Can Gun Control Work?

[MSimon]

"If black market activity in connection with the drug laws is any indication, a decades-long 'war on handguns' might resemble a low-grade civil war more than a law-enforcement initiative."

And that takes us back to drug prohibition—the eternally failed crusade to make much of the population change its ways, "or else."

It won't work. It can't work. It never has worked.

But the authorities try, and try, and try to make people knuckle under to laws that they find offensive and intrusive. And as people refuse to comply, the authorities raise the stakes, adopting tactics that most of us recognize as violations of fundamental rights and of simple human decency.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/04/u ... ent-offic/

There is always the anal probe for non-compliance. Or non-violation. PRN.

[Stubby]

3D printing will make/is making guns laws obsolete.

[choff]

Quote:
"If black market activity in connection with the drug laws is any indication, a decades-long 'war on handguns' might resemble a low-grade civil war more than a law-enforcement initiative."

And that takes us back to drug prohibition—the eternally failed crusade to make much of the population change its ways, "or else."

It won't work. It can't work. It never has worked.

But the authorities try, and try, and try to make people knuckle under to laws that they find offensive and intrusive. And as people refuse to comply, the authorities raise the stakes, adopting tactics that most of us recognize as violations of fundamental rights and of simple human decency.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/04/u ... ent-offic/


There is always the anal probe for non-compliance. Or non-violation. PRN.

No telling what weapons they could be hiding up there.

[Schneibster]

I can't imagine gun control working in the wilderness, and I expect the human race to be in a lot of wilderness over the next couple thousand years.

On the other hand, the opposite argument, big cities don't mix with guns. We have to find some balance. It's not easy. But people who behave like adolescent gunpenis addicts are of no help whatsoever. They even make the people who just need to carry a weapon in the wilderness look bad. That has to stop. Getting mauled by a bear because you couldn't carry a gun is silly. And yet not silly, if you're the one getting the stitches- or doing the dying.

There has to be some compromise that will recognize the truths on both sides. My personal prejudice is that this compromise will involve the definition of "urban" and "wilderness" areas, and perhaps others, where different laws will apply. This will protect those in wilderness and those in cities as well. I don't understand why everyone wants to fight about this. If you want a bunch of weapons go live in the country.

[williatw]

Quote:
"If black market activity in connection with the drug laws is any indication, a decades-long 'war on handguns' might resemble a low-grade civil war more than a law-enforcement initiative."

And that takes us back to drug prohibition—the eternally failed crusade to make much of the population change its ways, "or else."

It won't work. It can't work. It never has worked.

But the authorities try, and try, and try to make people knuckle under to laws that they find offensive and intrusive. And as people refuse to comply, the authorities raise the stakes, adopting tactics that most of us recognize as violations of fundamental rights and of simple human decency.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/04/u ... ent-offic/


There is always the anal probe for non-compliance. Or non-violation. PRN.

No telling what weapons they could be hiding up there.

Well...as long as the worst abuses of the war on drugs were confined to poor minority neighborhoods, the public by and large were quiescent. I still think the best hope of ending it is demographic change; those over 60 are still the biggest supporters of it (the war on drugs), so give it another 15 years or so for them to die off. The growing forfeiture of asset bonanza however suggests another possibility...there the most tempting targets will be those who have assets worth taking, and they by and large are not young poor minority youth, but affluent whites. Yet another area where Obama has shown himself to be a hypocritical disappointment...talking the talk about "reforming" drug laws while drug raids have escalated under his watch.

[williatw]

HALBROOK: What made the Nazi Holocaust possible? Gun control

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -confisca/


Author Notes How Gun Control was a Prequisite for the Nazi Holocaust


http://voices.yahoo.com/author-notes-gu ... tml?cat=37

...to be sure one can always make the argument that the Nazis would still have been able to wage their war against the Jews even if they had been as well armed as - say - the average Texan. But history suggests that it would have been a lot messier and bloodier for the Nazis. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising showed the Nazis the cost of molesting Jews who had gotten weapons. The process of reducing the ghetto, which had been planned for three days, took over a month. It inspired other uprisings and acts of armed resistance to the Nazi regime...
The 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is what the ultimate enforcement mechanism for all of the other parts of the Bill of Rights. Liberals who use the latest mass shooting to insist on "common sense gun control" tend to roll their eyes at the idea that private gun ownership is the ultimate check on tyranny. Earlier in 2013, HBO ranter Bill Maher used the anniversary of Waco to point out that the government has superior fire power and would always prevail in any conflict with armed citizens. It's a kind of bone chilling argument, in effect that you had best give up your guns because we can kill you anyway. Never mind that the folks at Waco were burned to death in a fire they started.

