Regardless of which side of the fence you are on, the law itself was poorly designed and a challenge was inevitable. It was the equivalent of making bicycles illegal, and then labeling anything from a Tesla to a skateboard that you didn't like a bicycle because it also had wheels.
I'm extremely skeptical of the reasoning you lay out, and I'm extremely skeptical of the good faith of an association that brands itself like the FPC does (pictures of happy people holding assault rifles, "WE'RE FIGHTING FOR YOUR RIGHTS") when debating a policy that results in any limitation whatsoever in access to firearms.
Saying "okay, but the definition of what is an 'assault rifle' is murky" isn't a good faith rebuttal, because the endgame of the people making that rebuttal isn't "therefore we should find a more clear-cut way to define what firearms are too dangerous for people to have access to and pass efficient legislation to limit that access", it's "therefore we should let people have whatever weapons they want".
The endgame of the people isn’t relevant to whether the law is good or bad, legal or illegal.
This group is for gun rights and seems to want to remove all restrictions, thus the pictures of happy people with guns, etc.
It seems their aim isn’t to figure out what firearms are too dangerous, so they won’t be participating in that discussion.
Assuming that everyone shares my problem and wants to solve it is not accurate. If I make a bad law that’s ambiguous, I shouldn’t expect enemies of that law’s aim to help me fix it, but to destroy it.
I'm genuinely trying to act in good faith. That doesn't mean I should take a stakeholder's arguments at face value.
If a journal took a massive donation from Facebook, and subsequently published an article about how Facebook's business practice are perfectly legitimate and consumer-friendly, people on HN would be justifiably skeptical of the journal's endgame, and of its intellectual honesty.
As far as I'm aware (I'm open to being proven wrong), gun lobbies in the US want no restriction on the ownership of firearms, period. Any argument used against a particular firearm legislation has to be considered within the context that it's strictly a tool to achieve that "no gun restrictions" goal; if the argument is addressed, gun lobbies will simply come up with another argument.
That doesn't mean the arguments shouldn't be considered on their own merits. And honestly... I don't think they're very good on that front either? Maybe an "assault rifle" is a fuzzy concept. But, leaving aside legal complexities, from a purely utilitarian point of view, I don't think that really matters.
Like, this seems a lot more controversial than I'd expect, but... people don't need assault rifles. People don't need "a weapon platform that allows for massive customization", to quote someone else in the thread. People don't need assault rifle parts that have been rebranded using technicalities so you can use them to build an assault rifle using other rebranded parts. If all you need is to defend yourself, a handgun is fine. Unless you're planning a school shooting or to invade a foreign country, I have no idea what you could possibly use an assault rifle for.
So, while I get that the law has loopholes and that's bad, using these loopholes to repeal the law seems like playing the part of Nicolas Cage in Lord of War in that scene where he says "No, see, it's perfectly legal for me to sell these assault helicopters to a 3rd-world dictatorship. I've bolted the missile attachments off and now they're humanitarian helicopters!" while he sells the missile attachments separately. Maybe it's true bureaucratically, but I can't see how this is at all defensible from a common-sense perspective.
(that's, of course, my point of view as a non-american who thinks this whole 2nd Amendment thing is kind of silly and overrated, but that's another argument)
>therefore we should find a more clear-cut way to define what firearms are too dangerous for people to have access to and pass efficient legislation to limit that access"
>A well regulated(1) Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep(2) and bear Arms, shall not be infringed(2).
(1)Regulated, at the time of authorship of the Constitution, was meant to communicate the state of being in good or well working condition, not "constrained by executive or legislative dictat".
(2)To keep implies not only the mere act of possession or ownership, but the ability to maintain in a functional and useful state, which also implies that any tools or consumables needed for this maintenance are similarly protected.
Stop trying to encroach on a Constitutionally guaranteed Civil Right, and these types of problems won't emerge. Your end state is in violation of the highest law in the entire country. It is not a tenable state of affairs in the U.S. that citizens should be able to be denied the capability to exercise a Constitutionally guaranteed right by default.
Yes, I'm a hardliner. No, I'm not salty because I want a minigun. Too much maintenance and ammo is expensive as all get out. More than anything I want the legal word torture that props up most firearms regulations to end, because all it does is set precedents for even more brazen violations of plain English rendered Constitutional rights under the guise of Public Safety.
