Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History

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Can someone post some statistics that compare stats from states with strict gun control laws like CA to states with lax gun control laws. Seems like the data should be out there to determine whether tighter control has any positive effect on crime/violence/shootings/etc.

My hunch is that there is no correlation.
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First, I should point out that my last post was something I worked on throughout the day, between cases, without keeping up with the other posts in the thread. Some of the verbiage may seem slightly out of place given the posts in the interim.

doctalaughs said:
Not really: "For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9715182/
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How in the name of all that is evidenced base was that study allowed to be published with that conclusion?

They did not show that "Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense." Their denominator was not "guns kept in homes", it was homes and surrounding areas where shootings occurred.

A more appropriate conclusion is, in or around homes and where fatal and injurious shootings are likely to occurs, it is more likely that the shootings will be criminal or accidental in nature rather than justified.

They completely ignored all the unfired guns kept in homes during the study period. The use of "around a residence" reeks of padding the stats. A gang shootout in the front lawn may or may not have anything to do with guns kept in the house. Unfortunately, I can't get into the materials and methods to see how liberal they were with their around the house criteria.

This study is almost 20 years old. Since that time, gun ownership and interest in home defense has skyrocketed. Gun accidents continue to decline as do homicides and violent crime.

Suicide is on the upswing, but it is far from clear that any type of gun control will have a statistically significant effect on this due to substitution effect. Of course guns are one of the most effective methods of suicide so a substitution may result in reduced suicide success.

-pod
 
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Twiggidy said:
An explosion of gun sales and gun owners didn't lead to the reduction in crime......
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I specifically and intentionally never made the claim that it did. In fact in a previous post of mine I said

periopdoc said:
Contrary to the gun control advocates' predictions of blood in the streets, homicide rates are at 50-year lows, and homicide and violent crime are in a steady downtrend since peaking in the 80s and 90s.

While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, I think it is very difficult to argue that expanded recognition of gun rights will in any way lead to more violent crime and homicide since the exact opposite has happened.
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In other words, despite (not necessarily because of) the explosion of gun sales and owners and carriers crime rates are going down, and so it's hard to make the argument that a continued increase in gun rights would reverse the trends

-bsd
 
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periopdoc said:
I specifically and intentionally never made the claim that it did. In fact in a previous post of mine I said



In other words, despite (not necessarily because of) the explosion of gun sales and owners and carriers crime rates are going down, and so it's hard to make the argument that a continued increase in gun rights would reverse the trends

-bsd
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Ok so violent crime is going down despite more gun owners. Can anyone explain why the US gun homicide and accidental death rate is still an order of magnitude greater than any other developed nation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26551975/?i=21&from=2015 gun violence

Are we really just that much more violent?


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doctalaughs said:
We have 25-50 times the number of broken families than all those other nations?


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From that article "For 15- to 24-year-olds, the gun homicide rate in the United States was 49.0 times higher." How old do you think gang members are?
 
doctalaughs said:
Ok so violent crime is going down despite more gun owners. Can anyone explain why the US gun homicide and accidental death rate is still an order of magnitude greater than any other developed nation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26551975/?i=21&from=2015 gun violence

Are we really just that much more violent?


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To add to this, we got so many arguments as to why "more gun control" will never solve the problem and that it's a bad idea. However, I don't believe I've heard an alternative solution to the problem (gun violence in America).
 
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RadOncDoc21 said:
To add to this, we got so many arguments as to why "more gun control" will never solve the problem and that it's a bad idea. However, I don't believe I've heard an alternative solution to the problem (gun violence in America).
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Better economy/education and more two parent families....education and # of parents in home are huge predictors of life trajectory
 
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doctalaughs said:
We have 25-50 times the number of broken families than all those other nations?


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Yes. That's what long working hours combined with long commutes, or having to move to a non-native city, does to families. Not to speak about incarcerations.

It's not normal to work more than 35-40 hours a week, or to expect that from others. Lack of leisure time combined with fatigue equal less time spent with family, equal more crime, more unhappiness, just a recipe for disaster. There is a reason they call it the rat race.

We used to say that it takes a village to raise a kid. There are no more villages, no more neighbors, just a bunch of strangers who don't have time for each other's busy lives, and are avoiding the neighbors and their problems.
 
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Pooh & Annie said:
Did anyone else notice that among the gun advocates, one guy argues that the laws are specifically meant to keep guns out of white people's hands, and another guy argues they're specifically meant to keep guns out of minority's hands?
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If I wasn't a white boy living in the suburbs, I might be worried about what the police might do to me if I was a lawful CCW carrier. But that's a problem with the police, not guns. We could fill another 15+ page, 750+ post thread up with discussion of what the police have become.

