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The point is to make someone live with the consequences of their own stated beliefs, whilst minimizing collateral harm.
If they won't accept THIS deal, then I refuse to accept any other proposal they could offer because its clear they DON'T actually believe that gun control measures would reduce crime and death, or else they'd jump at a chance to enact a partial gun ban.
If they can't get gun control passed any other way, surely those 20% of Democratic gun owners (who are an astoundingly small minority overall, so its not a big loss!) will sacrifice their rights for the greater good.
Or not, and force a reckoning.
Literally, I will accept any proposed gun control measure, background checks on down, as long as the caveat "only applies to registered Democrats" is appended to it.
Find me one they'd accept.
I've mentioned it before, but America cannot function as a nation or a people if they had to live with the consequences of their own stated beliefs. Hell, most people can't do that. The Germans managed it, and they initiated World War 2 as a result.
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People can stay inconsistent longer than you can berate them over their hypocrisy.
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My point is that there is no "they" you're negotiating with, though. "Democrats" do not speak with a single voice. Even if you look at majorities, that Pew survey I linked indicates that a majority of Republicans agree with preventing people with mental illnesses from owning guns, raising the minimum age to buy a fire arm to 21, and oppose allowing people to carry a concealed fire arm without a permit. Put that way, there is no party that is universally against gun rights or for gun rights.
The Democrat blob is not a monolith, and neither is the Republican blob.
If you're trying to make a point that Democrats who won't pass their preferred gun control policy (but limited to registered Democrats only as a compromise) are being hypocritical, I'm not sure the argument straightforwardly gets off the ground. First, I don't think the vast majority of gun rights advocates would be in favor of such a compromise, so you're not putting forward a live proposal that is really worthy of consideration. And second, there's reasons for wanting to oppose such a proposal apart from believing in gun rights. It's stupid to unilaterally disarm yourself, in a society where 40% of your "enemy" is legally armed.
Nobody has made this proposal seriously, so perhaps this is simply a matter of it not being considered at all yet.
Why not change that.
Wow, maybe there's certain advantages to owning guns that THE SECOND AMENDMENT WAS MEANT TO PRESERVE?
I GUESS THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS GOOD FOR SOMETHING AFTER ALL.
/sarcasm
So this argument now convinced me that I should oppose ALL gun control measures.
Debate over, as far as I'm concerned.
I agree that there are advantages to owning guns, but the 2nd Amendment is about more than an "advantage" it is about a supposedly inalienable right. I would imagine that we should hold rights to higher standards than merely being "advantageous", as there are plenty of advantageous things that aren't rights. Cars are advantageous, for example, but there is no recognized right to car ownership or operation.
I'm weakly pro-gun rights, because I think that gun ownership is one of the more likely ways for minorities to protect themselves against right violations by the majority (i.e. a black man during segregation, or the Black Panthers following cop cars in the 70's), but I honestly have trouble mapping the limits of acceptable political violence within that framework. What is the dividing line between the 1954 attack on the United States capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists and the January 6th riots? What is the dividing line between trying to assassinate Hitler or Pol Pot and trying to assassinate Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? If cops are a representative of the force and will of the state, who gets to decide when cops have crossed the line into tyranny and it is thus morally justified to kill them?
Because I am pro-civilization and anti-violence, I have trouble with my tepid support of gun rights. It seems great to be able to defend against a tyrannical majority in the abstract, but how do we balance that against the fact that any state (tyrannical or not) is going to defend itself and attempt to delegitimize resistance by the oppressed? Why do we consider the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers good, but the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War bad and illegitimate?
The nationalists' fellow travelers eventually took power and pardoned them. At least, so far that's the political difference.
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"Don't shoot at congresspersons" seems like a pretty bright line?
I suppose I didn't make myself clear. I am somewhat sympathetic to motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists of 1954, and I don't have a great argument for why they should have seen political violence as beyond the pale given their island's relationship to the United States. The ordinary means of political redress were denied to the Puerto Ricans, and violence seems reasonable enough under those circumstances, even if I prefer if Congress would not be attacked by people for the sake of stability.