Even machine guns are not regulated under the auspices of "Public Safety" and instead, are handled under the banner of regulating interstate commerce through taxation, with particularly high penalties for being caught having tax evaded. Yes, I find the closing of the machine gun registry in 1986 to be questionable in the legislative sense, as it's an end run around saying machine gun registering is henceforth illegal/impossible (unconstitutional) by instead restricting what the Federal Government can spend money on to not include maintaining and updating the registry (debatable legit on the cover, but second order or higher thinking renders this highly suspect). There's a contention there between the power of the purse, and the restriction of laws Congress can legally make that thusfar, there is a great deal of reticence on anyone that floats up to the Supreme Court to resolve.
Frankly, I've seen it as a madness that's only been getting worse over the years, and has served to rot the quality of legislation ever since it was enacted. That's just me though.
Frankly, as someone living in a country where firearm access is strictly restricted (and, as a direct consequence, people aren't regularly shot in their car by a twitchy police officer who thought they were reaching for a gun), I find the whole Second Amendment thing baffling.
Like, I get the practical reasons to want to own a gun, but the knee-jerk way gun advocates will react to any attempt to restrict gun ownership, no matter how meek the attempt or how dangerous the gun (is the right to own a M16 really necessary for public safety?), strikes me as disturbing fanaticism.
Legalese aside, I really don't get the impression that widespread gun ownership is a net-benefit from a consequentialist point of view. I'm open to being proven wrong.
Fair enough, but you are commenting on a post about a judicial ruling, not a post about a constitutional amendment or an act of the legislature. The moment judges decide to ban something or uphold a ban on something based on consequentialist decisions rather than interpreting the law is the moment we go from a rules-based government to government by judicial fiat, and that has some very bad consequentialist repercussions. This was a bad law that needed to be overturned, and it was.
I was commenting more on the language used and the article posted by the FPC than the ruling itself. But I don't think it's a productive debate either way.
it's a loose terminology that includes a wide range of weapons. It's not really a simple definition. Also, the AR15 isn't a weapon - it's a weapon platform that allows for massive customization. IIUC much of the complaint about California's law was how it identified a specific part of the AR-15- the lower receiver- as the "gun", and the other parts were really accessories.
13 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] threadRegardless of which side of the fence you are on, the law itself was poorly designed and a challenge was inevitable. It was the equivalent of making bicycles illegal, and then labeling anything from a Tesla to a skateboard that you didn't like a bicycle because it also had wheels.
Saying "okay, but the definition of what is an 'assault rifle' is murky" isn't a good faith rebuttal, because the endgame of the people making that rebuttal isn't "therefore we should find a more clear-cut way to define what firearms are too dangerous for people to have access to and pass efficient legislation to limit that access", it's "therefore we should let people have whatever weapons they want".
This group is for gun rights and seems to want to remove all restrictions, thus the pictures of happy people with guns, etc.
It seems their aim isn’t to figure out what firearms are too dangerous, so they won’t be participating in that discussion.
Assuming that everyone shares my problem and wants to solve it is not accurate. If I make a bad law that’s ambiguous, I shouldn’t expect enemies of that law’s aim to help me fix it, but to destroy it.
Some people don’t want gun limitations.
If a journal took a massive donation from Facebook, and subsequently published an article about how Facebook's business practice are perfectly legitimate and consumer-friendly, people on HN would be justifiably skeptical of the journal's endgame, and of its intellectual honesty.
As far as I'm aware (I'm open to being proven wrong), gun lobbies in the US want no restriction on the ownership of firearms, period. Any argument used against a particular firearm legislation has to be considered within the context that it's strictly a tool to achieve that "no gun restrictions" goal; if the argument is addressed, gun lobbies will simply come up with another argument.
That doesn't mean the arguments shouldn't be considered on their own merits. And honestly... I don't think they're very good on that front either? Maybe an "assault rifle" is a fuzzy concept. But, leaving aside legal complexities, from a purely utilitarian point of view, I don't think that really matters.
Like, this seems a lot more controversial than I'd expect, but... people don't need assault rifles. People don't need "a weapon platform that allows for massive customization", to quote someone else in the thread. People don't need assault rifle parts that have been rebranded using technicalities so you can use them to build an assault rifle using other rebranded parts. If all you need is to defend yourself, a handgun is fine. Unless you're planning a school shooting or to invade a foreign country, I have no idea what you could possibly use an assault rifle for.
