My grandfather had a selection of rifles. I was inches away from accidentally being shot in the shoulder with a .22 by a best friend when I was showing them to him. =)) No gun safety being taught in my home. At that time, I didn't know that a stuck bolt meant a live round in the chamber. We even lied about the gun going off when questioned. The hole in the shower tile on the other side of the closet back wall gave us away. That near-miss didn't affect me much except to think more safely about guns. His collection was basically one for each unique hunting trip he went on in his life. I vaguely remember 7 rifles and no pistols. Many of my cousins are skilled with arms and grew up hunting because they couldn't afford grocery store meat.

As a former Marine, I can clearly see how a reasonably armed populous as individuals is a great hedge against a rogue turn of the government or an invading force, but I don't see that as an even remotely serious threat for even the coming century.

We do though have a very real, measurable, and growing problem with American terrorists shooting up public places. When Al-Qaeda was all the rage, we were collectively (as a country) clamoring for Muslims to fix their terrorist problem. We were also demanding that parents turn in their children because we "knew" they knew what was going on. Introspect would warrant that America needs to solve it's problem the same way, but when it's us their's so much diverting the attention; video games, mental illness, nobody could have seen that coming, arm everybody. Why aren't we demanding that good cops turn in bad cops that are condoning white-supremacists? Why aren't more students ratting out their friends when they hear murderous talk in private?

All the things we tend to see in corporate media related to the problem is good for selling more guns. We don't have enough rational people shaming the nutty ownership of guns. We don't have any outrage or lawsuits against the producers of firearms the way we do against the tobacco (nicotine) industry for marketing products to children. A guy got murdered by the police for selling single cigarettes, but selling guns can happen anywhere and even have conventions solely for that purpose. Were learning from for-profit cable news that the way to live is to yell at your opponents instead of having meaningful dialogue that heads towards a better world for all. It's just way too much #Idiocracy in our world. People need to stop supporting the NRA who are defacto the marketing agency selling the needles for our heroin addiction. All rational gun owners should be calling their elected officials to complain about the gun problems we clearly have so that they can grow the balls to not be enslaved by the NRA. We pay Hollywood remarkable amounts at the box office to have them reinforce the lies that good guys kill bad guys and all is well. Our top-down class divisions, that are omnipresent in our culture, are a big part of the problem too. Many of these fuck-head shooters were part of the demoralized class of people in their school where we teach and reinforce a social order of Jocks and Cheerleaders at the top, nerds go to middle management and the rest of you losers will do meaningless labor till we throw you away. We arent building compassion into the system, it's only there because some teachers keep that candle lit in their classrooms, but the cold wind of the bureaucracy blows it out as often as it can. We have a religion problem that routinely teaches children they are the special ones and the other groups are inferior cause they do their incantations to god different. Fucking righteous indignation has caused plenty of these murders.

Our culture has so many things it's doing wrong and has been doing for so long that the fissure of mass-shootings is just a telltale sign of our reign coming to an undignified end.

Sorry for just talking mad, but this shit frustrates me to no end. At the top of this worldwide problem of violence against innocents is driven by the negative externalities of scale by the omnipotent industries extracting wealth and leaving ruin for the locals in their wake.

... to control slave populations.

Actually, you have that completely backwards. Gun control is meant to control slave populations ... of all ethnicities. Case in point.

@OsakaAli while preparing to refute your claim, I found out I was in error. I remembered things very wrong. It was the centralized police forces that were married to the fugitive slave act. Sorry about that. Do you think I should edit the original post?

I had disorganized memories that stemmed from the connection between CBP's inception and xenophobic border militias (Part 1 & Part 2).

However, nowhere in my original post was their talk of to gun control. My focus was on identifying more clearly the nuance between rational gun ownership, and irrational gun ownership. I don't begrudge minorities, especially marginalized minorities, from their right to bear arms. The distinction may be summarized by the following: I own this firearm because your people might come to kill me vs. I own this firearm to maintain my power and keep your people in line.

The majority of mass shootings are signals from a group that thinks it should rule to other groups it wants to rule that they better get in their subservient places.

Oh boy Osaka Ali, I feel like this is becoming a conversation we should have in person at a coffee shop or something. Note that typically, but not always, if I don't directly address something you said, I probably agree with it.

Just as a note to the very first reply you made, it appears that you indeed used that out of context. Maybe you were mad at the time and just wanted to punch my face with something righteous sounding. We aren't enemies parting ways, and I am not against the second amendment. I'm not siding with a foreign adversary over monetary gains for myself which encroach on freedoms for you.

I think you would agree that an agent who takes away another person's freedoms without a justifiable cause doesn't deserve the right to that authority. So a person who shoots to death a bunch of innocent people based on psychosis definitely didn't have the right to gun ownership. If you can't differentiate pre-meditated mass murder based on fictional fears and self-delusion from legitimate self-defense then this writing may be fruitless for you and me.

