WookieOnRitalin wrote:dougthonus wrote:
What are the guns doing other than violent revolution? Providing silent threats that we may revolt? You think any politicians are considering that the populace is armed when making their votes on topics?
They would if there was not a great majority of our elected representative who did not gun rights.
It looks like you have a typo here, I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
I can't envision a realistic scenario where threat of violence from the populace because they have guns would be positively impactful in the legislation practice today.
You say "worth" more, I say "protected" from a totalitarian urban majority. It's a question of equalizing power which the founders were smart to do. I do believe in it for a large variety of reasons and it's not because I am some far right conservative. The foundation of the belief is to create a society where autonomy can exist and you cannot do that if you an oppressive power inhibiting a minority with their will.
Yes, "worth" more is a mathematical view of how much the vote counts, your stated view is an oped piece on why you think rural votes should be worth more but don't want to say it that way because then it becomes clear that it's ridiculous. I could say urban votes should not be worth less than the <insert insulting rhetoric> of the rural minority, but I don't need to just create a wide sweeping insult of a group of people to show my point, because these are subjective values not objective values in terms of facts.
We now have a minority inhibiting the majority with their will. Of the two situations, that is easily the worse of them.
This is why slavery needed to die. This is why several injustices have been corrected with constitutional amendments. The foundation of our constitution is to protect rights all the way down to the individual. This is why you have a right to do process and a right to face your accusers in court.
Your lack of belief needs to be supported with something superior that also protects the voices of those who do not live in large urban centers. I have not read anything as yet that is convincing on that front.
Why do you believe that minority voices should get their way over majority voices on societal policies? Minorities need to be protected in terms of discrimination, but this isn't that. I don't know that simple majority is the best way to manage all policy, but if you flip this on the head, the majority of the country has policy going against their wishes due to a vocal minority which again, is a worse situation of the two.
I fail to see your claim. As a resident of the state of Illinois, have you not had a say in various gun control policies in the state? Of course you do, as do I in the state of Tennessee. The point here is that gun control is a state issue and not a national issue unless you want to create a constitutional amendment of some form banning guns (which will never happen).
Go look at any poll for gun control any, and you can see that people are overall significantly in favor of stronger restrictions on guns. What does that mean from an implementation standpoint? I'm not crafting law. There are experts that can help figure those things out, but the people want more gun control and they want so by a 2/3rds majority. You said if the will of the people says we should do something and if you can craft consensus we should do something, well we do have a good consensus on this issue.
I'm all for more sensible national gun laws, but gun laws that do not address the underlying problem of gun violence are absolutely, 100% bound to fail. Anyone who comes into the conversation who fails to acknowledge that is missing a huge component to the puzzle.
Who cares what you want individually or what I want individually? Didn't you just say it is important what the consensus wants? The consensus wants more gun control. It is up to the experts to figure out how to implement that most successfully (by your stated viewpoint of a consensus should push things through), but a consensus doesn't actually have power, because politicians do not represent the consensus, because you can not vote on every topic you want. You have to take your politician as a whole.
Ironically, in this day and age, we could completely do away with the current system and make every issue decided by popular vote, we have the technology to do it now, something that would never have been practical in the past.
The idea that you can't do anything to help if you can't resolve the underlying problem is a conservative red herring. Yes, we should look to resolve underlying problems whenever we can, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't craft laws to resolve the main problem.
To be honest, I don't even care about gun control really, just your arguments that the minority should run the country because they live on farms and the gerrymandering that allows conservative voices to still have power despite having views that express a minority of the views of the country is a crap system. While I don't care much about gun control laws in general, I also don't think guns serve a particularly meaningful purpose in society either. We'd be fine without them, just like many other Western countries are fine without them.
That said, if you want to care about gun deaths you should be talking about suicides and violent crime not mass shootings. Mass shootings have largely an emotional impact on society which is as big as we allow it to be personally or could be as small as we allow it be personally. From a cause of death stand point, they probably aren't in the top 1000.
