Michael Cain:
Which state you choose as an analogue is important.Or more accurately, states...

My (unresearched) feeling is that all of those states (or collection of states) have crazy high levels of their GDP tied into trade with other states. I go down to the local food store and very little can be local, probably all of it is out of state. My expectation is the rest of the store is similar.

Similarly when I talk to people very few of them have lived their entire life in this state.

Similarly the federal gov would be non-trivial to replace.

The EU *should* be like this but either it's not or the 'stay' people weren't able to articulate their case.

The amazing thing about the brexit is it's unclear if it's going to be an economic problem (I think it will be but that's just me). Picture one of the 50 states leaving the union, say, Ohio. Forget the politics of it, the economics of it is clearly terrible.

It's been multiple decades, it says a lot of bad things about the EU that it's not clear.

Free trade isn't intuitively obvious as a good thing, especially to the people who are hurt by it, yet free trade being a good thing is to economics what the Theory of Gravity is to Physics.

There are lots of examples of that. If I *want* something to happen then it *must* be a good thing for the government to make it happen. This is how we got Prohibition, the drug war, the massive amount of redistribution of money we have, etc.

Hidden costs can be just that, hidden.

DavidTC:
All you have to do is harass a person until they took a swing at you.

When it comes to gov policy, especially for things like self defense, there are no perfect, cost free, solutions. Which brings us back to my question, "how often is this a problem"? Other than Martin (who got shot for more than taking a swing), I can't think of any. I.e. if we're interested in reducing deaths, my expectation is this was an extreme exception and really shouldn't be driving police, much less used as an excuse to reduce constitutional rights.

DavidTC:
On the other hand, my wife’s unarmed home town did have 80% of their population murdered (12k out of 15k) by the Nazis.
First, I feel I should point out that the Nazis doing something is the literal *opposite* of the government losing control.

The gov has the responsibility to protect you, that's why we have police. They can fail in that deliberately (Tyranny) or from a loss of control (incompetence, failed state).

DavidTC:
Second, I feel I should point out that ‘Defending yourself from the government’ is something I literally am refusing to accept as any sort of argument. It’s gun-lobby gibberish.

It's math. 12k a year gun homicides (which includes the drug war). So the holocaust balances roughly 1000 years of gun related homicides, and there's no history of any gov remaining stable and good on that time frame. Take the drug war off the table and we're looking at tens of thousands of years of balance, and even that is an understatement because we're assuming gun control could prevent most all those homicides.

If we exclude the Nazis as extreme outliers which won't happen again, then we have the Japanese whose body count may have been higher. If we exclude both of them we have dozens of other examples, leading to a back-of-the-envelope worldwide chance of roughly 2% per decade of something of this scale. This excludes failed states, wars, and Communism's charming habit of making mistakes which starve or otherwise kill millions of their citizens.

If we only want to look at the US, then we have the KKK (which was often run out of the local sheriff's office) and our treatment of the Indians as examples of government abuse.

The really concerning thing when we look worldwide is many/most are only obvious with hindsight. No one in 1920's Germany would have predicted 1940. The implication is we can go from normalcy to nightmare in just a decade or two.

DavidTC:
Here is the sole statement I will make: The Nazis have bombs, and if that city had offered resistance in the form of gunfire, they would have bombed the city flat.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Being "bombed flat" is FAR better than being sent to a death camp, lots of places were bombed flat.

Unless what you really meant was the full weight of the Nazi army would have been brought to bear... but the full weight of the army simply can't be put on every hick town.

DavidTC:
You seem willing to allow the personal use of a gun at all, but that seems unusual.
I do not think you know what the world ‘unusual’ means...

My bad, I spliced together two sentences and got one which was less than clear. You seem to believe that the 2ndAM doesn't give a personal right to a gun, but you also seem willing to live with Heller and see utility for people to have firearms for personal defense. I.e. although you hit the radar as a Gun Control Advocate you also seem sensible, rational, and not an extremist. Problem is as far as I can tell this is unusual for GCA.

DavidTC:
...but if you’re trying to make the argument that the majority of Americans think people shouldn’t be able to defend themselves with guns, you are a) wrong, and b) making *exactly the opposite* argument you want to be making a democracy.