The motivation for gun ownership does matter, obviously, we have a big body count of innocent people and its growing fast, and it's driven by terrible ideologies which seek to remove rights for entire classes of people.

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The second amendment isn't a mandate, I reckon. It is an observation.

Trivial note: I think for something to become an amendment and stay one it's pretty much a mandate unless we have different definitions of what a mandate is.

The observation is that living beings must have recourse to self-defense in order to live. Without it they won't. Man, as the pinnacle of creation, is even more justified in acknowledging and exercising this right.

Wow, this has so much I don't like. You are standing on the soap-box of self-defense while I'm trying to discuss a mass murder problem, which seems very unique to the USA. I will grant you that self-defense in the face of imminent dangers is a must. I don't agree that a person cannot live without guns at the ready. Most people on Earth don't have guns but seem to live long happy lives.

And what's this Man at the pinnacle talk? That sounds like something you have been told and accepted without much thought. Sure we have opposable thumbs and are able to communicate better across long distances so we are in practice better killers of all other living things, but that's no reason to think we're special. You seem to have said that because we can communicate better we are supremely allowed to use the murder card against all other living things. Justified... ...harrumph. That's just so weird to me. Why not think about living in harmony with the Earth and the living things around you? Why not instead apologize to the hog or deer you are going to eat cause it was either them or you?

The constitution, to its credit, states a plain fact and a truth of the natural law, a law superior to anything conceivable by mankind.

Ugh, natural law? This should be its whole own thread. This only seems like an inarguable fact until you talk to non-like-minded people. Neither did the constitution state a plain fact or a natural law; although I don't know your definition of natural laws, or where you are getting yours from. If it was a plain fact we wouldn't still be arguing about it to this day.

And please don't deify the words by making them inconceivable by mankind when a bunch of flawed people while under pressure studied what other people were doing and saying, then argued it out amongst themselves before writing it down. That's exactly what it is to conceive it through mankind. A common "Natural Law" is thou shalt not kill.

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It is not possible to be a zealot on this issue, just as it is not possible for you to be a zealot in asserting your right to prevent me from harming or killing you by anything from your protest to your entirely justifiable application of deadly force to protect your life and property. I think that I am not stating anything in the above sentence that you don't already know or agree with.

I'm not sure we agree on what a zealot is. I'm routinely ambivalent on defending myself in the face of real or perceived threats. Typically people who are threatening to me are mentally unstable because of their experiences in life. I'd rather help them fix their thinking than injure them. They've been through enough already.

A typical joke is, the converts are always the zealots. I think zealots are people who suffered some generalized form of PTSD and their hypervigilance (the standard symptom) is what puts them in the zealot group on that topic. You don't have to go to war to get a case of PTSD. You get it from being forced to endure a horribly traumatic experience that you weren't prepared for. Being beaten as a child can do it. Getting ostracized or shunned by a group in society can do it. Divorce can do it. Lack of compassion from your fellow man can do it.

So, you assumed wrong that I would agree with that. You presented a spectrum of reaction to a threat of some sort, and that spectrum wasn't all-inclusive but made a point; you didn't extend to no resistance at all. So after stating the boundaries, you concluded that the array of possibilities were all equal responses and therefore zealotry couldn't be possible. A gentle protest of don't hurt me or begging for life isn't zealotry. A vendetta against your family tree as a response is zealotry.

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So then why the questioning of the moral merit and character of gun owners? Do you contest the legal principle of innocence until proven guilt? It seems that you are willing to trade that fundamental part of the foundation of American jurisprudence. And for what: The illusion of public safety? Sorry, but this is sounding to me like essentially the same components of the justification of the notion of "pre-crime" or even "thought-crime".

I as a citizen of this country have more apprehension of being shot by a mad-man at random than I do for any other way to die; I don't worry much about death, but a random asshole is the top of my list. This is a statistical thing based on the frequency and randomness of the events plus the pervasive nature of the ideology of the perpetrators. That's why I question the moral merit of the gun owners.

You are making me a straw man in order to jump to the idea that I reject innocent till proven guilty, but that's not the biggest problem with your sentence. It's that you placed that metaphor out of context. Innocent till proven guilty (as opposed the post Magna Carta England) was being applied to criminal trials. In civil trials, it's not applied. We went with the "Beyond the shadow of a doubt" because England was convicting on shitty evidence back then. It was a good call, and I like it. You think that it's mutually exclusive that if I like innocent until proven guilty means unfettered access for everyone to firearms. That's wrong. I can be worried about the stability of my neighbor and report it without being able to prove my fears. That process may wind up in court where should I be wrong, my neighbor will be exonerated and have just cause to not like me anymore. A person suffering a time out in their life due to suspicion of something is not mutually exclusive of the innocence principal.

