All Firearms Discussions in This Thread

[kepPNW]

You say that we have constitutional rights to resist government oppression, and I can only assume you mean with firearms, using violence.

The notion is that when "the people" have guns, they can overthrow the government, as was done in the 1770's. What's overlooked is that at that time both sides had comparable weaponry. There will be no violent revolution now. Since we're among friends, I'd be hesitant to use the words "macho posturing," of course.

I would never argue my worst enemy shouldn't have the right to free thought and expression.

Of course, very darn few of us even raise an eyebrow as we now prosecute and imprison people for thought crimes.

Oppression and wisdom aren't synonymous. These men did not bestow freedom upon us, we took it from them. So when you ask if genocide and oppression can happen here, it already has. This country was built on it.

Right, and to be clear, our country did not commit genocide against oppressed Africans. They were too valuable. Rather, it was Americans that were virtually wiped out.

Take away the 2nd Amendment, and you'll soon lose your 1st Amendment rights... it'll all go downhill from there.

Well, the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th have all, to some degree, been abolished in just the last few administrations. Seems "downhill" started some time ago (9/11?), despite the 2nd.

Things have changed so much Karl, you are 100% correct! And with the vigor that our "leaders" are trying to remove the rest of our rights (in the name of safety - it's for our own good you know) I fear for our country.

People aren't paying attention to what matters. While, by design, we argue whether pea-shooters can take on tanks, we don't even notice that we live in an officially Constitution Free Zone.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoNp0ZtBPj8

I should probably stop now. Like carrying a gun on a trail, no good can come of this argument here. At best, new friends may be lost due to misunderstandings that probably wouldn't have happened had this been face to face. At worst, existing friendships could be endangered! And certainly, nothing said here will have any impact whatsoever on changing the problems associated with gun violence in this country, so why take those risks?

[Koda]

Potato. The American revolution is what your asking. It wasn't another country's govt that waged war it was the private citizens. Under their own arms who together formed a militia.
I don't think the second amendment is about individuals or cults maybe on personal vendettas.

edit to add: To clarify I think the “well regulated” part assures any private militia operates lawfully. So we have the right to keep and bear arms for self defense, and for organizing a LAWFUL private militia. Not to say individually resist govt authority for a private cause. This is what gets many individuals, cults and other groups in trouble, like Waco or McVeigh…

[Peder]

That being said, I'll normally take to a trail with a Ruger LC9, SIG P228 or P220 or one of my AR-15s.

Too bad we do not have a thumbs up icon, or I would give you a few! You sure had me

I am sad nobody picked up on my my earlier reference to the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors. These Amendments are all set in stone by our founding fathers!

[airoff]

Oppression and wisdom aren't synonymous. These men did not bestow freedom upon us, we took it from them. So when you ask if genocide and oppression can happen here, it already has. This country was built on it.

Right, and to be clear, our country did not commit genocide against oppressed Africans. They were too valuable. Rather, it was Americans that were virtually wiped out.

Just to clarify, Karl, I was referring more to the slave trade itself, where an estimated 10 million Africans were killed. Its believed that up to 20% of slaves were killed on the slave ships alone.

If only someone had thought to afford them 2nd Amendment rights.

/rant.

[retired jerry]

From today's perspective slavery is obviously horrible. But at the time it didn't seem so bad. The slaves weren't capable of making decisions about life? How else do you pick cotton? The slaves are better off than they were in Africa?

Are there things today that seem okay that maybe 100 or 200 years from now will seem horrible? Maybe there are economic policies that keep poor people poor? Maybe we have wars just so some big corporations can make a bunch of money?

[kepPNW]

Oppression and wisdom aren't synonymous. These men did not bestow freedom upon us, we took it from them. So when you ask if genocide and oppression can happen here, it already has. This country was built on it.

Right, and to be clear, our country did not commit genocide against oppressed Africans. They were too valuable. Rather, it was Americans that were virtually wiped out.

Just to clarify, Karl, I was referring more to the slave trade itself, where an estimated 10 million Africans were killed. Its believed that up to 20% of slaves were killed on the slave ships alone.

