jeffwBiden says it’s ‘time to outlaw’ AR-15 after Trump assassination attempt
amniotic druidI can think of literally no better reason to keep ARs legal than the events of last week.
xionzuiYes, this is the exact intention of the second amendment. Armed resistance against tyrannical government. If the rise of fascism in America isn’t the time to use it, it’s meaningless.
The founding fathers envisioned state militias that would rival the power of the federal army and keep it in check. That ship has sailed, so it already lost a lot of its bite, but any power it still has can only be justified for that purpose
in b4 /pol mods delete this for “inciting violence”.
Yes, this is the exact intention of the second amendment. Armed resistance against tyrannical government
Nope. Judging by how they used militias at the time, they meant it for defending the federal government against both invasions and rebellions. The “defense against tyranny” reason is just an invention of people trying to justify their guns.
The founding fathers envisioned state militias that would rival the power of the federal army and keep it in check
Nope. There WAS no federal army at the time. They used militias IN STEAD OF a standing army, not as a check on an existing one. Which of course invalidates the entire amendment now that the country has the biggest and most advanced military in the history of humanity.
All of that being said, I consider assassination of a tyrant you can’t rid the people of in any other way the only form of murder that’s acceptable as it serves the common good.
Putin is one such tyrant, Orban probably is, and Donald Trump DEFINITELY is. The world would have been a much better place if Crooks had been a better shot.
I mean, that’s the exact opposite of what the federalist papers said. We don’t have to speculate what the founders intended, they wrote it down. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s ask Alexander Hamilton from federalist 29
If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.
I mean, that’s the exact opposite of what the federalist papers said
The Federalist Papers were a bunch of editorials, not laws. The amendment itself clearly says that it’s for the security of the nation and doesn’t mention tyranny at all.
Alexander Hamilton’s opinion on standing armies is not the second amendment.
It’s a bunch of editorials, written by the same people who wrote the constitution, explaining their thought process and exactly what they intended when writing the constitution.
I do admire your gumption, pretending to know the rationale behind the 2nd amendment better than Alexander fucking Hamilton.
Fun fact: sometimes the founding fathers didn’t agree on everything.
The section of his editorial you quote doesn’t say that it’s the rationale behind the second amendment. It doesn’t mention it OR tyranny.
The amendment, which specifically spells out the reason before the conclusion does NOT reference standing armies or tyranny.
You’re just assuming connections that aren’t there and then accusing ME of pretending to be a mind reader 🤦
The section of his editorial you quote doesn’t say that it’s the rationale behind the second amendment. It doesn’t mention it OR tyranny.
The entirety of federalist 29 is about the second amendment. I think it’s safe to assume the paragraph I quoted from federalist 29 also is.
You’re just assuming connections that aren’t there and then accusing ME of pretending to be a mind reader 🤦
Calling militias “the best possible defense” against a standing federal army seems pretty cut and dry. No mind reading necessary, just regular reading.
The entirety of federalist 29 is about the second amendment. I think it’s safe to assume the paragraph I quoted from federalist 29 also is.
Suuure it is 🙄
Calling militias “the best possible defense” against a standing federal army seems pretty cut and dry.
Except that’s not what the amendment itself says. That’s Alexander Hamilton’s opinion, NOT the rationale that was agreed on when drafting the text
No mind reading necessary, just regular reading.
And a bit of imagination to make the unconnected pieces fit together to mean what you want them to mean.
You’re acting no better than the libertarian nutjobs who insist that taxation is theft and also unconstitutional.
If my choices are the opinion of one of the guys who wrote the amendment vs the opinion of some teenager on Lemmy, I’m gonna have to go with the former
the opinion of one of the guys who wrote the amendment ≠ the amendment OR the reason for the amendment, which explicitly mentions the ACTUAL reason.
That shouldn’t be so difficult a concept to grasp.
Ok champ
Alexander Hamilton laid it out very explicitly:
“if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.”
Kalkaline Everyone gets a free scope and 100 hours of shooting lessons with purchase.
Scopes aren’t versatile enough for the AR platform. Free LVPO with purchase and 100 hours of training.
Ok, but can you throw in an M203 and a leaf sight? Maybe a box of 40mm HEDP? Indirect fire is a real game-changer.
1 in 5 Americans score adequately high enough in their spacial reasoning to qualify for an M32 or M320 credit. The M203 will only be available on surplus legacy rifle systems via lottery.
Just as dumb as when Beto said it before his election…
It’ll never pass, and he thinks saying it will get votes, but all it does is motivate idiots to vote trump, even tho he actually did an executive action to try and close a loophole.
It might not have stood, but it worked for a couple of years.
On its own its a dumb idea, but I do think another commenter had it on the money how this is more a ploy to catch trump with his pants down. Trump can either agree and piss off his pro gun base (and look like a coward given his previous statements), he can argue against it and seem like hes inviting more violence and alienate anyone in his base who thinks gun violence is bad. Or he can ignore it and look like hes a doddering old fool oblivious to whats happening around him.
alienate anyone in his base who thinks gun violence is bad
ie exactly nobody
to his base it would look strongbrave to ignore it with the most bigly beautiful thickskin
Biden is doing this to drive a wedge into Republicans. The gun nuts and the ones that don’t care about guns will have differing opinions because now gun violence affects them directly. It’s really smart.