I'm not sure how you think it would be an illusion of public safety given the rate of mass shootings in the USA. It's becoming an epidemic. Many of these shootings had obvious warning signs that if they had been taken seriously in a timely manner, many people would still be alive and happy right now. For you to think "pre-crime" as fictionalized in movies is the same as actually planning and executing a crime in a pattern with other like-minded people in that group planning new murder raids is deeply disturbing. It seems your current personally selected lofty ideals are blinding you to the pragmatic realities and failures of those ideals.

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This is why I responded your post and added an * as an addendum to "your arms" (because you claim that you don't possess any). What I see as insidious about your rhetoric is that it is, accidentally or otherwise, muddled. You resort to a textbook example of a "Red Herring" by comparing a law abiding, if distastefully motivated ("deplorable", perhaps?) gun owner to a politician who lies to their constituency. The politician makes a sacred oath upon taking office to serve the public and the founding documents' directives. The gun owner is not required, nor should he (or she) be, to make any similar oath in order to exercise the right I think I have adequately defined above.

A red herring is misapplied here, so is the term law-abiding. I'm not discussing the average gun owner who has no plan to kill other human beings. I'm also not discussing in any way removing the second amendment. A red herring is if I said to repeal the second amendment because somebody died by accident. The majority of a herring catch are normal and I'm focusing on one of the millions which is red.

To focus down away from ordinary gun owners to the subset of people who buy guns "Lawfully" with a specific intent to kill people they don't like at some undetermined time in the future is a different issue. This type of person who possesses a firearm had obtained it under false pretenses and would not be considered a lawful citizen if they were planning a mass murder. Their duplicity is directly comparable one-to-one with a person who lies to the public while they are a social deviant in private.

I don't think it's a stretch to think child molesters shouldn't be allowed near children, Bill Cosby shouldn't have had a suitcase of Valium, kidnappers shouldn't be sold windowless vans, and murderers shouldn't have weapons.

The outer edge of this group of clandestine premeditating murderers to be are the types who make ostentatious displays of weaponry. Like the packs of white people in camo that show up to a black people's political rally to stand around with an AR-15 draped over their shoulder. It's a form of coercion and intimidation, but it follows the letter of the law while violating the spirit of the law. It's not like those people are carrying their rifles everywhere they go in public.

If you think the second amendment was written hoping that arrogant people with a head full of bad thinking could flash a large caliber pistol in order to win a position of power over people they shouldn't have power over then that's nuts. If a their was person who you knew, and you also knew they wanted to kill you, would you drive them to a gun store? I hope you wouldn't. Your position of unfettered access to firearms would say that you would drive them to the gun store.

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Who qualifies as a 2A "Zealot" or a "Status Symbol" gun owner? If the zealot is indeed guilty of the crime of "Zealotry" should their rights of expression, free expression, be somehow limited? Do you recommend that even absent of the application of state controls on their speech, the society should somehow coordinate to 'shun' such "zealots"? Do you think that gun purchasers should be made to prove that their motives for weapon possession exclude any hint of baser motives, such as wanting to "show off" to some audience, or to attain some kind of prestige?

Well, 2A Zealots rush out to make news about unfettered access to any weapon they choose for any reason especially after a mass shooting has just happened. They could also be the type of people who buy themselves a 50 caliber chain gun for personal protection. They could be the type of person that has 2 or more concealed pistols on them at all times just waiting for an excuse to start shooting in public. They could be the type of person who boosts clicks on social media by making short sultry clips with a shiny pistol trying to give foolish boys a boner along with the desire to irresponcibly buy a firearm. It could be a nutty militia type who spends more on guns than they do on food. It could be the border patroll slef-deputized "volunteer" walking around with long range rifels looking for brown people to shoot.

We are in a very weird space here. It appears in context that the founders had some fear of the forming federal government being usurped by tyrants, so the dual description of ways to bear arms, personal and militia, was a hedge against that. This freedom was great when our citiznry was mostly reasonable people. We seem to be going through a time when a type of loosley affiliated but like minded people are leveraging that right to plot against our society. Though you cannot know what a persons intent is without them telling it and it being a plausible credible thing, evidence comming out of the mass shootings we are suffereing through is showing us that their were ways we could have seen it coming before it happened. The shooters have displayed motive, means opportunity and had made incriminating statements before their heanous actions. They should have lost their rights to bear arms. That's entirely different than repealing the second amendment. You can't act like their is some slippery slope between the person suffering psychosis planning a mass murder and the normal law abiding sprotsman. We can draw that line between unfettered access to all and some people loose their priveledge through the abuse of the priveledge. The founders were against treason too; you can have guns in case were bad, but also we will kill you if you rise up against us. The only thing that makes that obvious cognitive dissonance make sense is if you assume all the people are acting rationally.

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I definitely wish their was a better way to have a branching discusson than this long form reply that we are doing. I've thought about inventing it in the past.