We just had 50 people die in a 'gun free zone', how many were able to 'defend themselves with guns'? And is the political response that we need more rights for Americans, or fewer?

DavidTC:
In practice I’d expect if we let the gov decide how much self defense you’re allowed, the answer will be ‘not a gun’.
Why the hell do you think that?

Chicago gun laws. DC gun laws. The various 'gun free' shooting zones which end up in the news occasionally. Taylor Woolrich's experience http://www.inquisitr.com/1394954/gun-control-rule-at-dartmouth-college-denies-taylor-woolrich-protection-from-stalker-with-rape-kit/

DavidTC:
Every single state in the US has laws allowing self defense. And you realize that the current interpretation of the 2nd, which stated a constitutional right to self defense, happened in *2008*, right? Before that, there’s absolutely no constitutional obligation to have laws allowing self defense. (Technically, there wasn’t after that, either. Just because it works as a constitutional defense in court doesn’t require *laws* allowing it.)

This would give me a lot more confidence if the Supremes had voted 9-0 rather than 'all liberals adamantly opposed' 5-4. If the Court had been 4-5 (one more liberal), would DC have been able to ban handguns outright and require any firearm kept in the home be kept "unloaded, disassembled, or bound by a trigger lock or similar device...this was deemed to be a prohibition on the use of firearms for self-defense in the home." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_Control_Regulations_Act_of_1975

I look at 4 Supreme Court Justices being just fine with DC's laws (or presumably ones going further) and I question what 'self defense' will mean after we get more Supremes that think like them. I also look at all the dead in Orlando and question what their 'right' to self defense meant in practice.

DavidTC:
You keep saying really weird things that are extremely hard to follow.

I'm an Engineer, I get that a lot.

DavidTC:
You mean other than the guy who was shot in the head and his corpse set on fire.
There is no evidence whatsoever that had anything to do with the unrest at all.

They had 20 murders in the last 12 years. If it's not connected it's one heck of a coincidence. http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Ferguson-Missouri.html

Joe Sal:
Dark I must say it’s been good having you around lately.

Thank you.

Joe Sal:
...pretty major errors, I don’t know what constitutional law class a lot of these folks are taking...

Now there you (and others) have me at a disadvantage. My background is math/logic (thus the name) and not law.

DavidTC:
1) At best, IMHO the anti-gun movement would offer this as a “compromise”, pocket it, and then keep pressing for less and less useful guns. Their actual position is no guns for anyone and this would just be a step along that way.

…that is not how constitutional rights work.

You're correct only as long as it's 5-4 court. Over turning Heller is pretty clearly part of the plan, the conservative media claims Garland fits that description. Or to put it differently, if you were President, would you appoint Justices who would overturn Heller?

DavidTC:
Now that we *are* saying it’s an individual right…well, ‘defense of state’ doesn’t really work as an individual right, so it sorta got left out.

Interesting read of this.

DavidTC:
1) A right own a gun for ‘self defense’ was actually very, very contentious in early America. There were a lot of worries that armed people would start fights and then use the fight as justification for self defense and kill people. Or harass people until those people took a swing at them, and then shoot them. Good thing we’ve totally figured out a way around *that* happening, eh? Right? We actually did figure that, and didn’t just pass laws that would allow people to start fights and then kill the other party?

It's been 200+ years. How often has this been a problem?

DavidTC:
Moreover, I feel I must point you keep going back to Ferguson, and inventing these hypothetical situations where protesters were breaking into and setting fires to businesses with attached houses.

...I think you're thinking of someone else. Ferguson is an example of the gov losing control, it's not an example where mass murder was needed to defend yourself (although setting on fire dozens of buildings in a tiny community is coming 'right' up to that line). On the other hand, my wife's unarmed home town did have 80% of their population murdered (12k out of 15k) by the Nazis.

But claiming these examples are 'hypothetical' is an effort to have the gov decide how much self defense you're allowed. You seem willing to allow the personal use of a gun at all, but that seems unusual. In practice I'd expect if we let the gov decide how much self defense you're allowed, the answer will be 'not a gun'. It'd be like letting a group of pro-life advocates decide whether you're 'allowed' an abortion.

