What makes you think that? When the arch-conservatives on the court invented the new notion that the second amendment applies to the states and localities, they didn't leave themselves any intellectually plausible grounds for saying a regulation was OK in one place but against the second amendment in another.
First, sorry for the delay in responding -- life has been happening.
What makes me think that? Primarily the 10th Amendment, and the entire doctrine of state sovereignty. The 2nd Amendment didn't apply to ANY state before 1867. It has now been ruled that it applies to all states (in the MacDonald decision), but obviously many states are less restrictive than California, Illinois or Massachusetts. Whether those restrictions can stand (many are currently facing court challenges) is an open question. Would they stand as national law? Unlikely. It's also politically unfeasible.
Granted, intellectual consistency isn't their strong suit, and they're just shameless enough to pull another new legal concept out of their asses and pretend they found it in invisible ink in the second amendment. But, for now, it makes sense to say that if a form of gun control is in place at the state or local level, it's Constitutional, and could be rolled out more broadly if we choose. The court would be free to review those regulations and strike them down if they ran afoul of their view of the second amendment, but we don't have to try to anticipate the new legal ideas they may choose to invent for the NRA down the road. For now, we have options.
To date they've been consistent, and found no invisible ink. Since 1876, SCOTUS has held that the right to arms is not dependent on the existence of the 2nd Amendment for its own existence. The amendment merely provides additional protection to the right. The Heller and MacDonald decisions clearly left the opening for additional challenges to establish a bright line on how much restriction amounts to infringement, and as I said, some of those challenges are working their way through the court system.
Agreed. But you have to pretend that you think the truth is the opposite of what you actually think it is, because you don't want the practical considerations aligned against a position you've taken for reasons that are unrelated to those practical considerations. You'd oppose gun laws even if you were 100% sure they would save lives, and so admitting your suspicions that they'd save lives does you no good.
Simply wrong. The truth is I don't believe gun control, in the United States, reduces crime in the United States. So I'm confident that each new desired restriction is merely a stepping stone to the next one. Now, I would oppose them even if they were effective on the grounds of individual freedom. Freedom entails risk. That doesn't mean that I think such laws would be effective.
Yet, as you know, the waiting periods clearly did a lot of good -- resulting in a much quicker drop in murder and violent crime while those were in place than after they were replaced by InstaCheck.
I know no such thing. Violent crime in the U.S. has been on a steady decline since the late 1980s. That decline continued after InstaCheck came online.
As you know, that's simply a lie. I get where you're coming from: the end result is what matters to you, so when truth is an enemy, a lie is a welcome ally. But this material is publicly available and can be checked. The Brady Bill became law in 1993. The NICS system that allowed for instant checking went into place in 1998. The waiting period was in place between those dates. In 1993, the murder rate was 9.5. By 1998, it had fallen to 6.3 -- a decrease of 33.7% in just five years. The violent crime rate fell by 24% in that same time
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And as you know, crime was falling before the Brady Bill was enacted and continued to do so.t
Why would anyone want society not to have guns, other than that being a means to an end? It would be like wanting to get rid of screwdrivers, or electric can openers, or any other tool. Nobody just wakes up one morning with a vendetta against a class of tools and a desire to eliminate them. The gun controllers aren't focused on guns as the end, but as a means to the end: a means to making people safer. You're welcome to argue that gun control won't make people safer, or to argue that even if it will we should oppose it because you like shooting things and other people's lives matter less than that. But if you're going to be serious in your arguments, you have to recognize the truth about WHY gun controllers want to control guns. It's a means toward the intended end of making society safer.
I don't know. I've never understood the paranoia on the left when it comes to individual firearms ownership. I could offer a number of scenarios, ranging from simply a fear of freedom to the paranoiac (the goal is to disarm the population so that it can be enslaved -- which sounds paranoiac when not coming from one of the multiple framers of the Constitution that it paraphrases). But at the end of the day, I simply don't know -- I've never understood how me giving up my guns will enhance the life of anyone else -- but I'm replete both here and elsewhere with people telling me that it would do so. I do not agree that my doing so will make society safer.
There are multiple factors. The existence of a factor doesn't mean other factors stop existing. I assume this would be easier for you to grasp if you thought of it in a context other than guns, where your religious sensibilities won't be triggered. For example, does crack cocaine use increase mortality rates? I'd wager yes. Yet I'd also wager that mortality is quite high in old folks homes, and almost none of them use crack cocaine. How is this possible? Well, there's another factor: age. But if age factors into mortality, does that mean crack cocaine use doesn't? Of course not. Similarly, if population density (or poverty, or demographic mix, etc.) factors into murder rates, that doesn't mean that gun prevalence doesn't.
My engagement with firearms is by no means religious. It is primarily historical, and it is also my personal pathway to the physical sciences. As someone who has called for a repeal of the various drug codes dating to the early 20th century (one could by heroine over the counter before 1913), I find that comparison unpersuasive as well.
As for the "other factors" argument, if guns are such a large factor that they require more and more controls, I would have expected to see some sort of negative outcome in my rural home town, despite its lack of population density, etc., and yet there was none. It seems to me, then, that if you want to actually improve safety in society, you need to focus on those other factors, while I retain my right to arms.