Biden looks presidential. Trump has three choices:
Come out against AR-15s, for obvious reasons. This makes gun nuts less likely to vote for him.
Come out in favor of AR-15s. He looks insane to Republicans who don’t care about guns.
Trump ignores the issue or waffles and looks unpresidential.
Number 3 is most likely. Of course the correct answer is number 4: propose a competing policy that is nuanced. But that’s impossible for trump.
How many Republicans don’t care about guns?
The ones that are republicans for tax purposes.
And the ones that are Republicans to fuck over everyone but the rich. They’d definitely prefer “poor folk” didn’t have guns at all.
Is that enough to matter? And is this issue enough for them to change their vote, given the tax stuff? All the other shit Trump does certainly doesn’t matter.
The richest places in America are pretty solidly blue. A lot of rich people like good public schools and colleges, clean water, etc. and understand that taxes and charity are how those things are paid for.
Other rich people like gated communities and stopped reading books^1^ when someone stopped assigning them. They’re the Republican rich people.
^Some will read a book about war or some shitty airport bookstore thing that’s 80% out-of-context quotes about how to be a leader.^
I wonder how many of those hedge fund billionaires down on Wall Street are Democrats. I doubt that it’s many of them.
I don’t have any desire to defend hedge fund or VC billionaires so I’ll concede the point. There’s a reason San Francisco has NIMBY policies and New York City can’t elect mayors for shit.
Yeah, because the people who own all of the businesses and real estate constantly battle those who work at the businesses and live in all that real estate, which just go a to show what a fucked up and unbalanced role money plays in our democracy.
Bankers? Nah. Media and Telcom? Not likely. They’re all based in NYC, the bluest of the blue cities.
Now you’re just making things up. You can’t just say “nah, not likely” and prove anything. It’s a lack of effort that shows you don’t have evidence.
NYC is a “blue city” (whatever that means) because of these professionals. The actual working class people in NYC make up a lot of the conservatives. That’s why cities are more liberal: because they have more educated people. Those people work in banking or media; they’re not all artists or plumbers or something.
Hilarious. OK, where’s your evidence, then?
Rich people don’t give a fuck about public schools, lmao, they send their kids to private ones.
Private schools often suck. Rich people aren’t smarter. They just have more money. There’s plenty of districts where the best public high school is way better than whatever private schools exist. Half the private schools are for weird religious groups or kids who got expelled.
There’s almost always good public schools in cities. That’s why there’s always loopholes that allow rich people’s kids to go to them.
And in colleges, Harvard isn’t better than UC-Berkeley or the honors programs at most state flagship institutions. It’s just older. (There have been studies that compared students who got into an Ivy League school and ultimately chose a public flagship and the Ivy grads only did better in the first few years after graduation. But then the public flagship attendees caught up.)
You and the commenter above are using different definitions of “rich.” They are referring to upper-middle [working] class. You are likely referring to the wealthy, or upper class.
Upper middle class rich people still largely prefer elite public primary and secondary schools due to tiered admissions standards of elite tertiary institutions like Harvard and Columbia University.
EVERY group is big enough to matter. Reminder that the last two elections were determined by around 10,000 votes.
Those republicans already know he’s fucking crazy and they don’t give a fuck what his stance is on guns.
At this point Donald Trump could build a shrine to and start worshipping Obama as a God… It won’t affect anything.
And who don’t give a shit either way about guns to make any effect
Not a lot but every wedge is probably worth it
Lots of them. Do you know any Republicans? None of them care about issues that don’t affect them and their families. Even other “conservative” issues. They are not driven by policy.
Only Republicans with guns care about guns. And only 50% of Republicans have guns.
news.gallup.com/…/percentage-americans-own-guns.a…
They don’t care about each other. Liberals care about what other liberals think. Stop thinking like someone who cares about policy.
I’ve had to explain this to a lot of people who naturally assume that any organization of people will be organized around some kind of shared values. Most of the time that’s true, but not for Republicans.
Republicans are just a mish mash of obsessive single-issue voters, and by in large they just don’t care about the other single issues that their fellow party members are going on about.
At the head of the Republican party it’s people who want to minimize their tax burden, eliminate regulations on corporations, and cannibalize as much of the US government as they can into for-profit institutions. You could say that’s three issues instead of one, but the overarching theme is to cater to personal greed, no matter the harm to society. These are the ones who are primarily pulling the strings, at least historically.
Just below them is the military industrial complex and gun manufacturers who just want to sell guns no matter the harm to society. They like to rile up 2A fanatics with conspiracy theories that the government is out to steal all their guns so they’ll be defenseless, paving the way for King Biden to ascend to his throne. The industry only cares about selling guns and the fanatics only care about having guns, and neither care about any kind of harm to society.