While we're on the subject of how much self defense is allowed, what do you think of 'gun free zones'?

DavidTC:
They, uh, were not.And there were *no* fatalities, and the only injuries appear to be on the police by protesters, or on ‘protesters’ (Or people near them.) by the police. There’s no record of protesters attacking non-police.

You mean other than the guy who was shot in the head and his corpse set on fire. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest#cite_note-Joshua_burned-131

Stillwater: Darkmatter, do think there are rational positions people coule reasonably hold in the space between “no guns for anyone, ever!” and “citizens should be able to possess whatever weapons the government does!”?

I regard myself as a somewhat neutral, disinterested party. I don't own a gun, I've fired one once when I was a 13 year old boy scout, every member of my somewhat-large family is the same.

I can picture the Gun-Rights-Advocates being fine with more restrictions, i.e. fewer guns. I'm pretty sure they think the mentally ill, criminals, etc shouldn't be armed. Very seldom do I see them argue for "whatever weapons the government has". Heavy military weapons are already illegal.

I've never heard the Gun-Control-Advocates being fine with fewer restrictions, i.e. more guns. I have seen multiple high level politicians admit "no guns" is their actual desired policy choice. Take two silly-extreme cases:

1) In Orlando we had 300 victims watch the shooter reload probably a dozen times in a gun free zone. The victims are mostly young men so some are going to be current/former military/law enforcement. These types of shooters kill until someone else with a gun steps in (and normally they kill themselves then although this one didn't). And more guns is clearly a bad thing. Totally unthinkable. Apparently in the context of an active shooter, everyone is safer if the active shooter is the only person who has a gun (if I point that out either the conversation ends or they'll actually try to justify why that is, in fact, true).

2) A young pretty woman has an obsessive stalker, who the police have arrested for stalking her and who was found with a rape kit in his trunk. She wants a gun she can carry with her... and again this is totally unthinkable. Clearly she's the one who has mental issues, everyone is safer if she's unarmed. She can just call campus police (who openly admit they can't protect her because they don't have the man power to consistently walk her everywhere).

IMHO the two sides aren't equally guilty of failing to reach compromises. When are more guns the answer? When are fewer guns the answer? IMHO the bulk of the GCA movement actually is standing on that fringe caricature you mentioned.

dark-matter It means if the federal or state governments hasn’t passed a law, the people can simply do it. It isn’t a world where everything not specifically allowed by the state is forbidden for the people, rather everything that isn’t expressly forbidden is allowed.
DavidTC: That…is not what ‘powers’ means.

It's one of 'powers' definitions in legal-dictionary.: Powers: The right, ability, or authority to perform an act. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/power

dark-matter Assemble is hardly something which can apply to the states
DavidTC: Because the states and the people are two different things.

We're talking about whether or not 'the people' refers to states' rights.

DavidTC: We could collectively be secure with *most* of us being secure, if that’s what you’re actually asking.

What I'm asking is if being secure in my house is a right I have as an individual. Despite trying to relabel this as a 'general principle' the clear answer is 'yes'.

DavidTC: and some sort of weird shortening and merger accidentally put it as a right of ‘the people’ instead.

I think that completes the set. Are there any references to 'the people' in the Bill of Rights that are not exceptions or mistakes? As far as I can tell, the Bill of Rights consistently uses 'the people' when it's talking about individual rights. And this is after using the most restrictive syntax possible, it'd be real easy to claim freedom of speech links to 'the people' in the first AM, etc, etc.

DavidTC: Because, the 2nd amendment, at the time it was written, *did not bind the state governments in any way*.

Other than the 2ndAM, what other parts of the Bill of Rights get that carve out?

DavidTC: I don’t *agree* the 2nd amendment is an individual right, or that it was supposed to be...

The people that voted this thing in were gun owners. If we try asking that segment of today's society what they think of the 2nd, imho they're not going to agree with you. You and I have a lot of respect for the State and the State's power, the people who voted in the 2nd would not because by modern standards theirs was a failed state (the State didn't have a monopoly on the use of violence).