Also, although the history of gun control, particularly from the post Civil War era through the 1960s, is very obviously and overtly grounded in racism and classism, more recently the kind of racism and classism is the softer kind, i.e. low expectations and the condescending paternalism of (mostly Democrat initiated) "you can't provide for yourself or protect yourself, so the government will, for your own good". That doesn't make it OK.

I'm certainly not giving the Republican party a pass on either racism or classism.
 
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FFP said:
Yes. That's what long working hours combined with long commutes, or having to move to a non-native city, does to families. Not to speak about incarcerations.

It's not normal to work more than 35-40 hours a week, or to expect that from others. Lack of leisure time combined with fatigue equal less time spent with family, equal more crime, more unhappiness, just a recipe for disaster. There is a reason they call it the rat race.

We used to say that it takes a village to raise a kid. There are no more villages, no more neighbors, just a bunch of strangers who don't have time for each other's busy lives, and are avoiding the neighbors and their problems.
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I don't totally buy this argument. First, most violence/crime isn't coming from the people working 60-100 hours a week in the US. Second, the economy in the US has now and traditionally been better than most of the countries in that study. Third, social isolation and broken families are not a uniquely US problem. I would argue its more a cultural western phenomenon, seen less in asian cultures. I agree incarceration is probably making the issue worse but to account for the order of magnitude of the difference between other similarly rich countries you have to question if the sheer number of guns we have in civilian circulation plays a big role.


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periopdoc said:
No numbers, no stats, just some feelings from two purported vets and two law enforcement trainers who are worried that civilian carriers may not use good judgement or have good marksmanship.
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As an aside, we really shouldn't be looking to law enforcement or 90%+ of the military for credible commentary on marksmanship.

Most police officers are less competent than most gun owners when it comes to firearm handling and marksmanship, for the simple reason that they tend to only handle and shoot them during their required annual qualifications. I would trust a random guy at the range over a random police officer to safely handle a gun and hit what he's aiming at. I'm not just cop bashing ...

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...very-women-dorner-manhunt-20160127-story.html

... shooting well just isn't a priority for them. They perceive their vehicles and radios to be more important pieces of equipment. And that's probably a good thing, on the whole. Ammo to practice on your own costs money.


Most members of the military haven't touched a firearm since basic training. We're that top- and sideways-heavy with support personnel (I'm one of them, of course). Even the trigger pullers spend the great majority of their time doing things that don't involve shooting. Back in the day, at the height of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, when I was the doc for a Marine infantry battalion, dry and live fire training was a small fraction of the Marines' monthly schedule.

The Army still maintains a marksmanship unit that does it full time, and those guys are good. Their entire job is practice, travel for competition, and training other Army units in basic marksmanship. I give those Army wankers a lot of well-deserved crap :), but this is one thing they do right. For the rest of the military, even sanctioned competition at military-run events is generally self-funded by the individuals who choose to participate!

The last time I shot a government firearm was in 2012, when I got 2 or 3 hours worth of re-familiarization fire before going to Afghanistan. I was named to the Navy rifle team this year, so I'm not a total scrub amateur. Right now I'm at the annual interservice championships, shooting my own ammo, out of my own rifles, hauling my own gear up and down the range, sleeping in a hotel room I'm paying for. And I love it, but that's how non-seriously the non-AMU military takes marksmanship training and excellence.


So, when it comes to marksmanship, take what you hear from the police and military with a very large grain of salt. Your average dude in uniform isn't likely to to be especially qualified, and may very well carry some look-down-on-mere-civilians baggage that biases their opinions.
 
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pgg said:
Most police officers are less competent than most gun owners when it comes to firearm handling and marksmanship, for the simple reason that they tend to only handle and shoot them during their required annual qualifications. I would trust a random guy at the range over a random police officer to safely handle a gun and hit what he's aiming at. I'm not just cop bashing ...
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Point taken. But I'm personally much more concerned about the decision to start shooting and who is being shot at than the accuracy, per se.
 
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o0kMpEc.jpg
 
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pgg said:
As an aside, we really shouldn't be looking to law enforcement or 90%+ of the military for credible commentary on marksmanship.

Most police officers are less competent than most gun owners when it comes to firearm handling and marksmanship, for the simple reason that they tend to only handle and shoot them during their required annual qualifications. I would trust a random guy at the range over a random police officer to safely handle a gun and hit what he's aiming at. I'm not just cop bashing ...

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...very-women-dorner-manhunt-20160127-story.html

... shooting well just isn't a priority for them. They perceive their vehicles and radios to be more important pieces of equipment. And that's probably a good thing, on the whole. Ammo to practice on your own costs money.


Most members of the military haven't touched a firearm since basic training. We're that top- and sideways-heavy with support personnel (I'm one of them, of course). Even the trigger pullers spend the great majority of their time doing things that don't involve shooting. Back in the day, at the height of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, when I was the doc for a Marine infantry battalion, dry and live fire training was a small fraction of the Marines' monthly schedule.