While I don't think January 6 posed all that great a risk to the country given how badly executed it was, I tend to be less sympathetic to the January 6 rioters. A big part of this is because I don't think the thing they were angry about - stolen elections - were a "legitimate" complaint, if we don't engage in a motte and bailley about what we mean by a "stolen election."
However, what makes one "acceptable" and one "unacceptable"? I would prefer if there were easy and widely accepted principles for when political violence was considered acceptable, but the mainstream answer seems to "never, except in retrospect."
Like I said, for me it's the 'shooting up congress' bit that's unacceptable -- if the Puerto Ricans had held it to breaking a few windows whilst yelling and milling about in restricted areas, it would not seem like a very big deal? (either)
Do you believe there are ever any circumstances where it is okay to attack the US congress? Do you believe that there are any actions that the US congress could commit that would ever make violence against them acceptable?
I think the difficulty I have is that we in the United States aren't a nation. The United States isn't and has never been defined by being a single ethnic group sharing a common birth. We are a civic state, defined by our ideals and institutions. (This is the reason American conservatives are so different than "blood and soil" European conservatives. By and large, even the conservatives are classical liberals in the United States.) Because we got our start in a bloody revolution justifying itself based on a conception of natural rights, it must be the case that there are circumstances where it is alright to attack a government and its representatives. But despite this being a core part of the ideology under-girding the United States, I'm dissatisfied that the vast majority of people seem to think that it is never okay to rebel or engage in violence against the state and its actors.
If one of the justifications of the 2nd Amendment is that capacity of violence against the state needs to be preserved to lessen oppression and tyranny, why is it that in practice the set of "tyrannical acts that would justify violence against the state" seem to always be an empty set? Is it because America truly is the freest country ever conceived with no hints of tyranny and oppression anywhere in its 200+ year history? When is violence against the state ever justified?
Certainly -- not an expert but I think Puerto Rico's grievances did not rise to this level; or to the extent that they did it would have been more appropriately addressed in Puerto Rico. And J6 did constitute an attack.
Would that it were so -- 'people don't assault the state over trivial inconveniences' != 'you can push people as far as you like'.
It's relevant that the first part remains 'mostly true' -- the interesting part of the current phase of the experiment is that the bar is getting pretty low.
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This is incorrect and a vile form of genocidal propaganda that i will not let go unchallenged*.
Those fathers are the ethnic group of common birth. You are wrong, and while your conception is popular today, it is an invention of post WW2 globohomo. America literally didn't allow people who didn't share that common birth any citizenship at all.
America was founded by Americans, and I mean ethnically, not on paper or with a hyphen. There was an ethnogenesis which created the American race, and we exist despite people of your ilk trying to pretend me and mine dont exist and never did.
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If you live in a civilized country, you should have little trouble trusting your neighbors with weapons.
If you don't live in a civilized country, the need for weapons should be almost self-evident.
I used to lean slightly pro-gun-control, but there's simply no way you can deep dive into the statistics and come away with the idea that the guns are the problem, and by focusing on guns, it is in fact harder to address more fundamental issues.
Which is why I am losing patience with gun-control advocates who burn so much effort on a cause that simply will not achieve its purported benefits.
I mean, you can own a car and it can't be taken from you by the government without due process and such (literally the fifth amendment), whereas operating one on public property is explicitly a 'privilege.' So no, there is no explicit right, but there's still an inherent protection in there.
I mean, in my civilized country, a rando tried to assassinate the candidate of one of the two major political parties, so my trust is being strained.
My basic problem is that I can't say whether a rando trying to assasinate a political candidate is the 2nd Amendment working as intended (since it puts the power to decide when to overthrow tyrants in the hands of individuals), or if there is some principled way to criticize some acts of political violence as outside of the intended scope of gun rights?
The relevant comparison is whether it would be constitutionally possible for a Federal or State ban on cars to be enacted. I very much doubt if such a thing would ever happen, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
And in Japan, another civilized country, THAT HAS GUN CONTROL OUT THE WAZOO, a rando succeeded at killing an ex-prime minister. With a gun.
As I said, dive into the stats nice and deep and things become clearer.