DavidTC: However, that does not change your point, in that you want to know when, exactly, the 2nd amendment rights can be exercised despite the government opposing such use.

As far as I can tell, a good sum up of what you said was: 'If your State gov opposes this right, "Never".'

DavidTC: Which is why everything I’ve proposed is intended to work within that framework: A complete and total *tracking* of firearms, (No one has ever suggested any sort of right to *anonymous* gun operation!)

What compelling gov interest is there in tracking, and what sort of tracking was done back in the day? Keep in mind that criminals already don't bother with background checks, so this is only going to effect law abiding citizens.

To be fair I can picture legit gov interests... but this seems like a first step in confiscation. That's especially true if you're openly claiming you don't see an individual right, are just waiting for the Supremes to dismantle the 2ndAM, and want to ban entire classes of weapons.

DavidTC: (And if you want guns for *militia* purposes, which the court was oddly silent on, that’s what armories are for.)

This is nonsense considering you're also claiming I don't have the right to start or join a militia.

DavidTC: ‘It is not actually legal to walk around with a gun in your hand, you’d have to strap this to your back, and thus that is a crappy gun for the purpose of self-defense. We don’t let you have it for that. We recommend a handgun, which you can keep in a holster and access quickly.’.

Problems:
1) At best, IMHO the anti-gun movement would offer this as a "compromise", pocket it, and then keep pressing for less and less useful guns. Their actual position is no guns for anyone and this would just be a step along that way.

2) Preventing invasion seems like it would be a constitutionally protected activity. If this seems unlikely, then you don't live on the Texas border and need to worry about drug gangs or people smuggling. At the time of the 2ndAM, everyone lived on the border.

3) There are situations where you'd need to defend yourself against more than one person. Armed gangs, the gov losing control, etc. This country has seen riots even in the last few years. If I live in downtown Ferguson and I want to keep mobs from burning down my home and business, then yes, a AR-15(ish) seems reasonable. Hunting weapons aren't going to work if the other side shoots back.

The Bill of Rights (i.e. the ten passed at the same time, skipping the ones which don't mention 'the people' and #9 which we agree is a mess).

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

RE: #10
DavidTC: Note this is governmental powers, not rights. *Powers* that the government could have do not sit in individual people! If the US government hasn’t passed a law, or the State government hasn’t passed a law, then the *people* have the power to pass a law. Not, like, some random guy.

It means if the federal or state governments hasn't passed a law, the people can simply do it. It isn't a world where everything not specifically allowed by the state is forbidden for the people, rather everything that isn't expressly forbidden is allowed. Further, notice it mentions both "the States" and "the people" like they're different entities.

RE: 1
DavidTC: Notice the only rights listed of the *people* are to peaceable assemble and petition…those are, quite literally, the *group* rights.

Assemble is hardly something which can apply to the states, and "petition" is certainly something you can do, individually, to a court. According to legal-dictionary a 'petition' is A written application from a person or persons to some governing body or public official asking that some authority be exercised to grant relief, favors, or privileges. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/petition

RE: 4
DavidTC: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects is a *general principle* about how the government should operate.

It's not an individual right? Can we collectively be secure without any of us individually being so? Or perhaps the State has the right to be secure in it's house?

RE: 2
Trying to argue it's a 'collective' right would be fine if you were also claiming the people could use it collectively without the government's permission.

I can assemble with my friends without the government's permission.
I can petition the government or a court without the government's permission.
I am secure in my house, without the government's permission.

I can bear a gun... when exactly? If I join the government's military? Effectively you're trying to claim the 2nd AM has no effect at all. That it's not worth the paper it's written on, and that couldn't have matched what the people who voted on it thought they were doing.

The typical person back when the 2nd AM was passed would have been a farmer (90% rural back then), and farmers like guns. They would have lived within a day or two’s ride of dangerous animals, indians, etc. They’d just lived through a repressive government where the common man had picked up his guns and overthrown the government. They'd also seen the French-Indian war between 1754–1763.

From that description, imho The Constitution was amended by anti-government gun-nuts, or at least that's what they'd be today.

I seriously doubt they used tanks. Tanks are expensive, Germany had a limited number, if they'd needed tanks to deal with every tiny town then the Holocaust wouldn't have been as total.

