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.

LeeEsq: Many people off the Internet still want the War on Drugs to continue though. The more aggressive police tactics have a lot of political support even though you wouldn’t know this if you spend a lot of time on certain blogs or reading certain authors. The War on Drugs might be winding down but it is going to be a very slow one.

Sure, but imho it's more realistic to think ending the war on drugs would work than it is to expect drug dealers to submit to background checks.

Discussions about gun control SHOULD be discussions about the war on drugs because that's the biggest number we can actually do anything about. Yes, the issue is politics, and that normally gets blamed for most lack-of-gun-control, but most gun-control attempts aren't workable on the face of it (which is a real part of why the NRA is so successful at stopping them).

Orlando, combined with Sandyhook, showcase pretty well the lack of use of background checks and/or sanity checks. One passed everything, the other would have failed so killing someone and taking her guns was part of the plan.

What "improvements" do you want? Bring back stop-and-frisk? Outlaw gun-free zones? Something else?

Saul Degraw: The big issue is that I do think the NRA has a very Cavalier attitude towards mass shootings and sees them as acceptable collateral damage for unlimited gun rights.

I don't own a gun myself so I mostly don't view myself as having a dog in this race, but after every mass shooting we see a bunch of policy "solutions" that wouldn't have prevented the shooting and are pretty openly one step further towards disarming everyone. Admittedly that's not the plan for this year but it does seem to be the world view fueling it.

Thank you.

Saul Degraw:
@Dark Matter
“2) Thug on thug crime.
Solutions: End the war on drugs. Maybe ‘stop and frisk’ in some areas.”

I think this will help but won’t solve the problem completely. A lot of fights can be territorial and over other issues. There is also the matter of collateral damage. Just because someone is in a poor and crime-ridden neighborhood does not mean that they are collateral damage.

Without the war on drugs, street gangs become the gangs of "West Side Story" again, where the gang leader wants to drop and get a real job so he can have a girl.

Saul Degraw:
@Dark Matter
“3) Mass murder by nuts.

I think this one depends on perceptions and how we define gun massacres.

According to the article, there have been 1002 mass shootings since Sandy Hook as of June 14, 2016. That seems like an epidemic to me. The article hedges though and states:

You're mixing your numbers. Your first quote, Vox's article claims 1002 mass shootings (300 a year or so), but that includes domestic incidents, drug crimes, and even injuries. But the Harvard School of Public Health's definition results in basically 2 a year. IMHO the moment we mix our various problems we end up with distorted views of what's going on and why because the drug war's numbers are so great. I'm good with talking about Orlando and how to reduce it, but Orlando was stunningly rare.

In Orlando, the shooter passed various background checks, mental health checks, might have planned his crime for years (if the FBI is right about him not being gay), and basically kept reloading until someone else with a gun forced him to retreat (we don't have a total number of bullets he fired yet, but I expect it's going to be in the hundreds).

The only thing I see to work with there is getting rid of these fake "gun free" zones. This was a crowd of young men, some of them are going to be current/former military/law enforcement.

Sir,

First of all, good article, you seem to be fact driven which is a good thing.

On the other side of the aisle, I don’t see a lot of good faith interest in trying to find ways to do things that the Constitution does allow to identify that .1% and keep them from murdering people. When the NRA opposes pre-purchase background checks, it’s difficult to take their claim to want to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys seriously.I'm not with the NRA but it's very easy to see "pre-purchase background checks" become "no one, ever". Given how difficult some members of government want to make it to have a gun, it's difficult to believe the gov will administer this in good faith. One of the big purposes of rights is to prevent government abuse.

As I see it, we have four, mostly unrelated problems.

1) Suicide. Note it's somewhat dishonest to include suicide in with gun crime because other countries which are gun free have similar suicide rates.
Solutions: Not sure we have one.

2) Thug on thug crime.
Solutions: End the war on drugs. Maybe 'stop and frisk' in some areas.

3) Mass murder by nuts.

This is so rare it really shouldn't be driving the discussion, but somehow it is. We don't have a solution. A 'background check' wouldn't have stopped the last guy (a professional security guard who has passed mental health checks), nor anyone who is willing to plan things for months/years. IMHO it's worth pointing out that disarming the victims with these 'gun free' zones seems counter productive.

4) Government sponsored mass murder.

One government run genocide can easily be thousands of years worth of these others, hundreds of thousands if we exclude suicide and drug crimes. Our own government probably can't be trusted over that period of time, and has committed crimes probably worth the name 'genocide' within the last few centuries.

Yes, the gov has an army, yes, armed citizens can't stand up to it... but so what. If the gov needs the army to deal with every small hick town then it's lost right there.

Will H.:
Redefinition is exactly what happened in Second Amendment jurisprudence.
Prior to 1970, it was generally accepted that the right to bear arms was a right held by the states.
After about ten years of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history by the NRA, the individual right came to be accepted.

The typical person back when the 2nd AM was passed would have been a farmer (90% rural back then), and farmers like guns. The typical person 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.

This is not a description of someone who would be in favor of central government control over guns, any more than it's a description of someone who would be in favor of central government control over speech or assembly.

Lack of vouchers is how we get parents being forced to send their kids into what they know are failure factories.

RE: Unintended downsides
1) $10k is FAR too much. The gov has things to do other than BI, and having children shouldn't be a lifestyle. "Basic" should mean "poverty" (a min wage job easily takes you above that).

For example, median household wage is currently $52k(ish), I have 4 kids.

2) Giving out free money is popular, if we go down this road the gov will be under huge pressure to increase the BI (just like Social Security was originally intended to be a very basic low key top off, not your entire retirement).

3) The Purity of this system is great, but I'm not sure what happens after we get lots of political meddling.

I like the idea... a lot... but only if it's replacing existing systems (i.e. not a massive tax increase) and not in addition to them.