When are we going to get serious about Gun Control?

1. After Las Vegas, there will be another surge in gun sales. It’s what’s happened before. People who didn’t own a gun will buy one. Gun owners will buy more. It makes no sense. America has become known for guns. This will not change without gun control.

2. What happen in Vegas this past Sunday is not only a tragedy, it’s an embarrassment. The “Greatest Nation on Earth,” the nation that won the Cold War and is considered to be the leader of the Free World has this going on? On its own turf? Did our parents and grandparents defeat the Axis Powers so that their children and grandchildren could live in Dodge City someday? I don’t think so.

   And our senior Senator, Senator Thune, says that we need to learn to “get small” when the bullets are flying. Really? Just get small? I think we have already got small or smaller as a nation on the world stage as long as we allow this to continue and accept such simple and sophomoric advice and leadership from our political leaders, like Senator Thune.

   What we need, instead, are political leaders with courage. Political leaders that will demand that the gun industry live in the real world like the rest of us have too. And not the world where they are immune to product liability for their manufactured product. Because when we force the gun industry to finally live in the real world, then the market forces, and only then, can be unleashed to begin to reign-in this madness, that our current political leadership in this country does not have the guts to do on their own – a madness, which is our current domestic gun policy that is currently shielded by a naive and paranoid understanding and/or justification of the 2nd Amendment.

3. Along the Roseanne Cash line.

   https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/10/02/i-cannot-express-how-wrong-i-was-country-guitarist-changes-mind-on-gun-control-after-vegas/

4. Again we have the Senator raking the money in from the gun lobbyists how much does this guy get.One thing about Thune he never misses a photo op.The way he talks you would think he had served in the Milatary but never did,go photo op.

5. Great idea. Limit guns and seize any over the possession limit. Then I volunteer you to go door-to-door and enforce it. You must an overnight genius as you didn’t seem near this smart yesterday.

6. Well, if it were up to me, I would melt down 99.9% of the guns in this country and use the metal to build monuments to peace and diplomacy.

7. http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/10/05/commentary-three-facts-that-destroy-the-lefts-anti-gun-narrative/

   Commentary: Three facts that destroy the left’s anti-gun narrative

   Since the mass shooting in Las Vegas that ended with at least 58 people dead and close to 500 injured, anti-gun progressives have been working overtime to convince the American people that gun owners’ rights should be greatly restricted, a move they say will make the United States a much safer place to live.

   The left attempts to achieve its vision for a gun-free America by appealing to the emotions of a hurting nation, but if people look beyond the worn-out progressive slogans to the facts, they’ll see that passing restrictive gun laws does not create the promised reductions in crime. In fact, statistics show thousands of lives are saved every year because of legal gun ownership.

   Below are three facts that completely dismantle the left’s anti-gun narrative.
   No. 1: More guns do not equal more crime.

   Progressives’ entire argument about gun ownership hinges on the idea that societies that have more guns are more likely to have greater problems with crime. It has always amazed me how easily so many Americans have bought into such an obviously false claim.

   According to researchers at Boston University and Columbia University, there are only six states in which at least 50 percent of the households are believed to own a gun: Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, West Virginia and Wyoming. If liberals’ arguments about guns were true, we should expect these six states to have extremely high crime rates, with an emphasis on murder and other violent crimes. The evidence reveals the opposite.

   The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported four of the six states — Idaho, Montana, West Virginia and Wyoming — ranked in the top half of all states for having the lowest homicide rates in 2015, with Idaho and Wyoming ranking in the top six. Further, although Arkansas has both a high gun-ownership rate and high homicide rate, it had a lower homicide rate than four of its six neighboring states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma), even though it had a higher gun-ownership rate than all of those states. And a review of other forms of crime statistics will reveal similar results.

   So, if more guns don’t equate to their being more crime, what does? Generally speaking, poverty. In states where income disparities are lower, you tend to see fewer violent crimes. In states with higher disparities (and thus more extreme poverty), there’s more crime.

   What about all of the statistics showing high gun-related deaths? Progressives love to show charts, graphs and tables supposedly establishing a connection between gun-related deaths and gun laws. What they almost never do, however, is tell people that gun-related death statistics include suicides, which greatly skew the results, especially since many rural states (where gun ownership is high) often have high suicide rates.
   No. 2: Stricter gun laws don’t prevent violent crimes.

