Prince of Dorne
Not this silly thing again...
Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic
Professional Smartass
Three-Puppet Saluter
Well, for one thing, two-thirds of the U.S. military (circa 1995) believe they wouldn't fire on the population in the first place, and the military is a good place to get an idea of how you perform under pressure. For another, there are a lot of gun sportsmen in the U.S. Five hundred thousand or so, I believe.
Hail Martin Septim!
Anwalt der Verdammten
NOT THE BEES
And today, American operatives reserve the right to abduct you from your home without a warrant and hold you indefinitely without charges or trial. So yeah.
Three-Puppet Saluter
Indeed. There's a lot more to the values that make a republic than having weapons.
EDIT: I swear the Senate passed a law to strike out the hey-let's-suspend-habeas-corpus-for-no-reason clause of the NDAA. (And exactly one senator voted against it and I wanted to find out who that bastard was..) Am I just imagining that?
edited 23rd Apr '12 4:27:29 PM by DomaDoma
Hail Martin Septim!
This is the first I've heard of it, Doma. So maybe you did, or it's just gotten ignored in the onslaught of all this other election mess.
But I repeat, the status of our gun laws has no direct effect on the state of our democracy. Now, you can tell who's in what party at least partly by their stance on guns, but it has nothing to do with whether or not our democracy is flawed or broken. It's entirely non-indicative. In fact, I believe in this country you're perfectly capable of voting for whoever you want based on their stance on gun laws, which is an entirely legitimate thing to do here.
Like any Democracy, gun rights have as much to do with it as the people decide they do.
In the UK, they don't mean much. In the US, they often mean quite a lot. I don't think Democracy and Gun Rights are in bed by default.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I think Barkey's got it. The US won its democracy by the gun, and so it values the gun.
Well, I bring up the discussion mostly because the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms just recently had its anniversary. In the discussion of the Canadian constitution, a group of US constitutional experts were brought in to talk about it and they were discussing how the US constitution...
- Is outdated but has become relatively static now
- The supreme court has become an ideological battleground rather than upholding the spirit of the law and keeping the constitution relevant
- Is missing a lot of human rights and equality concerns that now dominate a more multicultural world
But the big thing they talked about was how much political and legal resources are blown around the subject of gun rights. I don't know of another country, if there is any, that has bothered to enshrine gun rights. There's basically no evidence to show that it has anything to do with helping democracy.
One of two ideas behind the gun rights was:
- It was dangerous and guns were needed to defend yourself
- Guns helped you overthrow an oppressive regime
The problem, of course, is that there's no evidence showing gun rights have anything to do with blocking oppression. In fact, as noted above, some of the worst police state actions by American authorities were backed by the same ideological group who supports better gun rights.
As for the guy who said "protip" about correlation and causation, I have a protip for you as well. It's only applicable to someone make an IF or IFF statement (ie. "If x then y").
EDIT: Just read the above post, and I suppose that is a justification for liking the gun but I think I'm more talking about how guns don't necessary mean anything. France won their Republic on Bastille Day with a whole lot of guns, but they certainly don't value gun rights at all and they're a pretty good democracy.
edited 23rd Apr '12 8:34:30 PM by breadloaf
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
I am in agreement with Barkey here. It is entirely about context of gun ownership by private citizens and the history of their democracy. For some democracies guns are not important for others that is a different story all together.
In America Private gun owners formed militias and frequently fought with the British in a variety of capacities. Historically they are credited with making extended land war into the interior portions of the colonies difficult for the British as well as serving as extra armed bodies for the military.
There is plenty of context from writings of the forefathers that provides additional insite into certain aspects of the constitution. The idea behind armed indviduals was that a body of armed private citizens could put up even some resistance should a government become corrupt and turn on the people. On the other side of the coin concealed carry was very frowned upon as it was considered hiding your intentions with your weapons as a Highway man, assassin, or robber might. Problem is people on both sides of the coin like to argue the points or beg questions a lot.
Things like the current advance of weapons would be nothing new to the fore fathers. The pursuit of advancing weapons tech is nothing new to human history. To try and argue that the writers of the constitution did not forsee weapons continuing to advance is a distraction and a poor arguement at best.
Ask the Libyans if having weapons is important to them. Before they didn't have mass access to weapons and their leadership started butchering them. Until they got armed they didn't stand a chance. We helped them but the bulk of the war was on the ground with warm bodies doing the fighting. The towns were not taken by ships, airplanes, or drones they were taken by men on foot armed with guns.
