Your side is always calling names and cannot have healthy dialogue. Name calling is brave behind the keyboard, but most of you are pussies who need their guns or else you’d be impotent. I can see from the name calling and use of LSM that you’ve been brainwashed by the radicalized Republican resources - Faux, Breibart, Alex Jones, etc.
But I digress. The point is that the constitution is a living document meant to change as our country changes. Case in point the Bill of Rights, which were written after the constitution and are changes / clarifications. After that, there have been other amendments that have changed the constitution. We can do that still.
The Federalist papers were essentially propaganda documents (and I don’t mean propaganda in a negative way, just that they were meant to influence) to ratify the constitution, so not sure what your point is about the opinions of those that wrote them. They are that, opinions. Fact of the matter is we have more than twice as many weapons per capris as any other countries, and the number of mass shootings and suicides by guns is astronomical compared to other countries. This is something we should definitely address.
Originally Posted by Barrymccockinner
A little background on myself - I voted blue until a few years ago. I lived in Chicago and was very anti-gun. Then I moved to San Francisco. Between living there, travelling western Europe, China, India, and around the US for work, it occurred to me more and more how much people were were becoming pro-statist, and that when left to it's own devices, it becomes a type of corporate feudalism in the US, and that once the state has taken enough power, situations like what is happening in Hong Kong arise.
That realization is what lead me to move to Texas and start stockpiling weapons. The 2nd Amendment isn't about hunting and really isn't so much about self defense, it's about starting a bloody grassroots rebellion in the event of a government gone rogue, or making invasion by a foreign power as gruesome as possible.
Talk of "this is a civilized society, weapons don't belong" is a privileged, suburban, "ivory tower" mindset. You are right that The Constitution is a living document, but I think it's intellectually dishonest to say that the 2nd Amendment doesn't allow me to have a machine gun, but the 1st Amendment applies to the internet, and the 4th Amendment applies to electronic wiretapping.
Yes, we have a shitload of guns in this country. By virtue of that, people committing violence tend to use those. Trying to get rid of the guns doesn't address the violence. The UK for example, for all it's gun and knife bans, is having a crazy epidemic of stabbings, to the point that offenders are using screw drivers.
An interesting (and horrifying) development in the UK Stabbing problem is that they've noticed that the goal has moved from killing to maiming and degrading. Allow me to introduce you to "bagging":
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/lond...y-9939397.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...-backside.html
While these attacks don't have a political agenda, I would argue that this sort of thing almost amounts to terrorism, which is what I would also label the publicized mass shootings we hear of, regardless of political agenda.
I don't want to make any of these monsters famous or make them martyrs to some cause. What I
DO want to know, is why they did it, and unfortunately, we seldom get that answer. But I feel like if we could, we could make serious in-roads on bringing the violence down. Furthermore, I don't understand the mentality of trying to add harsher punishments, like terrorism charges to this sorts of attacks when the attacker seldom executes these attacks with a plan to make it out alive.
When I see these shooters in the news, I see the same maladjusted kids I grew up with that killed themselves. A lot of these sorts of folks who do these attacks were the sorts to just kill themselves 30-40 years ago, (btw, ~60% of reported gun deaths every year are suicides). So what changed between now and then to get these people to hurt others instead of themselves?
I'm not an expert on anything, but my personal opinion is that this might be an internet-based problem. While bullying is bad, we've allowed people an escape to a place where they're left to their own devices, where they can find antisocial echo chambers that will parrot their own bad ideas back at them and instill them with a victim mentality that seeks justice, but still gives them no value to their own lives.
