Half a million #MarchForOurLives protesters rally in Washington DC - Polidicks

I dont understand how having fighter jets somehow means the military would automatically win against an armed uprising. Also back then i think it included cannons.

While I'm not a big fan of the whole "lets go topple the government tomorrow" mindset - I do think you should keep in mind that I doubt a lot of the U.S. military is going to suddenly turn on its own citizenry. While I'm sure that whatever despot in power that attempted to use the military in that fashion would have his/her cronies, coming from an area with a large military presense, I don't think a lot of them would start firing on civilians. But even beyond that, the U.S. military's biggest weakness is guerilla warfare, and if such an insurrection were to break out it certainly would be a guerilla war ala Vietnam or Afghanistan/Iraq.

You're not trying to argue thatt the founding fathers would have said "well hey, that's a little too much freedom!" when it comes to fighting off an oppressive gov't are you?

Okay so you're saying something everybody already agrees with you on but somehow structuring it in an argumentative fashion.

If they don't give them up, they'll be confiscated, and I wouldn't even so far as fining (let alone prison) the holdouts if they just give them up peacefully. Bear in mind, this deadline would likely be a over a decade at minimum. And as for handguns, or any other guns, again: I would heavily restrict guns based on a "needs a gun of this lethality" basis. As for self-defense against criminals with guns, also again: there are other self-defense tools we can arm civilians with that are far less lethal. I'm not even against weapons in general; just lethal ones. Well, that's where I stand. I say that if you want weapons, you find a way to make them less lethal. That the guns that are out there are as unrestricted as they are is a situation that should've never happened in my eyes, and my priority is fixing that.

If you ask me, I think that all guns should be banned and the 2nd amendment should be repealed. Obviously this is a total pipe dream fairy tale fantasy, but still, the US is one of only three countries who have the right to gun ownership enshrined in their constitution, and the other two based their constitution off of America's. Every other country gets by just fine with having guns completely illegal.

I don't think a blanket ban would be beneficial to anybody, seeing that there's a liberal notion that disarmament doesn't take into account the different effect it would have on non-white communities, at least not without equal disarmament of the police.

I've actually yet to have gotten anyone on the pro gun side really respond to that. I've seen a lot of people frame the arguments as if all gun control people JUST want an awb and that's it, never really an admission that any kind of gun control COULD work

And my priority is preserving people's rights while curbing violent crime - which to be perfectly honest is possible without confiscating guns.

Oh CHRIST you're not expecting people to meet criminals with lethal weapons and intent to use them with well wishes and pepper spray I hope There is nothing short of a firearm I would ever willingly take on any criminal with

How? What do you mean by less lethal, and how would you implement that.

It really comes down to what you define as gun control then. If it's background checks and classes then pro-gun types have already given you that in every single thread you have participated in. If it's arbitrary bans on firing modes, caliber sizes, barrel lengths, appearance, or attachments, you are going to have a hard time convincing people because statistical and historical evidence shows that in the United States these types of regulations are, at best, negligibly effective, while punishing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of gun owners or future gun owners.

How do you plan to achieve that? Unlawful searches of people's homes?

It's also important to distinguish that the argument that needs to be had is REFORM, not BAN.

Grenadiac specifically has gone over forms of gun control that would be effective in threads that you yourself were in.

For the longest time, the edge liberals could pitch over conservatives is openness, rationalism, and a natural progression of history as people do what they want. It's an important element in countering conservative narratives about liberal elites. This signals the disposing of all three and degeneration into radicalism and culture war. The gun non-debate is nothing more than a mix of moral panic and hatred. It's being used as a completely flawed, anti-empirical premise to unleash a hellstorm of irrational anger after the 2016 loss onto the backwards and folk-like sections of American society, the ones typically rural, in between the coasts, conservative, and stereotypically white. This is not political dialogue, it's a zero-sum game, and its every bit is a part of the post-truth phenomenon. It's neither reflective of facts nor is part of organic social change based on a consensus, it's shoehorned and transparently just a struggle for political power over parts of society that can't be described as forward-looking. I honestly cannot fault the inevitable conservative reprisal to this concerted and post-factual cultural attack that only seems to have merit because the media has allowed a baseless momentum to fill the void of facts, because "enough" or something This is one of the biggest non-policy debates on policy we will see for a while. The above describes anti-immigrant momentum yet it's being treated differently for some reason.

How will they be confiscated? How will the gov know who has any left?

So now you have gone from saying "all guns that can kill many people in seconds with a few squeezes" to literally all guns. And you guys wonder why these conversations don't ever get anywhere.

Confiscation of firearms would be a nightmare at best and probably result in a civil war.

Well wishes? Come on, do you take me to be that naïve? But as for pepper spray, and to answer this post: I've said it before in this very thread, but I'll say it again: the ideal weapon is that which maximizes stopping power but minimizes lethality as much as it can get away with for its role. Whether that be pepper spray, a taser, or something we haven't even developed yet. To me, the majority of weapons R&D should be focused on non-lethal weaponry, and maximizing their effectiveness. Can nothing meet the raw stopping power of a true firearm right now? Hell, I'll grant that. But that doesn't have to remain the case in the future. Lethality may currently be a necessary evil when it comes to personal defense. But that's the key word: currently. And it's only because we haven't tried harder to find better methods. Do I have that answer? No. But I refuse to believe that one isn't out there waiting to be found.

So the argument was "The second amendment defends my position of more regulations" until you saw that well-regulated doesn't meant what you think it means, then it became "the second amendment is irrelevant due to the differences of technology" I can agree with the 'well-regulated' part while also believing that the 2nd amendment as a whole is still an antiquated piece of garbage and is pretty much one of the biggest reasons why the US has the highest amount of gun deaths out of any first would country on earth at the same time. Can you see why the pro-gun side isn't exactly leaping to your side of the aisle? Hard to change someone's mind when they don't want to listen to you.

Its fucking baffling that everyones always so confused that rampant, demeaning, condescending, snide insults, jabs, name calling, shit talking, and in a lot of cases outright ignoring facts somehow doesnt convince people of anything. Its almost like people dont like being treated like that or something.

Most civilian AR-15's are .223 anyway.

Well, what do we do about current illegal firearms? Surely we don't just give up and say "why bother"?

You dont shoot firearms to maim, you dont shoot firearms to injure, you shoot firearms to kill. Tazers are considered "less than lethal" because they still hold the capacity to kill. You dont fire a projectile at super sonic speeds at someone without the very real likelihood that its going to kill them. Even iirc rubber bullets will still fuck you up hardcore and kill people.

In a perfect world, yeah. But this isn't a perfect world, this is a world where if you even slightly mention even the tiniest of regulations against guns, gun owners go completely ballistic (pun intended). So you have to start with baby steps.

Well heres the thing, if you suddenly made firearms that millions of people have illegal and go to confiscate, i'm pretty sure a shitload of people would end up dying. Because thats a terrible idea.

Whether or not the government has more firepower than the average citizenry has nothing to do with the principle of being armed against a potentially tyrannical government.

If gun owners can't be trusted to have their toys taken away without shooting anyone that tries to take them then they maybe probably kind of shouldn't have them in the first place.

Is the 2nd amendment the only antiquiated piece of garbage? Putting aside that half of gun deaths are suicides or accidents, it's disingenious to cast the argument in terms of reducing "gun deaths" instead of just "deaths", or "gun crime" instead of just "crime. Of course the country with a large density of firearms per capita is going to have higher death rates than countries that don't. I can deal with condescension, what I'm getting annoyed by is SIRIUS in the peanut gallery chiding me on not being able to have a conversation with gun control advocates when the reality is that they don't even know what they want.