The Army still maintains a marksmanship unit that does it full time, and those guys are good. Their entire job is practice, travel for competition, and training other Army units in basic marksmanship. I give those Army wankers a lot of well-deserved crap :), but this is one thing they do right. For the rest of the military, even sanctioned competition at military-run events is generally self-funded by the individuals who choose to participate!

The last time I shot a government firearm was in 2012, when I got 2 or 3 hours worth of re-familiarization fire before going to Afghanistan. I was named to the Navy rifle team this year, so I'm not a total scrub amateur. Right now I'm at the annual interservice championships, shooting my own ammo, out of my own rifles, hauling my own gear up and down the range, sleeping in a hotel room I'm paying for. And I love it, but that's how non-seriously the non-AMU military takes marksmanship training and excellence.


So, when it comes to marksmanship, take what you hear from the police and military with a very large grain of salt. Your average dude in uniform isn't likely to to be especially qualified, and may very well carry some look-down-on-mere-civilians baggage that biases their opinions.
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swoon.......

the interservice championships would be a dream of mine....just started basic level practicing to work toward my EIC, unfortunately all this "trying to be a doctor" takes time ;)
 
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powermd said:
The point I am trying to make is that your interpretation of the second amendment doesn't lend itself to drawing a line.

You have expressed a very serious concern with protecting yourself and possibly fellow citizens from a tyrannical government of the future. In fact you are willing to accept however many real firearms deaths per year occur in order to provide some (unclear) measure of protection against the government possibly intruding in your life in the future. As a person of Jewish descent, I can sympathize with the desire to maintain one's ability to defend against the government. I don't want to sidetrack on this too much, but if I were an American Muslim and Donald Trump were elected, I would definitely think about buying a weapon.

But it sounds like you are okay with drawing a line *somewhere*. For you, it's the point at which weapons no longer become individual man-portable, correct?

I think we can both agree that as technology progresses, the destructive power available on a single-man weapon will probably increase, maybe exponentially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minigun

If a man could carry this much firepower, you would agree it should be legal, right?

I can only conclude that if the Orlando shooter had arrived at the club with this level of firepower and taken out all 300 people inside, and massacred the police and SWAT teams that arrived to defend the public, you wouldn't budge on your position.

Do we even need to take it that far?

With body armor, full-auto rifles, and large capacity magazines, he could probably accomplish the same thing.

It that event happened in your town, would you have the courage to step in front of the cameras and grieving families to make your point about how these weapons are important to protect us against the government?

I think more than a few people would be right to ask who's side you're on.
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sb247 said:
swoon.......

the interservice championships would be a dream of mine....just started basic level practicing to work toward my EIC, unfortunately all this "trying to be a doctor" takes time ;)
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:)

I'm at 14/30 on rifle, hoping for more on Sunday. 0/30 on pistol, and that's not likely to change soon.

It's a lot of fun.
 
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doctalaughs said:
I don't totally buy this argument. First, most violence/crime isn't coming from the people working 60-100 hours a week in the US. Second, the economy in the US has now and traditionally been better than most of the countries in that study. Third, social isolation and broken families are not a uniquely US problem. I would argue its more a cultural western phenomenon, seen less in asian cultures. I agree incarceration is probably making the issue worse but to account for the order of magnitude of the difference between other similarly rich countries you have to question if the sheer number of guns we have in civilian circulation plays a big role.


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No...violence/crime is coming from the children of the estranged individuals who work 60-100 hours per week in the US. Or from those with any other reason for not seeing their kids (incarceration, death, abandonment, etc.) Look at the "mass" shooters: most/all were/are male, from broken families (or from radical-leaning ones). Look at inner city broken families where gun control laws are useless and guns are everywhere. LA, south side Chicago. Nobody knows whose daddy is whose, ergo the gang is their only family. So blatantly obvious I'd venture to place all my eggs in one basket and say the correlation is extremely statistically significant.

The reasons politicians want to "enhance" gun control laws are probably several such as:

- citizens want to see them do something, even if it is useless, so politicians appease them (or truly think more laws will suffice) (just like docs prescribe abx for viruses bc pts aren't listening)
- agenda (hate guns despite the logic of guns deterring criminals and that little thing called the Bill of Rights that shall not be infringed on)
- probably the big one: they realize seriously curbing gang proliferation would be such a monumental task akin to political suicide in money required and actions necessary to take as well as moral stances they'd have to take on social issues like gangs themselves or promoting tight-knit families that the scapegoat response is "guns are to blame, let's regulate them".

I guarantee you, gun control will never ever stop at "assault weapons". It will continue onto handguns, and then the regulation of large kitchen knives, or what have you. And mark my words, once the 2nd amendment is rendered weak enough just like the 1st is rapidly becoming, we will eventually see the most swift signing of laws at the most rapid pace in our history it will make Obama's presidency look like it moved at a snail's pace. Or, a revolution, which maybe is what some of them wanted after all.
 