The point of course is not that private ownership of guns would prevent the establishment of a fascist regime in America, as unthinkable a prospect in 2013 as doubtless it was in Germany 80 years ago. The point is that it makes the cost of doing so unacceptably high.Any potential tyrant has to think long and hard about pushing an armed citizenry too far.

[williatw]

Bill Maher: ‘Ridiculous,’ ‘quaint’ to think 2nd Amendment can protect from tyranny

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... endment-c/


“Can we get to, first of all, how ridiculous it is for people to think that the Second Amendment protects them from tyranny. Didn’t Waco solve that?” Mr. Maher asked on his show, “Real Time.” “We just had the anniversary a couple of weeks ago. Remember Waco? You know what they had in Waco? They had like 1.9 million rounds of ammunition; they had .50-caliber machine guns; they had grenades. … What did the government have? Everything else. The winner and still champion — the United States government.

I apologize...I only posted this so I could preface this from the comments section of the link:


From Svigor: Talking points 101: any time someone says something like this, just reframe the issue as a question:

"If you were planning a totalitarian state, would you rather work with an unarmed population, or a heavily-armed population, all else being equal?"

OR,

"If you were planning an insurgency against a tyrannical gov't, all else being equal, would you rather have a heavily-armed population, or an unarmed population?"

Et cetera.

Their entire point depends on the way they've framed the question. Don't let them dominate you this way; reframe the question in such a way that logic is re-introduced into the discussion, and they're forced to answer a simple, straightforward question, or show themselves to be liars or cowards.

They lean on their supremacy over the media like a crutch; kick it out from under them. There are no guarantees in life. Condoms pop, guns jam, the enemy shows up in superior numbers. Doesn't mean being prepared, or having choices, isn't better than not being prepared, or not having choices. Duh.

[Diogenes]

HALBROOK: What made the Nazi Holocaust possible? Gun control

You beat me to it.

[Diogenes]

HALBROOK: What made the Nazi Holocaust possible? Gun control

This week marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass, the Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews on Nov. 9-10, 1938. Historians have documented most everything about it except what made it so easy to attack the defenseless Jews without fear of resistance. Their guns were registered and thus easily confiscated.

To illustrate, turn the clock back further and focus on just one victim, a renowned German athlete. Alfred Flatow won first place in gymnastics at the 1896 Olympics. In 1932, he dutifully registered three handguns, as required by a decree of the liberal Weimar Republic. The decree also provided that in times of unrest, the guns could be confiscated. The government gullibly neglected to consider that only law-abiding citizens would register, while political extremists and criminals would not. However, it did warn that the gun-registration records must be carefully stored so they would not fall into the hands of extremists.

The ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power just a year later, in 1933. The Nazis immediately used the firearms-registration records to identify, disarm and attack “enemies of the state,” a euphemism for Social Democrats and other political opponents of all types. Police conducted search-and-seizure operations for guns and “subversive” literature in Jewish communities and working-class neighborhoods.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... z2kMrFcbHg




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MA Lawmaker Wants Home Inspections for Gun Owners

While there’s already a “safe storage” law on the books, Swampscott Selectman Barry Greenfield believes police should go door-to-door to inspect the gun collections of his town’s residents—to see if they’re in compliance with the law.

The selectman said state law requires Massachusetts gun owners to keep their firearms locked away or rendered inoperable.

The problem, he said, is that police do not have the authority, granted by a local ordinance, to enforce the law and inspect the safeguarding of guns at the homes of the 600 registered gun owners in town.

The selectman said he has spoken with Swampscott Police Chief Ron Madigan about this.

“We need the ability to enforce the state law,” the selectman said.

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/1 ... un-owners/



He isn't suggesting anything the Nazis didn't already pioneer. "Liberal" has become nearly synonymous with Nazi.



But of course by far, the greatest problem we face nowadays is the difficulty people have to go through just to get high.