Heffay, on 10 October 2016 - 07:48 PM, said:
That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You *are* free from my guns.
He means freedom not to own them - which is different than how you're taking it. It's also a great propaganda statement from the perspective of the gun control advocates who coined it, because it invites such misunderstandings to polarize the issue and generate bad press for firearms rights advocates.
A few thoughts on the Constitutional foundations of the right to bear arms: Marack, you misunderstand the Constitution on this issue. You demonstrated this misunderstanding on the first page of this thread, when you cut a word out of context and quibbled about the definition of
"is," "arms." To get a reasonable idea of what arms are being talked about, you only have to read the document in its historical context: it obviously refers to the personal arms of militiamen. The framers of the Constitution had been through a war that they were able to win in part because most military aged males had muskets and knew how to use them. So yes, military-grade personal arms are intended for inclusion in this document. Breaching charges, cannons, and grenades, for example, are not.
The Constitution also - in context - tells us why the right was given, and for what purpose: to allow the militia to draw on a population of recruits who were at least familiar with weapons. This was done to prevent their newly constituted federal government from leveraging a monopoly on military power to stage a coup, and it is by
no means a typo that the right was given to the
people, not to the States. It is obvious that the framers of the Constitution intended the militia - now constituted as the National Guard - as a framework for their resistance, but the granting of an
individual right is significant, and intentional. The mainstay of even the modern battlefield is still the combat rifleman - ask the Iraqi insurgency how well killing insurgents with tanks and airstrikes works to quell unrest. The Constitution intends
the people, hopefully through the militia organization, to have a method of last resort.
(Also, your assertion that American soldiers "frequently" shoot Iraqi families is both a demonstration of your military ignorance and an indication of your grasp of nuance in general. It is also a lie: that which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence, after all.)
As far as violence is concerned, well... Samuel Clemens once quipped that there were three kinds of lies: "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Unfortunately, it's very easy to find data that supports your viewpoint; even serious, reputable sources can disagree in their analysis, which makes it easy to find an analysis you like and dogmatically insist upon it. There is, however, a certain amount of raw data available which is not seriously in dispute. And from this data, I can reliably see certain trends: first, as of 2014, violence of all kinds in the United States
was decreasing - and had been since the 1990s. Sadly, this trend has reversed itself in the last year of available data (2016 data isn't available yet,) but it's too soon to know if that trend will continue. What it's
not too soon to note is that violent crime rates do not correlate with gun control regulation, even with time lags. Similarly, the purported number of firearms has been climbing during this entire, decades-long decline. The obvious counter -arguments - that there are too many guns for purchase regulation to affect crime rates, for example- typically miss the point: firearms do not strongly correlate to general violence. To look at another statistic, take mass public shootings: our perception is that they are on the rise, but this has
not been the case historically. Instead, mass public shootings like Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech have remained roughly constant per population since the late 1960s - when it jumped up to its current level. Similarly, this latest year of increasing violence has also been the forerunner of political unrest, as proudly displayed for all to see in the
amazingly debauched circus and peep show that we're calling the "Presidential Election Campaigns" this year. Whether or not I'm right in my suspicion, the fact remains that violence in our culture is an issue with
society, not its tools. Fully or partly banning guns
will reduce the proportion of gun violence, and eliminate some edge cases - but just as we can't fix crime by building prisons (or militarizing your police,) we won't address the
cultural problem we have with violence by confiscating certain tools. We will succeed only in shifting violence into other avenues, gaining a little security - in exchange for a little liberty.
As for the original topic of the thread: In general, you don't hear about such things
as much, because major media outlets are for-profit businesses whose income depends on ratings. Therefore, while they do have institutional rules and personal standards about proper journalistic practices and procedures, they also
have to cover the kinds of things people will watch - and it is a sad and incontrovertibly demonstrated fact that we will watch bad news in preference over good news. We also crave novelty: this is why you don't see a huge bout of mass hysteria when there are gang-related shootings; we know that "poor people," "criminals," and the like kill each other; but while we acknowledge intellectually that they are terrible events, it's part of the background - we already "know" that, and so it's not interesting.
Part of the Plan. We may care, but we don't care to watch it: show us something we don't know - this isn't that unusual. But when there's an event that is unusual
and terrible, like a school shooting, or the Pulse terrorist attack, - well, we turn out (or tune in) in droves. That's why you find significant coverage of incidents like the little girl with her pink firearm only on local news - or in
other media telling you that there's an exceptional, terrible conspiracy to mold public opinion by sock puppeting "the media." Except, of course, the collection of outlets that marketed the story to you... Don't get me wrong; I do think there is institutional bias in the media. But it's not the same bias(es,) and there is no "the" media. The idea (sold to you by media outlets) that there is a giant conspiracy to use a monolithic conglomerate of news outlets that can be called "the" anything is just that - a conspiracy theory.
Edited by Void Angel, 10 October 2016 - 11:08 PM.
1
- my youngest loves it to open cabinets 
This topic is locked