   Progressives often argue that the only way to stop gun-related crime is to restrict gun ownership for everyone. People living in cities like Chicago, where the gun laws are very strict but there’s also lots of gun crimes, know this isn’t true. But when liberals are faced with examples such as Chicago, they will quickly say that the problem is guns are flooding into the city from other places. If gun laws were strict everywhere, they argue, gun crimes would be reduced.

   If this were true, we should see lots of crime in states with lax gun laws. After all, if criminals are buying guns legally in the hopes of hurting other people, wouldn’t they be more likely to do this in states where it’s easier to buy guns?

   Here, as we saw before, progressives are totally wrong. Many states with extremely lax gun laws have very low crime rates as well. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that advocates for gun control, gave in its recent gun-control report card “F” grades to five out of the six states with the lowest homicide rates. The sixth state, New Hampshire, received a “D” grade. And these states also have very low crime rates in virtually every other category.

   What about mass shootings like the one that happened in Las Vegas? Surely those would be prevented with stricter gun laws, right? Again, the research says otherwise. In an op-ed published Wednesday in the Washington Post, statistician Leah Libresco, a person who said she used to support gun-control laws (until she examined the evidence for herself), said the data show Australia and Britain have not experienced fewer mass shootings following their efforts to tighten gun laws.

   “I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be,” Libresco wrote. “Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.”

   Further, gun-control advocates ignore the fact that guns save lives every year. Numerous surveys have been conducted on defensive gun uses, and they report there are hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses every single year. Some report more than 2 million. Even on the lowest end of the spectrum — the National Crime Victimization Survey — more than 67,000 people used guns to defend themselves or their property. (About 33,000 people are killed every year from guns nationwide, and two-thirds of those deaths are suicides.)
   No. 3: Ridding America of its guns would be virtually impossible and conflicts with other progressive beliefs.

   The United States has a gun culture unlike any other in the world. No one knows exactly how many guns exist across the country, but most estimates show around 270 million. Some show nearly as many guns as people. And guns aren’t just a hobby; for many Americans, gun ownership is considered an essential liberty. Even if the U.S. Congress were to pass laws severely restricting all forms of gun ownership, what would happen to the hundreds of millions of guns currently in existence? What would the government do to the millions of people who would refuse to give up their guns?

   Progressives know passing restrictive gun laws anytime in the near future is an impossibility, but it remains one of their primary long-term goals, despite being in complete opposition to other progressive beliefs. For instance, progressives routinely demand strict gun control limits while at the same advocating for open borders. Even if the federal government could destroy every gun now in America, without closing our massive borders, guns would come flooding back in! True gun control without massive border-security improvements is not feasible, and of the two policies (open borders or gun control), it seems unlikely progressives would choose taking guns away over allowing illegal immigrants to enter the United States—at least for now.

   Further, what is the logical end of strict gun control? No or very little private gun ownership. That would leave only the military and police officers with guns, and progressives are constantly arguing racism is rampant in U.S. police departments. Why, then, would the left want the police to be the only ones in our society armed?

   Tragedies like the one that occurred Sunday night in Las Vegas are indisputably horrific, and Americans should do whatever they can, within reason and without destroying liberty, to prevent such events from happening again. But isolated tragedies should never be an excuse for limiting personal freedoms, and even if the case could be made that gun-control laws would reduce murders (it can’t), Americans need to consider the long-term ramifications of that decision. The Second Amendment wasn’t primarily passed so people would have guns to hunt and protect their homes; it was created and approved by the American people through their elected representatives to protect the people from a tyrannical government. As some unknown American writer once said, “When the people fear the government, there’s tyranny. When the government fears the people, there’s liberty.”

8. Why trust not they government?
   Once power is attained and the people are unarmed anything can happen as power corrupts many!
   Examples:
   Hitler first disarmed the people before taking over Germany. The only reason the US was not invaded by Japan in WWII was the Japanese fear of the armed civilians which they considered had the strength of an army.
   And a few days ago:
   http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2017/october/is-spain-cracking-up-nation-faces-separatist-showdown
   Is Spain Cracking up? Nation Faces Separatist Showdown
   10-05-2017 by Dale Hurd
   After unprecedented police violence against its citizens Sunday, Spain is headed for another showdown with the renegade province of Catalonia, which wants to become an independent state.

