Yeah.... fatalities from gun violence would fall by 90% without handguns. not sure why he thought that was sarcasm... it is just fact.
I liked the part where he called me a commie nazi who should move out of the country. Every year around New Year's on some cruddy cold rainy day I get everything out of the safe/vault and clean them, I'll be sure and think of @dashoulda that day.
Of course it is not realistic, the gun fetishists and paranoids have way too strong a lobby. All I said was: if you really wanted to be serious about stopping gun violence in America, that's where you would start. It's ok to not be serious about stopping gun violence, just own it.
If you are really serious about stopping gun violence , you would start with criminals and the mentally ill .... A felon to possess a firearm should come with a considerable prison sentence (Decade Plus) - how many you think are gonna risk it ? Legislation to keep weapons out of the hands of mentally unstable individuals which should reduce the number of mass shootings (which is what really matters - no one talks about the average killing) Nothing's gonna fix everything .... but those are where you start without infringing upon the rights of otherwise lawful citizens.
I've just skimmed through this thread and there is a lot of misstatements of history and specious reasoning. First "a well regulated militia" in the Constitution means exactly what we in the 21st Century thinks it means. It's a force that is controlled, disciplined and with a command structure. In Federalist Paper #29 on the militia in the first paragraph says: "It requires no skill in the science of war to discern that uniformity in the organization and discipline of the militia would be attended with the most beneficial effects, whenever they were called into service for the public defense. It would enable them to discharge the duties of the camp and of the field with mutual intelligence and concert an advantage of peculiar moment in the operations of an army; and it would fit them much sooner to acquire the degree of proficiency in military functions which would be essential to their usefulness. This desirable uniformity can only be accomplished by confiding the regulation of the militia to the direction of the national authority. It is, therefore, with the most evident propriety, that the plan of the convention proposes to empower the Union "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, RESERVING TO THE STATES RESPECTIVELY THE APPOINTMENT OF THE OFFICERS, AND THE AUTHORITY OF TRAINING THE MILITIA ACCORDING TO THE DISCIPLINE PRESCRIBED BY CONGRESS.'' While old English might've considered "regulated" as also meaning "well armed" Hamilton and Madison certainly meant it in the terms that we think of it. Further as the above paragraph shows the militia wasn't even thought of as an assemblage of individuals to resist the state but as a tool of the state. In fact the earliest use of the militia by the US government was to crush a citizens militia in Shay's Rebellion. Next this argument that the US has never been invaded because we have so many small arms held by individuals is historically wrong as the US was invaded and Washington DC burned down during the War of 1812. In 1916 Pancha Villa launched cross border raids into the US. It wasn't plucky individuals with small arms that repelled him but General Pershing and the US Army including for the first time in the US military aircraft. Also if small arms were an effective deterrence against invasion we would've never invaded Iraq since just before the US invasion Saddam gave every Iraqi family an AK47 and ammo to defend the country. We can see how well that worked out for Iraq. Regarding the argument that we shouldn't be so concerned about weapons like the AR-15 and other semi-automatic rifles with high capacities because they cause a small amount of deaths when compared to deaths by other causes including handguns is problematic. I agree that the stats are correct that relatively few deaths come from those type of weapons but consider that relatively few transportation deaths involves airplanes and statistically flying is much safer than other modes of transportation. I doubt anyone would say that we shouldn't regulate air travel that much because many more people die bicycling than they do flying but it is because the stakes in any plane crash are far more lethal than any bike or car crash that we regulate air travel so much. In same way a weapon like the AR-15 has a far greater lethality than other commercially available small arms that it should be regulated more.