The Government has the resources to send the tanks+army in to deal with any one town, kill any one person, etc. That's very difference from being able to send the army into every town.

More guns turns the Jewish uprising in Warsaw into the Polish uprising in Warsaw. In both cases the Nazis 'won', but in the later it was really, really expensive, took a long time, resulted in lots of dead Nazis, etc. The Jews killed 17 Nazis, the Poles killed 8000.

DavidTC: Militias do exist. The National Guard is one, a force made of all the individual state militias. Some states have other militias.

A militia which doesn't store their weapons at home and which presumably wouldn't take me. This is an effort to move the 2nd AM from being an individual right to being a state's right. "the people" is a phrase used over and over in the Bill of Rights and it's always referring to individual rights, there are other phrases for state's rights.

DavidTC: The only Supreme Court decision we’ve had that affirmed any sort of individual right to firearms did so on the basis of self-defense, home defense, and hunting. It was *completely silent* on any sort of right to defend against an invasion.

Then the Supremes are turning their eyes away from what it says. The 2nd AM makes no mention of hunting or home defense, it does however go over 'security of a free State' and 'militia'.

Constitutional rights should be as broad as possible (thus free speech covers the internet), not as narrow as possible.

2ND AM: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

DavidTC: Militias, being a *military force*, would generally require *military* weapons. Fully-automatic ones. RPGs. Tanks. That sort of thing. People…are not allowed to have those.

Militias, back in the day, stored only some of their weapons at home. You don't keep a cannon or other heavy weapons in your bedroom, nor are you able to "bear" them. However if you want to argue that the Constitution allows for "the people" to "have" any weapon they can "bear" then that's fine.

DavidTC: There seems to be this huge disconnect as to what the courts have said the 2nd amendment says, and what people *think* they’ve said it says.

When the court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson they didn't change what the Constitution "said". The correct way to allow gun control to the degree the left wants is to argue for, and then get rid of, the 2nd AM.

Go google "Clinton Cattle Futures", read the wiki (which makes her worthy of being arrested right there), then understand The Clinton Foundation (TCF) is the modern version of that. They have collected roughly 2 Billion (with a 'B') dollars, those donating is a who is who list of people who'd want to bribe the Sec of State. Why does Blackwater, when they're not out there killing/protecting people, think The Clinton Foundation is a worthwhile 'charity' to invest in?

She, Bill, and TCF are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. My assumption is the people paying them think they're worth the money. So... what is it that they're doing that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

The lesson of Rome, or for that matter, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, is that democracies create bureaucracies, run into trouble, and turn to strong men.

We're about to elect to the Presidency either an openly corrupt (to a mind-numbing level) Democrat who really should have been arrested years ago or a Demagog anti-immigrate strong-man Republican who shouldn't be running for office at all. Both of them believe in the Imperial Strong-man Presidency.

And this is in a time where we *aren't* dealing with anything especially serious.

In the easily foreseeable future we're going to have serious problems with the debt and paying for all these things we've promised. All of the possible answers are painful, poorly handled this could make conditions right for a despot.

Or to put it differently, I don't see how the chances of a despotic government in the decade after next isn't at least 2%.

Stillwater:
The American revolution wasn’t predicated on preventing tyranny. Hell, all those folks knew exactly what they were getting in to when they came to colonies governed by Britain. They walked in to what they subsequently viewed as tyranny and then fought their way outa it.

The 13 colonies were founded in 1607(ish), the Revolution was in 1776. While they certainly had immigration they also had a lot of growth from people having kids.

...a higher proportion of the population reached reproductive age, and that fact alone helps to explain why the colonies grew so rapidly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Colonies

Ignoring that, the Revolution largely came from Great Britain (GB) changing the rules. GB colonies would be run with the purpose of enriching GB's economy. Thus the Tea Act of 1773, which led to cries of "No Taxation without representation", The Boston Tea Party, and ultimately the revolution.

Chip Daniels:
When has “prevent a tyranny” ever worked, anywhere?

The American Revolution comes to mind.

greginak:
fwiw, my moms GP’s were polish jews and had relatives who were killed in teh Holocaust. This not just some twaddle i haven’t thought about. It is related to my history.