   With its capital of Barcelona, Catalonia has it’s own history, culture, and language. Catalonia also pays more in taxes to the Spanish government in Madrid than it gets back, and many Catalans want to be free of Spain.

   There are reports the Catalan parliament will consider a declaration of independence from Spain on Monday.

   Europeans were shocked at the extraordinary level of violence directed against Catalans trying to vote Sunday in a referendum on independence that the Spanish government declared illegal-and it made many wonder just how free and democratic the European Union really is.

   Vaclav Klaus, a former leader of the Czech republic who grew up under communism, once told EU lawmakers that the European Union reminded him of the old Soviet Union, and he was booed.

   But the violence seen Sunday could easily remind at least some Europeans about what life was like in the totalitarian governments behind the Iron Curtain. Almost 900 were injured by police.
   “I’ve called the European Union undemocratic, I called it anti-democratic, but never, ever in my fiercest criticisms here did I think we would see the police of a member state of the Union injuring nine hundred people in an attempt to stop them going out to vote,” said British Member of the European Parliament, NIgel Farage, “Whether or not it was legal nationally for people in Catalonia to have a vote, surely, surely, people are allowed to express that opinion. We saw women being dragged out of polling stations by their hair, old ladies with gashes in their forehead. I think it is quite extraordinary to realize that this union is prepared to turn a blind eye.”

   Catalans viewed the vote as a democratic expression of free speech and self-determination, but the European Commission has sided firmly with the government in Madrid, and said the Spanish government’s use of force was necessary to uphold the rule of law.

   The independence movement in Catalonia is a big problem for the EU, because there are many regions of Europe, most notably Flanders in the northern half of Belgium, where other separatist movements also want to break away and declare their own nations.

9. Anyone who desires to live under severe gun law restrictions has the option of moving to and living under the restricted gun laws in Chicago, the rat hole of crime and HIGH gun deaths. Crime thrives in gun restricted areas.

   If the law abiding must relinquish their guns, then we probably should restrict knife ownership and truck/cars because of their frequent growing usage to kill in terrorism attacks.

   And lastly Hillary and the powerful should be denied their ARMED body guards. They should not be treated differently than the masses.

10. “The Second Amendment wasn’t primarily passed so people would have guns to hunt and protect their homes; it was created and approved by the American people through their elected representatives to protect the people from a tyrannical government.”

    That is just not true. That is merely a political narrative or myth which the NRA has effectively placed into the mindset of the American people over the last fifty years.

    Logically, why would policy-makers or political leaders in time and place place into a constitution, which oversees their political realm, a means on which to over throw themselves? Especially, when the checks and balances found within the Constitution and the complementing Separation of Powers Doctrine are the real and only legal means by which to correct a wrong or wrongs by political leaders. Because if we are a nation of laws and not a nation of men, then how can we inherently be a nation of rebellion which is not of a civil means?

    When people accept the above quote, they are advocating the legal relevance or standing of what is often called the “2nd Amendment Remedy,” but such remedy is not legally grounded or logical within a constitutional society. It is merely a quote of emotions, of rhetoric, and naively a quote which knows no place in any legitimate political and or governmental entity of constitutional form. Because its solvency itself is tyrannical in and of itself and smells of an outcome which the book ‘Animal Farm’ best demonstrated in its conclusion to no avail beyond the birth of a new tyrannical rule in and of itself.

11. Nothing like Guns and Abortion to get the long comments going.

    “And lastly Hillary and the powerful should be denied their ARMED body guards. They should not be treated differently than the masses.”

    I agree. I think we should stop funding the secret service and capital police and arm our DC representation with government issued pistols. This will help Mr. Thune and his colleagues practice on how to ‘get small’.

12. Mr Claussen, you live in a liberal bubble. Just go back to the Revolutionary War. If the colonists had not been armed, England would have ruled this country. And as previously stated, Japan would have invaded our country in WWII if the civilians had no guns. Our civilian army was much larger than their military capabilities.

