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Agreed, but it seems to me that empirical evidence shows that letting people make more of their own economic decisions clearly leads to much better economic outcomes, in general, than centralized economic control. I agreed with that ten years ago and I still agree with it today. To me the evidence for that seems overwhelming. However, when it comes to guns I am not so sure. Is it really the US' gun rights that are a major factor for why it, for example, the US government does not suppress free speech as much as England's government does? Or is it the explanation for that more of a cultural thing?
Also note that I am not advocating for the government to make all decisions for people. My attitude about the 2nd Amendment is more that I no longer believe that it is necessarily the best idea of gun ownership to be available to basically everyone except felons and people who have been proven to be mentally unstable. I think it might be better to revise the 2nd Amendment so that gun ownership is restricted to a significantly smaller subset of the citizenry that it is today. Not along lines of "what politics do they support", but more along the lines of "how likely are these people to be likely to use these guns purely for defense rather than in an attempt to obtain profit". Not necessarily saying that it is realistically possible for any laws to make such delineations well, but I am just trying to explain my current thinking.
While I probably have the same terminal values as you do here, this feels like wishcasting.
If the 2nd Amendment were to be cast aside, we wouldn't get a newer, better 2nd Amendment. We'd get a wholesale ban on guns like they have in the UK, Australia, or Japan.
To put it another way... we should be very careful about casting aside long-established norms. Because when we do, we will not end up at some ideal, better place. We will end up wherever the regime wants to take us. There is no world in which you get to have a gun but the people you dislike do not.
Just to point out the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns. A shotgun license is pretty straightforward to get. Rifles slightly less so. Handguns are generally banned except perhaps ironically back home in Northern Ireland.
Semi-auto rifles (ie. the one thing you need to give authoritarian overreach the potential to cause pain to said authorities; the Right Arm of the Free World, if you will) are AIUI completely banned in useful calibres?
Again depends on locality, but in England I believe that's kind of accurate. You can have self-loading .22 rifles but nothing in a higher caliber. You can also have lever action rifles so you can cos-play as your favorite Wild West hero.
But given most people don't bother to apply for gun licenses, I wouldn't imagine being allowed AR-15's or whatever would make much of a difference in the populace's ability to fight the government. You would still only have a very small number of people.
Remember this is not the US, the culture is not the same.
I know, but neither is it the same in Canada, and lots and lots of people have various self-loading rifles -- they are super-fun, and there's a case to be made that a suppressed .223 semi-auto would be much more effective and humane for a lot of the hunting in the UK than what's currently in use. (much moreso than for Canadian use cases if I'm being honest -- also we aren't allowed suppressors)
Even if not many people actually own the things, their potential existence constrains governments -- the 'firearms threat' associated with the trucker protests turned out to be mostly non-existent, but you can bet your ass that the presence of a bunch of yucky blue-collars who happened to be unarmed this time hanging around the seat of government got some wheels turning on how far the population can be pushed.
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Do you believe that the UK has a functional right to self-defense?
Yes indeed. Though largely you can't want a gun for those purposes. Again excepting Northern Ireland where you can get a firearms license for that reason alone.
Edit: Though this has nothing to do with the correction that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns. The rest of jeroboams post may or may not be true, but that particular statement is straightforwardly incorrect.
UK has duty to retreat, carrying any weapon is illegal, pepper spray and stunners are illegal and famously the pensioner who shot someone in his own home was jailed.
What right to self defense?
Tony Martin did shoot one of the burglars in the back with a gun he did not have a license for. Even in the US shooting someone in the back as they run away may find you having trouble with a self-defense plea.
I've been in three violent altercations in my life, all in the UK, all where I was defending myself. In all three I called the cops, and in all three the cops did not arrest me, but either arrested or attempted to arrest the attacker. Now none of these involved guns or weapons (other than a pint glass in one case), but that doesn't stop them being self-defense.
Edit: and the duty to retreat was removed in 2008. Then in 2013 the standard for self-defence in one's home was improved from not being unreasonable to not being grossly disproportionate.
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I'd have to look up how things are in the UK, but Europe is pretty staunchly against self defense, and I haven't heard anything that would indicate the UK is any different.
IIRC there are situations where self-defence is allowed, but as @FCfromSSC implied there's no functional right to self-defence; if you have a gun to hand when someone goes active shooter, I think you're allowed to return fire... but you 99.99% of the time don't have a gun to hand if you're following the law, because you're not allowed to take a gun (or a knife or armour) with you for the purposes of self-defence, which makes the point moot.
Forget guns, a lot of Europe has this idea of "proportional force" which requires you to make constant legal evaluations as you're fighting for your life, resulting in cases like this where people watch helplessly as an attacker scales a ladder to assault them in their own home (there's a more disturbing video version of this somewhere that I can't find now, because all searches suck now).
Is that because of the legal framework or because most modern people are very unfamiliar with violence and hesitant to engage in it? I heavily suspect the victim there was not worrying about the law.
My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that a lot of middle class people whether in the UK or US shy away from violence even in self-defence, not because of legal worries, but because they have never really had to engage in it.
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Sure. You've established that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns, I'm trying to get to what they do have and how to describe it. What's the optimal encapsulation of the socio-political position of firearms in UK society?
Generally, most people do not keep firearms even though they most likely could have a shotgun or semi-auto .22 rifle, or larger caliber bolt-action rifle if they wanted to. This is mostly because of cultural attitudes to firearms in the UK and is not particularly a live political issue. Even back home in Northern Ireland, where you can get a firearms license for self-defence alone, and where you can get handguns legally, the vast majority of people do not do so, even during the Troubles. It is also not particularly difficult to get hold of an illegal Kalashnikov or similar automatic rifle in Northern Ireland, but very few people outside of the paramilitary organizations do so.
Restrictive firearms laws are generally supported by the majority of the population, because the cultural attitudes towards firearms are very different than in the US. Most people who have guns will likely be farmers or other rural folk, (most of my uncles have shotguns and rifles for example), and the average person (certainly in England) is likely to be somewhat uncomfortable around guns, and most police will not be be armed (again as almost always excepting Northern Ireland, where almost all officers are armed, and the population is exposed to people carrying firearms probably on a daily basis).
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Going for maximum brevity: you are allowed a gun for shooting objects or animals, but never ever ever for shooting at a human being no matter what.
(i.e. generally the law tries to say yes to sport and hunting, but no to lethal self-defence or rebellion. In days when people had more faith in government, this was pretty well understood and supported as being the government retaining its necessary monopoly on violence. Now, of course, two-tier anarcho-tyranny beckons.)
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I don't think this is true. There is a large pro-gun constituency in the US that does not exist in other countries. Maybe in several generations time that would change, but I would struggle to imagine eg Texas passing a full ban in the forseeable future even if it was allowed to.
I think the existence of the Second Amendment is partially causative in the continued existence and size of that constituency due to the way Kohlberg IV morality works.
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The federal government bans drugs, why not guns too?
Everything I know about Kamala Harris tells me she would have no problem regulating guns on a federal level. The 2nd Amendment makes that a lot harder.
For the same reason - there is a large pro-gun constituency in America, and those people have political power and influence in a democratic system. There are many levers of power in America, and many of them are within the grasp of the pro-gun faction.
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