My wife's home town lost 80% of it's population, 12k out of 15k. I've no clue how many Germans it took to make that happen... perhaps just a handful. But if Warsaw had 1 handgun for every 2k Jews (200-ish from a population that started at 400k), then presumably the number of guns would have been close to zero, so "a handful" would have been all it took.

greginak:
To clarify. The nazi’s blamed jews for many things. Jews became the scaprgoat for the Stab in the Back narrative of the loss of WW1 and there was plenty of anti-semitism floating around to make jews seem like they were a mortal threat to the German state. This is completely clear from nazi propaganda from the 30’s and 40’s. If Jews had lots and lots of guns the nazi’s would have just had another reason to ramp up their fear ie. “jews are evil mongrels, corrupting our country and mussing our pure blood and they are arming themselves to over throw us in line with all their bankers.” The propaganda rights itself. Instead of just a simple Kristalnacht the nazi’s would have gone in harder and bloodier and would have felt completely justified in doing so.

All of this is true.

greginak:
Any retaliation by jews would have just been more excuse to send in tanks or whatever. If jews had been armed it would have changed nothing in general. They weren’t safer w/o guns, they were only safe outside of germany and then europe.

You're assuming an unlimited number of tanks/soldiers that they can put anywhere. Germany enlisted as many men as they could, they created as many tanks as they could, etc. They had to make trade offs. If it takes 20x as many soldiers to do things, then some things just don't get done. Or alternatively, if the Nazis really were willing to divert tanks/soldiers from the front line to deal with every small town etc (and they might have been), then they would have lost the war sooner.

greginak:
I’m in no way calling for guns to be taken away. I’m fine with gun ownership although i’m sure i want different regs than you. I think the tyranny is coming aspect is a weak argument that relies to much on paranoia and slippery slope arguments. If we want to avoid tyranny we need a hellava lot more than just a lot of guns.

IMHO the 1st AM has done more than the 2nd to avoid a tyranny. At the same time we'll never know of ugly paths avoided because the people in charge decided it'd be more trouble and risk than it was worth.

The problem with calling it "a weak argument that relies to much on paranoia" is it's happened several dozen times in the last century. Humans aren't good at evaluating small percentages that probably won't happen in their lifetime but care large impacts. That's why the lottery works so well.

greginak:
The Jews were a tiny minority, if they were armed they would have been killed just the same. They were widely outnumbered. In fact it was a murder by a jew of a nazi that provoked serious reprisals. If the Jew had been armed they would have been considered an even greater danger.

Where they existed they tended to exist in numbers, and I don't understand this 'an even greater danger' line of thought. Are you suggesting the Jews were safer because they weren't armed?

greginak:
It was a truly noble fight in the Warsaw ghetto for the jews to fight back in 44. And they got slaughtered while putting up a good fight.

13,000 Jews died there, another 57k were sent to death camps. The ZOB (the larger of the two resistance groups) had 220 hand guns (many home made), one machine gun, and a few rifles. They had very little in ammunition. There were 2,090 Nazis (source: wiki).

So there were roughly 10 Nazis for every Jewish gun, and perhaps more Nazis than Jewish bullets.
The Jews had the manpower for 300x as many guns (more if we count quality).
This is not an example which shows guns don't matter, just the opposite.

greginak:
You know stats don’t work like that. They are meaningless, you can’t calculate the chance country will be a dictatorship in that crude fashion. That is for Spock or Hari Seldon, but in real life it doesn’t work like that.

Interestingly NPR was just talking about a time capsule of Jewish letters from... I think 1930. They had no clue what was coming. Ask someone in 1950 to predict which 20 countries are going to have genocides in the next 50 and I don't think he can. Or for that matter, predict which 20 countries are going to have genocides over the next 50 years.

"Random" isn't a good word but genocide is a lot more common and less predictable than we like to think. Further that's just the extreme of tyranny. There's lots of lesser situations where one could reasonably want a militia-worthy gun.