Then there’s the radical Christians whose obsessions cover an eclectic mix of social reactionary positions and literal death cult worship (e.g. Christians who give absolute support to genocide in Palestine because they think Israel’s conquest is a crucial step towards the rapture, which they believe is imminent). Broadly speaking the people in this group just want to hoist their religious doctrines onto everyone they can by any means available and no matter the harm it causes to society. They literally only care about “God’s Kingdom” in the afterlife.
Then there’s people who just lack any capacity for adaptation or learning. Their obsession is to feel like things are staying the same, or even reverting back to a past that they only know how to view through rose tinted glasses. They can’t be bothered to comprehend the problems we’re facing as a society or how the past was not the idyllic utopia that they mistakenly remember, nor can the old way of doing things sustain a growing and transforming society. These people just want to exist in comforting ignorance by feeling like they get to remain in familiar surroundings, no matter the harm to society.
There’s really only one thing that truly unites them: Each one wants one specific thing no matter the harm to society, and that one specific thing that they each want IS HARMFUL to society. But they work well together because none of them care about the harm being caused by any of the others, and as long as they all tow the same line, each one gets what they want.
I’ve never met any Republicans that were pro-gun-bans. I really don’t believe you’ll be able to find a single one either.
This is dumb as fuck timing by Biden, but I’m sure he can’t help himself because he’s been super anti-gun for decades so it’s probably just like a reflex at this point for him to to off about banning guns after a shooting.
Trump, for one
How many of them will stay home or change their vote because the head of the party they’re still a part of despite all the gun nuts continues acting like a gun nut?
If Biden is trying to use guns as a wedge issue for Republicans, he’s the person we saw at the debate all the time.
The ones that are antiabortion or evangelicals who don’t own guns. GOP has the most gun owners but its not even like half their voters. Vocal minorities is all it is.
The only issue the GOP is actually united on right now is how they don’t like democrats.
Any of those options will work fine for Trump. He doesn’t need to have policies, strategies, or responses to anything. His voters can’t remember it anyway. You think they remember that he banned bump stocks in the first place? He could promise to ban AR-15s one day, then criticize his own proposal the next day, and he’ll just get cheered by both sides. Voters are fucking stupid.
All that matters is that he keeps the steady supply of hateful buzzwords flowing. You can’t win chess against an opponent who’s playing hungry hungry hippos.
All of that wastes trump’s time and makes him look unprofessional to swing voters. He can’t win with just his fans. That’s why he lost big time in 2020. The swing voters saw him failing to respond to an actual issue.
Correction: He lost big time because of mail-in votes. Trump in 2020 got the record high for votes for a Republican candidate at something like 67.2 million, which was just about a million votes less than what Obama got during his first election (which was a record-breaking turnout). Biden got around 80 million votes in 2020, breaking every voter turnout record ever.
Swing voters are still crucial because that’s how Hillary lost despite having only 100,000 less votes than Obama did in his second election, but I feel like swing voters have probably more or less already made up their minds. If you don’t see Trump for what he is already, the odds of his reaction here being the final straw seems unlikely. I think if people had better access to voting, we’d easily see a repeat of 2020 even if we were to vote right this minute.
Trump already said he’d take away everyones guns, no questions asked, years ago. No one that supported him even blinked. This means nothing to them.
ElsieI’m pretty sure the NRA had a heart attack when they heard that 🤣
That’s just bullshit, he did not. He said the one stupid thing about ignoring due process for red flag law situations. This is pretty far and away from “everyone’s guns”
You made me curious, thank you. The actual quote is “take the guns first, go through due process second.”
Trump will go with number 5: “Did you know socialist immigrant windmills causing cancers kill more Americans than guns?”
FuglyDuckBiden is doing this to drive a wedge into Republicans. The gun nuts and the ones that don’t care about guns will have differing opinions because now gun violence affects them directly. It’s really smart.
Or… he just doesn’t want to get shot himself. Just saying. not wanting to get shot is a powerful motivator…
Not that it’s perhaps prudent. or you know, god forbid, actually a good fucking idea.
It’s just dumb. The sniper that killed the guy wasn’t using an ar-15. Stopping ar-15’s wouldn’t have done anything to change something like this.
What do you mean, it was an AR-15. I don’t support a ban, just clarifying facts.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear in my statement. When I said “the sniper that killed the guy” I was specifying the the secret service sniper that successfully head shotted Crooks. I wasn’t referring to Crooks.
Pointedly, I was saying that the guy who hit what he was aiming for wasn’t using an AR. Not the guy who failed.
Ah ok, I get you, then. I didn’t downvote your comment.
Guns are tools. And what’s more, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
FBI special agent in charge Kevin Rojek said Crooks used an AR-style rifle chambered in 5.56mm, a common caliber for such weapons. Authorities said the weapon was identified and traced using records from a gun dealership that is no longer operating.
If that source doesnt work for you, here’s the president of the United states:
“An AR-15 was used in the shooting of Donald Trump, just as other assault weapons were used to kill so many others, including children."
That’s from the linked article.