If only someone had thought to afford them 2nd Amendment rights.

/rant.

Okay, sure. I was just thinking what was done to the native folk here was really worse, at least in terms of what proportion of their total was exterminated. Not fair to compare tragedies, though. As you said, genocide and oppression can and has happened here!

Interesting side-note... The current concealed carry push was an outgrowth of the oppression of blacks, and their interest in overturning the old laws forbidding it. For much of this country's existence, carrying concealed was forbidden almost everywhere. As the governor of Texas put it in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man." The NRA has really turned US on our collective head! ("The rest of the story.")

[Chase]

That being said, I'll normally take to a trail with a Ruger LC9, SIG P228 or P220 or one of my AR-15s.

Too bad we do not have a thumbs up icon, or I would give you a few! You sure had me

I am sad nobody picked up on my my earlier reference to the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors. These Amendments are all set in stone by our founding fathers!

I got a chuckle out of it.

I also liked the YouTube video Kep posted. All this is way off topic from hiking, though.

[Lurch]

Interesting side-note... The current concealed carry push was an outgrowth of the oppression of blacks, and their interest in overturning the old laws forbidding it. For much of this country's existence, carrying concealed was forbidden almost everywhere. As the governor of Texas put it in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man." The NRA has really turned US on our collective head! ("The rest of the story.")

Admittedly I only skimmed your article, but WHAT? Concealed carry is an outgrowth of black oppression? That just doesn't make sense to me one bit, and is an argument that can easily cloud and derail a conversation.

Concealed carry has been on the rise for decades, murder rates have been on the decline for decades, despite the Clinton era 'assault weapons ban', and continuing past its expiration. I wouldn't chock it up to pure coincidence that nearly all (one or two exceptions) the 'mass shootings' in the past 20 years have been in "gun free zones," or as some like to call it, defenseless victim zones


(Yes I fully appreciate the lack of credibility of an image from a site called 'gun-nuttery')

There haven't been very reliable studies about 'defensive gun uses' and the results of the ones conducted very wildly, but I have yet to see one that disputes that there are more defensive gun uses than actual deaths caused by. You can't simply look at deaths, you must also consider the times where a person was shot but not killed, or where the presentation of the weapon ended the threat.

Potatoe: There have been multiple cases were assault/deadly force against a LEO was justifiable, I can try and dig a few up if you want. Some recent and somewhat disturbing stories of 'oppressive' government where people did not fight back can be found in during Katrina with hundreds of admittedly illegal gun confiscations, and the complete lockdown of Chicago and dozens of warrantless building searches for the Marathon Bombers. I don't know if anyone exactly had a problem with it, or how the officers would have dealt with a refusal to allow a sweep, but not many people say 'no' when a decked out SWAT team knocks on your door and asks to come in. The whole 'if you don't have anything to hide, it's not a problem' argument is missing the larger picture.

Peder: Nice try but the 18th was in 1919, far outside founding fathers and bill of rights territory

But that's WAY outside the spectrum of this thread, so I think it honestly comes down to just a couple questions.

1. Do you oppose the idea of concealed carry?
2. Do you oppose the idea of open carry?

3. Does the type of weapon matter?
4. So long as there is no criminal intent, does the reason for carry matter?
5. Does location matter?

Crusak: I would avoid the 5.7. Not because it's a bad gun, but because it's such an odd-ball. There is always going to be 9mm .40S&W and .45ACP available on some level. If you want concealed and already have a subcompact 40 I would probably stay in the same family at least, XD40SC would have similar operation and function your glock. Other completely valid trail guns for around here I would suggest would probably fall into the likes of the hammerless airweight S&W revolvers.

[kepPNW]

Admittedly I only skimmed your article, but WHAT? Concealed carry is an outgrowth of black oppression? That just doesn't make sense to me one bit, and is an argument that can easily cloud and derail a conversation.

I hate to let facts get in the way of a good argument, but there ya go. Sorry, that was low.