If we include failed states, wars, lack of law enforcement, or other situations where the government loses control over it's monopoly on violence then it's a LOT greater than 2% a decade. The Ferguson riots were the exception in this country, not the rule, but that's of small comfort if it's your house being burned or your life on the line.

Oscar Gordon: Of course, here in America we don’t have any formal structures to ensure that not only is the population armed, but that it is consistently trained in any fashion whatsoever.Rather than providing even the most basic training, we’ve basically given up any pretense of anything resembling a militia by taking the approach of, “Get yourself a rifle, if the fit hits the shan and we don’t have any real soldiers to send, well, good luck!”

Nowadays, between GCA extremists who don’t want anyone except cops to have a gun outside of a military base, and GRA extremists who see any government attempt to regulate anything as a prelude to confiscation or a backdoor ban, any hope of reviving the militia of old, even in the most basic sense, is a lost cause.

A militia is probably pointless, but under what situations would I need a gun? Economic Collapse? (Say, if the political class decides to use hyper inflation to deal with the debt). My city becomes a very high crime area and for some reason I can't move? I'm targeted by a stalker?

My expectation is that I'll see whatever is coming a year or more out, and as long as I have the right to buy a gun, I don't actually need to do so right now. However if the GCA extremists look like they're going to win then I'd need to get armed while I can.

greginak:
I think the “prevent a tyranny” argument fails a bit unless you want to say Javelins, Stingers, grenades, mortars, .50 cals, mines, etc. are all fine for everybody to own to their hearts content. Yeah there are a few that go that far but if you really want to give the peeps an option to fight the gov they gotta be able to take down helo’s and pop armored vehicles.

Generally speaking a country's army can deal with any one city, but needing to deal with all of them is a big enough problem that a political solution will be found. If it takes the real army to impose order, then that had better be the exception, not the rule.

The inflammatory way to phrase that is "the holocaust would have looked very different if the Jews had been armed". If we want to limit history to 1950+, then worldwide we've averaged about 4 genocides a decade, that's roughly a 2% chance per country per decade, or each country has a 50% chance of one every 350 years or so.

These numbers are really, really stark and one sided. Even if "prevent a tyranny" only works half the time, it's STILL worth losing a hundred people a year.

First let me say you make seriously good arguments. Logical, sensible, and I had to chew on them for a while. Very well done sir.

DavidTC:
Cities, counties, boroughs, whatever, have no legal rights beyond what the state grants them. ...

Agreed.

DavidTC:
Put differently, the militia was the people.

They were in the militia because the government had drafted them in. That line is literally *the draft*, not some sort of philosophical statement of what militias are. If the government later says they are not in the militia, they are *not*. There is no right, whatsoever, to be in a militia. There is no right to start one, there is no right to join one.

Also true... but that needs expanding.

Culturally I think people then could NOT have related to the concept of not needing a militia, nor would they have been able to relate to the militia not needing every warm body. The state government was that weak, and the federal gov even weaker. Having said that, I think legally this is fine.

But I don't think it takes us where you want. Even if you don't have the Constitutional right to create or join a militia, even if militias don't currently exist, what we're talking about is whether or not you have the Constitutional right to have militia-worthy weapons, and this is expressly called out in the 2nd AM in the affirmative.

A big part of the militia, and thus the 2nd AM, was preventing/dealing with a tyrannical government. Obviously, misuse of those sorts of weapons also leads to these mass killings. On a side note, all the (non-drug, non-family) mass killings we've had in the last century don't add up to one bad year with a tyrannical government.

You're very welcome, and I don't think I've read Mark Kleiman, certainly not his books. And agreed we outsource the worst effects of this mess, drug gangs can rival governments for their resources and power in parts of the world, especially at a city level.

RE: Pre-Prohibition gangs.
I'm not sure what undid the Bowery_Boys and their rivals the "Dead Rabbits". Making the Irish white? The Car? Publically funded and control fire departments?

My bet is effective rule of law and the creation of a functional legal system. Given this is roughly 1800 to 1850, we're also talking about a time before the political/legal system got it's act together. If the political system doesn't offer protection, you'll make one that does even if it's "illegal".

scott the mediocre: That was hyperbole, yes?Great image, though.

