regulations that apply to non-weapons with similar properties, which is expensive and inconvenient.
If those other conventional weapons were covered as "arms" under the 2nd, then those other boring regulations don't matter. The fact that those regs even exist is because so many weapons are specifically not covered as arms. I can own an AR-15. I cannot own a switchblade. I can own a 9mm semiautomatic, but I cannot own a small pen gun. I can own a short shotgun (coachgun) but I cannot own a crossbow in New York. Walk into a Nevada store with a handgun on your hip or an AR over your shoulder and nobody will bat an eye. But carry a sword and you will be arrested. It was only a couple years ago that laws banning "chain sticks" were struck down. SCOTUS has consistently narrowed the 2nd to only protect guns. Most ever other weapon is open for whatever reg the government wants to enact.
Sadly, since the Dick act, Congress has defined “well-regulated” as “yeah, whatever.” Nevertheless, since that was Congressional intent it satisfies the well-regulated requirement.
https://time.com/5169210/us-gun-control-laws-history-timelin...
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Grammarians have been puzzling over this text for many years.
It would help if someone could find another phrase in the Bill of Rights that refers to, or even alludes to, the primacy of the rights of the state (whether "Congress" or a collective state-sanctioned "militia") over those of the citizenry.
There don't seem to be any such phrases, which lends a lot of credence to those who argue that the preface to the Second Amendment is just that -- prefatory, with no functional or prescriptive aspect whatsoever. The Bill of Rights is simply the wrong place to look for rules that grant, rather than restrict, governmental authority.
1. In the beginning everything in the Federal Constitution--and all the amendments--were understood to be only a restriction on the Federal government.
2. Many restrictions on the federal government were created out of states' concerns about it "going bad" and trying to ensure their own autonomy was protected.
3. The Second Amendment was drafted during the Articles of Confederation, at time when every state was required to support their own state-militia with arms/materiel, including guns-on-wheels that could be pulled by a horse, and the legislature had to appoint the upper-ranks.
So in combination, I argue the Second Amendment was wrongly "incorporated", abusing its original legislative intent of preserving a degree of state military autonomy. So on one hand, that means individual states can impose much stronger restrictions if they want, and on the other hand the federal government can't complain if your state lets you tow around a flak-cannon behind your truck.
So it's not so clean cut as you'd think.
While this has surface appeal, this theory of "gun ownership as bulwark against oppression" falls apart when you examine both how the US still manages to exert power over its populace and how democracies where guns are much harder to get continue to function just fine.
exert power != oppression
Self-oppression. For all the fearmongering, the US population is clearly able to install random people into high office and rewrite the rules as they see fit. Both Obama and Trump are clear evidence that you don't need to be from established political families to gain power. Literally any idiot can be elected should the people want them. Many are.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
This is a great way for one to learn about Moloch - the by far greatest threat humanity is facing. Moloch is the personified generalization of all multiplayer games, where the payoff matrix looks like this:
| v Reward / Choice > | X | Y |
|------------------------+----------+-----------|
| For myself, short-term | good | bad |
| For all, longer-term | very bad | very good |
Moloch is the common core of all the big problems humanity is facing, problems we seem unable to solve - surveillance economy, inequality, climate change, you name it.
Unfortunately, recognizing the presence of the ancient demon's namesake, and realizing the gravity of the situation, kind of kills the mood - which is why most discourse on those topics is rather unsophisticated and dominated by those who don't, as you put it, "engage this part of their brain", whether because they don't know how to use it, or because it's more fun/profitable to not do it.
The biggest problem is people saying this, that we're unable to succeed. They are serving our enemies - spreading despair is so obviously a bad idea that it's a fundamental of psyops (not that the parent is doing psyops; my point is that it's what an enemy would do).
And it's false; it's transparently false if we examine the evidence for a moment. History is filled with people sacrificing themselves, widely, for the greater good. The simple example is warfare, but lots of people have low-paying or lower-paying jobs because they want to do good, contribute to the world.
It's good news - the news is actually good (I know that totally violates social norms to say!): The good people far outnumber the bad, they have the power, the ability; human nature is on their side; they just need to wake up and get going - stop sitting around pop-theorizing about despair - and many of the worst problems will be solved.
Funny, the French seem to have no trouble standing up against their government while the armed US nuts seem ever so compliant. Maybe it isn’t the guns.
The US government is unlikely to carpet bomb its own territory even after hypothetically sliding into tyranny because it would presumably want territory to rule afterwards. What is left is intense urban fighting which we’ve seen in Iraq or wilderness fighting in poor terrain like Afghanistan. It doesn’t end quickly so the cost is a deterrent.