Here's a quote from that article that pertains...

The modern gun debate began with a shooting. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald bought a bolt-action rifle—an Italian military-surplus weapon—for nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents by ordering it from an ad that he found in American Rifleman. Five days after Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, Thomas Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, introduced legislation restricting mail-order sales of shotguns and rifles. The N.R.A.’s executive vice-president, Franklin L. Orth, testified before Congress, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

Gun-rights arguments have their origins not in eighteenth-century Anti-Federalism but in twentieth-century liberalism. They are the product of what the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet has called the “rights revolution,” the pursuit of rights, especially civil rights, through the courts. In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. than of black nationalists. In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Establishing a constitutional right to carry a gun for the purpose of self-defense was part of the mission of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was founded in 1966. “Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community throughout the nation,” Huey Newton said.

In 1968, as Winkler relates, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., gave the issue new urgency. A revised Gun Control Act banned mail-order sales, restricted the purchase of guns by certain high-risk people (e.g., those with criminal records), and prohibited the importation of military-surplus firearms. That law, along with a great deal of subsequent law-and-order legislation, was intended to fight crime, control riots, and solve what was called, in the age of the Moynihan report, the “Negro problem.” The regulations that are part of these laws—firearms restrictions, mandatory-sentencing guidelines, abolition of parole, and the “war on drugs”—are now generally understood to be responsible for the dramatic rise in the U.S. incarceration rate.

The N.R.A. supported the 1968 Gun Control Act, with some qualms. Orth was quoted in American Rifleman as saying that although some elements of the legislation “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

Anyway, all this laid the groundwork for what followed. Forty-four states have legalized concealed carry just since 1980! Before that, only 5 states allowed it.

Concealed carry has been on the rise for decades, murder rates have been on the decline for decades, despite the Clinton era 'assault weapons ban', and continuing past its expiration.

Concealed carry has only been an option for a few decades, if that. And the testosterone-enraged population has been both incarcerated at incredibly high rates, and shrinking as a percent of the whole overall, during that same time period.

I wouldn't chock it up to pure coincidence that nearly all (one or two exceptions) the 'mass shootings' in the past 20 years have been in "gun free zones," or as some like to call it, defenseless victim zones

Those definitions sound fairly debatable, especially given your use of air quotes. So I'll just dismiss it as propadogma.

Coincidence happens. Ask Darwin.

[Lurch]

That's all well and good, and if you want to look at it as an outgrowth of racial oppression I guess that's fine. I'd just prefer to think of it as an outgrowth of oppression in general and the reinforcement of a fundamental right.

Concealed carry has only been an option for a few decades, if that. And the testosterone-enraged population has been both incarcerated at incredibly high rates, and shrinking as a percent of the whole overall, during that same time period.

Not entirely sure where you're going with that. The people with CCW's are some of the most law abiding, and least confrontational people I know. We're arresting more criminals, and in general violence has gone down. Do you think it would have gone down appreciably *more* if concealed carry wasn't legal?

Those definitions sound fairly debatable, especially given your use of air quotes. So I'll just dismiss it as propadogma.

Oh fine I was trying to avoid digging up stats, but I may have been a little off in my numbers...

Since 1982 there have been 62 public shooting incidents. 48 of them would qualify as a 'mass shooting' in which 4 or more people were killed. (The clackamas mall shooting for example would NOT be classified as a mass shooting).

Of those, 6 took place at schools covered under the Federal Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 (not sure how many of those happened before 1990 though..)

3 more at Universities that don't allow firearms.

The rest are at privately owned businesses, malls, theatres etc, and are generally covered under all sorts of state laws and private mandates that are individually dependent. Aurora for example was the one of 7 theaters that was showing the Batman premiere, and the only one that banned concealed carry. Could easily be coincidence, but it's also logical to target large groups of unarmed citizens if you want the largest impact.

All that is drifting further and further from the point of the conversation, and you never answered my 5 questions Karl!

(PS I hope this topic, or me personally hasn't offended anyone. I love to play devils advocate)