    The Second Amendment which provides U.S. citizens the right to bear arms, was ratified in December 1791, having been ratified by three-fourths of the states.

    The amendment says: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    Furthermore, modern scholars Thomas B. McAffee and Michael J. Quinlan have stated that James Madison “did not invent the right to keep and bear arms when he drafted the Second Amendment; the right was pre-existing at both common law and in the early state constitutions.

13. ‘Mr Claussen, you live in a liberal bubble.’

    LOL. If you only knew. More like a liberal reality.

    One of the main reasons the 2nd Amendment was implemented was to prevent slave uprisings.

14. TNTG,

    Your Revolutionary War inference is illogical to this debate. Because unlike the Colonial period in American history, we now have our own country and our own constitution. You are at best comparing apples to oranges. No doubt civilian guns facilitated the efforts of the Revolutionary soldiers, but if a free people must continual to depend upon guns to maintain their freedom beyond a responsible police force at hand, then they are not free at all and only a veil distance from true tyranny itself, because they are then still a nation of men and not one of laws.

    Keep in mind that in many ways white colonists were free prior to the Revolutionary War, but they were governed without representation by a parent country which itself had and still has an unwritten constitution, and it was this lack of representative capability which led to the legitimacy of the Revolutionary War, but in our case today as American citizens we cannot legitimately make that claim, absence for a moment debates over gerrymandering and or disenfranchisement of some of our current citizens. But if you want to acknowledge these two latter realities, then does not your “Second Amendment Remedy” mentality advocate insurrection today by some in this country right now? And I question if you would be a supportive of those efforts, but if you wish or need to be subjective in your use of this remedy, that you advocate, then that itself is tyranny and a further example of a nation of men and not laws. Plus, history has proven out, that in a sophisticated democracy such as ours, that the appropriate way to address issues like gerrymandering and or disenfranchisement is not with guns but with ballots and petitioning. Because that is what a civil people do or a people of laws and not one of merely men.

    As far as your inference to Japan and WWII, the Japanese never invaded the mainland of the US because they did not have the naval capacity to do it and not because they feared any American civilian firepower potential. My father was stationed at Fort Ord in California on the first night after Pearl Harbor as a Private in the US Army and he, and the other troops from Fort Ord, repositioned themselves that night into the interior of California away from Fort Ord and the ocean coast in fear of a Japanese invasion, but our government would have never taken that defensive position if they had legitimate confidence in a private gun ownership deterrence…Would they have?

    You then claim that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, but that contention has only been established in the last eight years as a result of the Heller decision, which was a 5 to 4 conservative court decision of complete judicial activism that was and still is at odds with all prior stare decisis opinions concerning the Second Amendment, however.

    Most legal scholars believe that the Second Amendment only guarantees the militia to be appropriately armed, but since militias have now been replaced by modern day National Guard units, where the arms are provided, that such a guarantee is moot in the presence of current active NG units.

    Now in your last contention you mention the history of the “right to bear arms” going back prior to our constitution. Well, I would allege that in a free constitutional society that one has the right to do anything as long as there is not a law that prevents it, but then it becomes a question as to whether that law itself is constitutional. One does not need the Second Amendment to justify the right to bears in my opinion. Rather its an inalienable right “to bear arms” merely for the sake of protection of ones person with the final decision as to whether a gun is the appropriate means to protect oneself being that individual’s own free choice or right. Which in turn lends potential credence to the Heller decision, but unfortunately the Heller decision does not appropriately address this reality in the context of past Second Amendment decisions, which in turn makes the Heller decision a bump in the road to our true understanding and usefulness of the Second Amendment in modern times. And thus, that is one of the major reasons you and I are having this debate on guns or gun rights right now. And until we began to have a honest and thorough debate of this issue absence emotions, but with court decisions of consistency, I am afraid the killing fields of our time will continue to stain our true freedom or freedoms.

15. Your wordy twisted recollection/rationalization of history is not true!! End of discussion.

    It was stated by media this morning that our newest concern regarding large group murders should be drones. ISIS is currently using them with great success. The fear is that someone somewhere will use one in the US.

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