I wouldnt suggest anyone willingly enter an armed conflict with the government for a variety of reasons. For example, you are likely being played, after Maos revolution all the revolutionaries got sent to the hills to be worked to death. Another one would be your own information horizon being manipulated, youve just walked into Gretchen whitmers office thinking there is a huge militia ready to follow in your footsteps, you only need to light the match! Violence sucks, blood calls for more blood and errodes the social fabric; there are USSR officials still collecting pensions in exchange for getting out of the way. Or we could get nuked.
So yes, it does require some more forethought than "weve got guns so we are just going to fight the government", however there already exists an understanding of this, evidenced by the fact that they are only catching the mentally stunted in entrapment schemes.
They will do so in war as denying it to their enemy, but not with M.A.D. So ordinary people having guns has nothing to do with war, except as a deterrent.
As far as an armed group in the united states doing that, I think we are a long way off from that. Although I would say democracy is structurally flawed, so long as the american public believes the foundation myth of their representation holds, no such thing is possible. The easiest way then to prevent an armed revolution, is to provide better transparency to elections. You dont even really need to make the elections fair; for instance im pretty sure republican voters will go on accepting that their civil and economic rights are trampled on; Democratic voters will go on accepting disfunctional criminal justice, healthcare, and education systems; so long as we arent playing games with who and how votes are tallied and what level of transparency we have over that process. Breaking that cycle, where the vast majority would really rather unwittingly vote away prosperity, requires a different type of revolution.
The game theory is that it is likely that most of the time successful Revolutions are backed by powerful opposing States or quasi-States. Any others get squashed, but likely most often don't get off of the ground to begin with.
What is the actual reality that says now there's a "balance of power" between the people and their government in the US?
How did people or groups challenging it with their guns (or even peacefully) because they thought of it as an "oppressive government" fared?
Well there was an American revolution that gave us our nation in the first place. I’d say it fared mightily well.
And I never said it was fair, I said it was a balance; the balance is very clearly biased towards the government, but they do not enjoy such power for complete and violent subjugation. They rely instead on propaganda, I would argue that is the foundation of their power in fact; the creation myth of our government, that the public interest is represented, keep a critical mass unwittingly subsurvient.
Guns do not make an army. Should 20 million AR-carrying Americans rise up, the "government" would be the least scared. The day after they stormed all the state houses, they would fractionize and turn against one another.
And how would those ar-15 bros would fare against an organized, professional army, with training, logistics, and coordination, not to mention air support, tanks, and the state on its side?
Not to mention most of those millions of gun owners would need to be on the same side to begin with, to count together.
>perhaps here you will find the reason you enjoy more liberties than someone living in china or north korea
I doubt it, First Amendment aside, European countries are freer than the US in more substantial ways (for starters, they don't have the kind of kafka-esque over extention of the law in the US, or the biggest ratio of prison vs general population, SWAT-ized trigger-happy police, and so on), and they don't have guns at home, except the ocassional shooting rifle.
Depends on the terms of engagement and the makeup of the professional army.
Are ar-15 bros going to effectively take and hold territory? Maybe on a temporary basis, there's a lot of potential objectives that are regularly barely defended. But it's pretty easy to roll out the national guard or whoever to flush people out if desired.
Can ar-15 bros be a significant problem for occupying forces? Almost certainly yes.
If you wanted or needed to remove this group or their weapons from a territory, it's going to be a major challenge, and highly disruptive to the other occupants, and that's going to inspire more people to take up arms. This is insurgency 101.
The government doesn't have a safe harbor they can operate from in a civil war, particularly one that has no clear geographic split. This severely curtails the use of heavy ordnance due to the importance of not killing the uninvolved populace, since that would only encourage them to also question the legitimacy of the government.
As a practical matter, it is not possible to control the US via military force short of indiscriminately murdering most of the population, and a domestic military force doesn't even have that as a realistic option. Everyone knows this, so this is a deeply unserious scenario and the government would avoid precipitating it at all costs.
The whole thing is just implausible.
The american public has no guns, only the occasional shooting rifle. Did I do it right? You do not distinguish between freedom and liberty, those liberties are at times suspended. Things are definitely not ok in the united states, but thats not what guns are there to stop at this stage of our political system. The most valuable tools in the day to day are encryption and censorship resistant systems.
False dichotomy. There are many nations that have strict gun control laws and plenty of liberty.
Or like the fact that the US has the largest prison population (percentage wise) than any western country, by a huge factor? And where over a million people are convicted of felony per year?
There is nothing logically inconsistent with saying disarming the native population was a tactic used to further subjugate them, as an example. Racially motivated violence has almost unilaterally been the causal result of insufficiently armed minorities. Im all for letting non violent offenders out of prison.
False dichotomy. There are plenty of nations that have strict gun control laws and plenty of liberty.
I hope we can evolve into a community that is consistently curious and thoughtful about consequences of policy decisions in various game-theoretical concepts as you describe.