So, while I get that the law has loopholes and that's bad, using these loopholes to repeal the law seems like playing the part of Nicolas Cage in Lord of War in that scene where he says "No, see, it's perfectly legal for me to sell these assault helicopters to a 3rd-world dictatorship. I've bolted the missile attachments off and now they're humanitarian helicopters!" while he sells the missile attachments separately. Maybe it's true bureaucratically, but I can't see how this is at all defensible from a common-sense perspective.
(that's, of course, my point of view as a non-american who thinks this whole 2nd Amendment thing is kind of silly and overrated, but that's another argument)
A few notable examples of regulations that many pro gun lobbyist like are bans on machine guns, Short-barreled rifles and shotguns. [0]
After the Los Vegas shooting many pro gun organization pushes for banning bump stocks [1]
Many of those organizations want to take away the right to any firearm from felons.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_stock
>A well regulated(1) Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep(2) and bear Arms, shall not be infringed(2).
(1)Regulated, at the time of authorship of the Constitution, was meant to communicate the state of being in good or well working condition, not "constrained by executive or legislative dictat".
(2)To keep implies not only the mere act of possession or ownership, but the ability to maintain in a functional and useful state, which also implies that any tools or consumables needed for this maintenance are similarly protected.
>https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/keep
(3)Infringed: Definition of infringe
transitive verb 1 : to encroach upon in a way that violates law or the rights of another infringe a patent 2 obsolete : defeat, frustrate
intransitive verb : encroach —used with on or upon infringe on our rights
>https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infringe
Open/shut case really.
Stop trying to encroach on a Constitutionally guaranteed Civil Right, and these types of problems won't emerge. Your end state is in violation of the highest law in the entire country. It is not a tenable state of affairs in the U.S. that citizens should be able to be denied the capability to exercise a Constitutionally guaranteed right by default.
Yes, I'm a hardliner. No, I'm not salty because I want a minigun. Too much maintenance and ammo is expensive as all get out. More than anything I want the legal word torture that props up most firearms regulations to end, because all it does is set precedents for even more brazen violations of plain English rendered Constitutional rights under the guise of Public Safety.
Even machine guns are not regulated under the auspices of "Public Safety" and instead, are handled under the banner of regulating interstate commerce through taxation, with particularly high penalties for being caught having tax evaded. Yes, I find the closing of the machine gun registry in 1986 to be questionable in the legislative sense, as it's an end run around saying machine gun registering is henceforth illegal/impossible (unconstitutional) by instead restricting what the Federal Government can spend money on to not include maintaining and updating the registry (debatable legit on the cover, but second order or higher thinking renders this highly suspect). There's a contention there between the power of the purse, and the restriction of laws Congress can legally make that thusfar, there is a great deal of reticence on anyone that floats up to the Supreme Court to resolve.
Frankly, I've seen it as a madness that's only been getting worse over the years, and has served to rot the quality of legislation ever since it was enacted. That's just me though.
- That the US Constitution matters to me.
- That I give any moral value to legal minutia.
Frankly, as someone living in a country where firearm access is strictly restricted (and, as a direct consequence, people aren't regularly shot in their car by a twitchy police officer who thought they were reaching for a gun), I find the whole Second Amendment thing baffling.
Like, I get the practical reasons to want to own a gun, but the knee-jerk way gun advocates will react to any attempt to restrict gun ownership, no matter how meek the attempt or how dangerous the gun (is the right to own a M16 really necessary for public safety?), strikes me as disturbing fanaticism.
Legalese aside, I really don't get the impression that widespread gun ownership is a net-benefit from a consequentialist point of view. I'm open to being proven wrong.
> - That I give any moral value to legal minutia.
Fair enough, but you are commenting on a post about a judicial ruling, not a post about a constitutional amendment or an act of the legislature. The moment judges decide to ban something or uphold a ban on something based on consequentialist decisions rather than interpreting the law is the moment we go from a rules-based government to government by judicial fiat, and that has some very bad consequentialist repercussions. This was a bad law that needed to be overturned, and it was.
I was commenting more on the language used and the article posted by the FPC than the ruling itself. But I don't think it's a productive debate either way.