If the problem is you DON'T trust your neighbors, that's a significantly larger issue, and evidence you don't live in a civilized (part of the) country.
And I should perhaps remind you that we can 3D print firearms at home now so you're NOT going to prevent a sufficiently dedicated rando from getting one.
The interstate commerce clause MIGHT stretch that far, but it is not in fact clear to me that a blanket car ban would pass muster unless there was some actual harm that the government was intervening to prevent. "Climate Change" might but probably doesn't cover that base.
The point of criminal laws is not to ensure that a thing never happens. We outlaw murder, but there will always be murders. The point of laws is threefold: 1) to discourage other criminals from committing the crime in question, 2) to reform the criminal so they never commit the crime again, and 3) if 2 is impossible, to safely contain a criminal away from the rest of society so that everyone else is safe.
My guess is that the number of gun-related assassination attempts in Japan over the last 50 years is probably going to be less than the equivalent number per capita in the United States. Now, if all-cause assassinations per capita were the same between the two countries (all else being equal), that would be evidence that gun control is unlikely to play much of a role in preventing assassination attempts.
... I mean, you can say that. But if that were the real point, surely we'd be seeing much stricter punishments for even petty crimes. And its the same people pushing for gun control who push for decriminalization of various activities, and 'defund the police,' and set up bail funds, and otherwise support an agenda that is so-called 'soft on crime.'
Yes, I have no problem admitting that the Japanese are far less violent on average than Americans. Not even a controversy.
Do YOU want to assert that violence in Japan would substantially increase if they repealed all gun laws and suddenly gun ownership became widespread in Japan?
(Because that's when we can start talking about the ACTUAL cause of violence, aside from guns)
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Your point is "their rules applied unfairly and against them". No one will accept that, and they'll be right.
"A rule that we believe is inherently fair and just shouldn't be applied against us, that's unfair and unjust!" Bullshit.
Why would people who want gun control rules applied to everyone object to those rules applying to them?
What's unjust about treating people PRECISELY how they propose treating others?
What makes it unfair, precisely? And why can't that unfairness be applied to gun control generally?
It applying to just them and not to everyone.
If the Democrats propose gun control for the entire country, then "treating them PRECISELY how they propose treating others" would be... gun control for the entire country. Not just for them.
It is applying to people who support gun control.
It would be unfair to apply it to those who oppose gun control, OBVIOUSLY. This is the fair outcome, where nobody gets a rule imposed on them without consent.
But as we've established, the entire country doesn't agree with it. So they can't get that. But they can get something.
Why wouldn't they accept a compromise that gets them PART of what they want? Surely they're capable of adapting their position to make such a thing 'fair'.
If they won't compromise aren't they just being unreasonable? That's what they keep saying about gun-rights advocates who refuse to compromise on gun control policies.
Because getting the policy enacted on the object level is only part of the motivation for partisan political affiliation and advocacy; there's another whole part rooted in the will to power, the desire to impose one's moral and aesthetic will over others, or just the desire to see opposing moral and aesthetic views stamped down/out.
To steal an old New Yorker cartoon - "it is not enough that dogs succeed, cats must also fail."
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That's not how it works, unless you're willing to amend your modest proposal with "and all other laws that a party didn't vote for doesn't affect them anymore".
Where do I sign? I'd bite that bullet for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. This is The Motte after all. I'm not going to retreat merely because my idea was pressed.
Incidentally, I'd also love a return to Federalism where the states can have more leeway over how they govern their own territories, but THAT is apparently goes too far by modern standards, which to me is an indictment of modern standards.
But no, I'm just making the point that 'compromise' requires both sides giving up something, and if the Dems want to achieve their gun-free utopia, they can start by with a compromise of imposing gun control on themselves.
Yes, that's what compromise means. Both sides giving up guns. Or else both sides having guns. One side giving up guns is not compromise when the explicit goal is equitably fewer guns.
Oh, so when we make Felons a class of people who can't own guns, are we doing something unfair?
I guess my question is, why wouldn't Democrats sign a document that voluntarily waives their own Second Amendment rights if it resulted in increased levels of gun control in the country?
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