Not exactly hyperbole. West Side Story (WSS) is the world of 1957, and the gangs had no way to earn money. They owned a few street blocks but there was no way to monetize that. Fights were for "honor", but losing a street corner didn't cost the gang hundreds of thousands of dollars of income per year. Win or lose the fight, in a few years they're going to age out of the gang.

The War on Drugs changed all that (and I'm fine with it starting in 1971). Being the top gang member means you're probably the richest person in the neighborhood. The way to get rich was to own territory, of course fist fights turn into gun fights (and everyone has the money for guns).

scott the mediocre:
There is quite a history of rather nasty street gangs at various times pre-1971, though I can’t think of any post-1933, which is apparently about when history began (that’s not a gripe at you,

I agree, we saw this before with Prohibition.

scott the mediocre:
O most honored embodiment of 27% of the mass-energy of the observable universe

Yep, that's me. :)

scott the mediocre:
...isolated subpopulations plus certain urban conditions alone seem to be close to a sufficient cause for street gangs (e.g. MS-13 started out as a more or less defensive gang for the Salvadorans in Pico Union against other pre-existing gangs).But illegal drugs certainly provide superb fuel for street gang growth and metastasis.

If Prohibition is our model, and it should be, after making drugs legal the violent, illegal players will try to stay around. They'll do protection, etc and we'll be 50+ years getting rid of them.

However "staying around" doesn't change that they'll have to take a massive pay cut, and the level of violence will go way, way down because every street corner won't be worth killing over. The drug dealer vs. drug dealer wars will stop (and when you have millions or billions of dollars fueling it, "war" is probably the right word).

Further these are all trends which feed on themselves. Dealers in other countries (or ours) will have far less money to corrupt the legal/political system, so dealing with them will be easier, the richest guy (role model) in the neighborhood won't be a criminal, etc.

DavidTC:
A militia is a *government operated* entity that is distinguished from a military by the fact that everyone is part time, instead of a professional soldier. The National Guard calls them ‘citizen soldiers’. (Which is a weird term vaguely implying that professional soldiers aren’t usually citizens.)

My impression from history is a militia could be organized at *any* level, including towns (which today would be villages). Looking for a more structured definition I've found...

The reserve militia or unorganized militia, also created by the Militia Act of 1903 which presently consist of every able-bodied man of at least 17 and under 45 years of age who are not members of the National Guard or Naval Militia. http://definitions.uslegal.com/m/militia/

A. The Colonial Militias

...Yet owing to the small British military presence of the time, the colonists soon found the need to establish a military force... The resulting colonial militia laws required every able-bodied male citizen to participate and to provide his own arms. Militia control was very localized, often with individual towns having autonomous command systems.
https://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/Bioterrorism/8Military/milita01.htm

Put differently, the militia was the people. We're talking about a time period where the state was exceptionally weak (and the federal state even more so) and it was reasonable to think you'd need to depend on your neighbors for "military" support to deal with Indian invasions, slave rebellions, or even hostile government.

DavidTC:
I’ve never seen any gun control law prohibit people from doing *anything* in a militia.

I think there's an argument that all federal gun control laws which attempt to prevent private citizens from owning guns are going to seriously impact Militias.

I think at best your line of reasoning results in gun control being a state level thing... but if militias really are by definition "all able bodied men" the issue we instantly run into is whether it's constitutional for a state to outlaw militias other than it's own.

DavidTC:
It is a somewhat interesting legal question if US *states* have any drafting power.

Sounds like militias were often exactly that. Granted, 4 days of training a year isn't "full time".

DavidTC:
A lot of carbines, often being designed as military weapons, work that way. That is a specific ‘niche’ that guns are designed to occupy. Small calibre, high velocity, lots of bullets. It is great for war. It is also great for mowing down civilians at a movie theater. It is stupid for home defense, or self defense, and not great for hunting.

And thus I feel there is not actually any constitutional protection for such weapons. There is always a better choice for the *constitutionally protected* reasons to own a gun.

I am not a lawyer, but the purpose of joining a militia (or even having one) is to prepare for war. It seems odd to claim that hunting and home defense are constitutionally protected activities but getting guns which would help your militia prep for war (as opposed to hunting) would not be.