After Heller, DC was forced to allow residents to store, in their home, a revolver. Not even a semi-automatic.

I think they use Massachusetts list of handguns to sell.

thing, or prod them. Every decade we do nothing puts another 100 million lethal weapons in their hands. 100 million more gunz to deal with when we wise up.

there is a reason I have never hurt a living thing in 35 years of gun ownership.

I rarely chime in on these threads because I know many gun owners including myself and we are a responsible lot. If we compare Europe with the US... there is one glaring difference, the mentally ill do not have the same rights abroad as they do here. They are generally "removed" from society... I personally have a problem with that, then again we are reminded these sort of mass shootings do not happen abroad, or only rarely.

it's an archaic anachronism from a time when standing armies were viewed with suspicion and the US Army had a strength of eight hundred men (and the fledgling US shared borders with three potentially hostile European colonial powers and innumerable potentially hostile Native American tribes).

how will repealing the 2A change a thing?

what else do you want that some judge has said no to?

Strict limits on magazine capacity, restrictions on semi-automatics, license required to own any firearm, licensing dependent on background check (including mental health), requirement for provision of separate secure storage for any firearms and ammunition, etc. All of those seem fairly sensible, to me, honestly. I don't think that someone who wants a shotgun or rifle for hunting game should be prevented from having one, but they should have to get a license (and you don't need a semi-auto to hunt, bolt action works just fine).

the reason it is not law has nothing to do with the 2A - it is because there is no public support for such laws.

I think hack's point that the 2nd amendment isn't what's stopping us is valid.

If you can get Congress on board, in addition to 2/3 of the states (or is it 3/4?). You'll still have all the state constitutions that protect gun ownership, plus the hundreds of millions of guns already in private hands. Let's stop pretending that the Second Amendment, or guns (inanimate objects), are the problem and start thinking about solutions that will prevent violent murderers from killing others. Frankly, the fixation on "gunz" simply exacerbates the problem because we aren't talking about the real problems, like poverty, income inequality and religious extremism (among other issues).

Were the Second Amendment repealed, it'd automatically nullify all those state constitutions you're talking about. (Go learn something about constitutional law and federal supremacy before coming out with a stupid argument.)

All so that you can institute full-scale gun bans.

Not going to happen. That's a fantasy.

Which is why I expect that the USA is going to have another civil war, at some point. That seems much more likely than any sensible gun legislation being passed, anyway.

A Federal statute banning guns could, but just repealing the 2nd amendment wouldn't do anything to the state constitutions.

And you better rethink your post, the 10th would then kick in.

To learn about federal supremacy issues you lack any understanding of the same. A repeal of the 2d Amendment has zero impact on state constitutions addressing gun ownership.

Repealing the Second Amendment wouldn't nullify any of the state constitutions. As it stands now, the states can't ban firearms, because of the 2cnd Amendment. If the second amendment were repealed, the states could ban them, if they wanted to.

Only repealing the Second Amendment would leave the decision up to the states. Essentially, not very much would change, since most states are actually trending towards more lenient laws regarding firearms. What you'd need to nullify those state constitutions is an amendment that replaces the Second that states that firearm ownership is not allowed.

Last edited Thu Dec 3, 2015, 12:28 AM - Edit history (1)

3/4 of state to ratify, it would take only 13 states to deep six any Constitutional repeal or Amendment.
I can think of more that 13 states that would refuse to go along with a repeal of the 2A

1. Alabama
2. Alaska
3. Arizona (my state)
4. Arkansas
5. Colorado
6. Florida
7. Georgia
8. Idaho
9. Indiana
10. Iowa
11. Kansas
12. Louisiana
13. Minnesota
14. Missouri
15. Montana

Well, you get my drift.

The majority of Western states, regardless of their voting patterns in presidential elections (or whatever other measure of relative "blueness" you care to use) would resoundingly reject any such proposal.

But there is no support for European or Australian type gun control. A bigger issue is that gun control is not a high priority for voters - it is not an issue that brings voters to the poll so there is no risk for politicians ignoring it as long as they focus on issues thst are important to their constituents.

Did you notice how favorably the NRA is regarded.

In a Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders has already found out what coddling conspicuous gun consumers and the gun lobby represents in the way of political liability, and that's about to get worse for him.

The NRA can thank gutless politicians for their ratings. Do you approve of them?

Rhode Island has relatively strong gun control laws - we have UBCs for example. But even here no one is willing to push for issues like registrations or bans - the voters don't care. Even in Rhode Island there was not support for an AWB after Sandy Hook - it died in the legislature with no public outcry.

It is clearly there to be nurtured; poll after poll shows that. The NRA is the most powerful and effective lobby in the country. They are far and away the leading reason why sensible gun control legislation repeatedly dies or isn't even proposed.

They are obviously an embarrassment to you as a responsible, progressive gun owner. The proof is this stupid dance we're doing right now.

so there is no risk to politicians in ignoring the issue and we all know that politicians will always take the safe path.

The folks currently doing the writing of the bills have no desire to introduce quality bills because that is not their agenda.

We'd have had much less of a problem. Imagine the people who would never have purchased if they had to be licensed and register their gun, like a car, no matter who they purchased it from? It might be too late for that now, but it it's still a thought.

I've also wondered about registering the ballistics of each barrel and linking them to the owners. I found a gun hidden in something I purchased once. The police told me it showed no history, it wasn't listed as stolen and it was all mine. No one cared if it had been used in a crime, or if it had killed someone in the past. That was never checked on because it had no history they could trace.

This baffles me. Guns shouldn't be something so simplistic that they're not traceable to the people who own them. We should be more responsible than that with something potentially so dangerous.

So, if they do the ballistics fingerprint when the gun is manufactured, and somebody buys it and goes to a shooting range for a day, by the end of the day the fingerprint won't match anymore.

I know nothing about guns, really.

I just wish there was some way to regulate and follow them in a practical way. Which we really aren't even trying to do at this point in time.

I mean, compared to the 1990s we've made tremendous strides.

It's like health care: there's a lot of moving parts each of which contribute to the problem, but people want a single solution to "fix" systems that took generations to get set up.

We're basically halfway between Canada's gun violence rate and Brazil's (though somewhat closer to Canada's). And, demographically, our population is about halfway between Canada's and Brazil's, in terms of age, gender, inequality, diversity, etc. Both Canada and Brazil have much, much stricter gun control laws than we do; they work in Canada and not in Brazil. But my suspicion is that if you're the kind of country where those laws work, you'll probably also pretty much do ok without them.

Name a reasonable gun control law that is not implemented some where in America