Drones are not the be all end all of warfare any arguement that any one piece of tech makes guns useless is baseless. This will only lead to circular and useless arguements.
Guns in the private hands can have quite a bit to do with democracy depending on the situation and history. For some nations Democracy was won at gun point by the people for others it is something that happened more naturally.
The U.S. Constitution also has processes in place to change it. Politics will always try and aim for hot button issues to draw attention. It is more a failure to focus on other important things then a failure of one of the constitution as a whole.
edited 23rd Apr '12 8:35:53 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
And they had no gun rights.
They obtained most of the weaponry by defecting military units.
EDIT: I'll be more clear.
The point is subtle. What it means is that gun rights won't ever matter. It only ever matters if enough of the elite (ie. the military) side with the pro-democracy factions to help them win. So in fact, the level of tech difference between the military and the civilian doesn't matter. It's about the political unity between the military and the government.
edited 23rd Apr '12 8:36:52 PM by breadloaf
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
They either stole them or were given them. Having weapons is certainly important to them now as they are unwillng to give them up.
Who watches the watchmen?
scratching at .8, just hopin'
I think there's power in the argument that gun rights are irrelevant to revolution, because if you're holding a revolution you'll just steal guns anyways.
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Having guns on hand may make a revolution uncessary or make it easier to kick off and more likely to succeed. Poorly armed revolutions being crushed is nothing new to history either. Privately armed citizens have forced change in governments everywhere with the threat of a armed revolt of the people.
Who watches the watchmen?
@Sheperd: not really. We won our freedom via sheer logistics. Between us managing to win a few key engagements, France playing merry hell with the british, and half of europe deciding it was a ripe old time to declare war on britain, britain's only option was to give the fuck up and go home.
But had the US not resorted to armed rebellion or had not the means, it would all have been moot anyways.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Midget: Your also ignoring quite a few engagements were fought by organized groups of privately armed militia. You cannot discount the other factors. Their favourite tactic was shooting leadership and raiding supplies. You know part of logistics.
Who watches the watchmen?
Well, yeah. But that was less 'we have guns" and more "fuck the rules of honorable combat"
- It was dangerous and guns were needed to defend yourself
- Guns helped you overthrow an oppressive regime
i think the first part is more important. most american already own gun before they have any idea of revolting against britain. Gun was necessary to protect against Indian and Wildlife.
Gun-owner is usually live in rural area, in south and west. City population and North East have relative less gun-owner.
There are argument that gun-rights is important to americans because americans never accepted legitimacy of government "monopoly to use force".
Americans believe their government couldn't or shouldn't protect them from Indians, Wildlife, or other American. And a lot americans also still maintained "the world is dangerous" mentality, many maintained that communist invasion, race war, federal tyranny, or society breakdown can happen soon.
Gun-Right, Militia, local election to police and judge, expansive right of self-defence, death penalty come from this historical feeling.
In a time where it is highly unlikely that A) the US is going to be invaded and B ) any of the enemies that could do significant damage to us would likely first do so by bombing us, I think us having guns to defend ourselves from foreign invaders is much much less relevant than it was at the time of the American Revolution. Or really any time since WW 2.
In any case, I think part of it is now a rabid and cultivated fear of our own government that's got people all up in arms, metaphorically, about it. Frankly I think that fear of the government is more dangerous to our democracy than gun regulations. Politicians can use that fear, and so can the big corporate lobbies.
But aren't Americans also mistrustfull/fearfull of Polititians and Corporate Lobbyists too?
Like this, but brown.
To give my answer to the titular question, a democracy could decide what gun rights are, but not in the United States, where there exists a constitutional right to bear arms. All Constitutional rights are essentially anti-democratic; that is, they exist as a barrier against democracy acting to curtail them. Only a supermajority has the ability to extinguish gun rights.
And I am personally happy about that. I want to be able to keep a gun to defend my home - if someone breaks in, I want to be able to defend myself and my property. I don't think gun owners are any less law-abiding than any other citizens, and I'd rather have the ratio of lawful to criminal gun owners be somewhat higher than 0.
edited 23rd Apr '12 11:09:52 PM by Vericrat
Much to my BFF's wife's chagrin, No Pants 2013 became No Pants 2010's at his house.
...U.S. is a republic, not democracy...
*runz awei*
Somehow you know that the time is right.