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chfo said:
poCBua.jpg
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No one blames law abiding gun owners. The problem is that every "law abiding gun owner" is immediately reclassified as a terrorist, criminal or mentally-ill person when the bodies show up.


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The governor of California just signed into law a ban on the sale of new semi-automatic rifles, a magazine ban, new purchase limits, background checks for ammunition purchases, and new registration requirements.

Go on guys, keep telling me the Democrats don't really want to ban firearms.
 
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pgg said:
The governor of California just signed into law a ban on the sale of new semi-automatic rifles, a magazine ban, new purchase limits, background checks for ammunition purchases, and new registration requirements.

Go on guys, keep telling me the Democrats don't really want to ban firearms.
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I hadn't heard about that. I can take a look and see what guns and ammo you can buy no problem if you want. I bet there's quite a bit.
 
Pooh & Annie said:
I hadn't heard about that. I can take a look and see what guns and ammo you can buy no problem if you want. I bet there's quite a bit.
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You'd be wrong. New semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines are illegal in California now.

Existing ones can be registered and kept (until that registry is used for a forced buyback or outright confiscation), but not transferred.

The right to own a semi-automatic rifle has been lost to future California generations.
 
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sb247 said:
I would move out of state if I was there
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I will never go back.*

I wasn't planning to anyway, given the taxes, cost of living, crowds, and congestion. But California isn't being coy about who they want living in their state. It's not me.



* Unless I'm ordered to by the US Navy, in which case I'll leave as soon as I can.
 
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pgg said:
I will never go back.*

I wasn't planning to anyway, given the taxes, cost of living, crowds, and congestion. But California isn't being coy about who they want living in their state. It's not me.



* Unless I'm ordered to by the US Navy, in which case I'll leave as soon as I can.
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I had thought about there being a lot of LEOs and military in california....like what the hell do they do now?
 
pgg said:
The governor of California just signed into law a ban on the sale of new semi-automatic rifles, a magazine ban, new purchase limits, background checks for ammunition purchases, and new registration requirements.

Go on guys, keep telling me the Democrats don't really want to ban firearms.
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How exactly does this work with heller and common use? Scotus has more or less just decided to keep mum for the time being about what is "common" outside of handguns as far as I can tell. Though I haven't had the time to follow them closely
 
WheezyBaby said:
How exactly does this work with heller and common use? Scotus has more or less just decided to keep mum for the time being about what is "common" outside of handguns as far as I can tell. Though I haven't had the time to follow them closely
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In my opinion, and it's just an opinion, SCOTUS has been derelict in its duties since McDonald. There have been a number of cases appealed to SCOTUS since then concerning carry rights and "assault weapon" bans, including cases involving clear circuit splits, and they have declined to hear the cases.

The cynical side of me believes that's because both political wings of SCOTUS weren't sure of what the outcome would be before they even heard the cases, and wanted to wait in the hopes of a new appointment shifting the balance toward their side. Win or lose, we really deserve an answer from them.


Also, in my opinion, it's absolutely impossible to reconcile any semi-automatic rifle ban with the Court's ruling in Heller and McDonald regarding common use, and the 2nd Amendment's protection of an individual (not collective) right to possess a firearm for the explicit purpose of self-defense (not to resist tyranny or foreign invaders ... self-defense). But we have to count on lower courts to do their jobs, and unfortunately the lower courts are just as political as SCOTUS.

We're lucky we got Heller & McDonald when we did. Those votes were close, 5-4 each time. Have no doubt, the Democrats will seek to undermine, ignore, and overturn it at every possible opportunity, the same way the Republicans have been aiming at Roe v Wade for decades.


In the end, it's the Right's fault as much as the Left's. The Republican party has become so completely incompetent, so evangelical, so hostile to minorities and immigrants, that there's been a huge and persistent shift that favors the Democrat party. It's even more significant than national polls suggest, because the shift is disproportionately large in swing states. Clinton has a huge, huge, huge advantage on the electoral map. If she wins even a tiny popular majority, she's likely to win the electoral college in a Reagan-sized landslide.

I think that gun rights are the last thread holding the Republican party together, and that if the Democrat party dropped gun control from its platform, the GOP would cease to exist in a national sense, with only pockets left in strongly evangelical regions. (The NRA is the only organization that is even running a credible ad campaign against Hillary Clinton right now. The presumed GOP presidential nominee can't even be bothered to do it!) We'd still end up with a two-party system ... but it'd be more Europe-like, with a very far left / progressive wing with Sanders and his kind, and a moderate left with the Clinton establishment types (who are actually pretty conservative from a global perspective).
 
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pgg said:
The governor of California just signed into law a ban on the sale of new semi-automatic rifles, a magazine ban, new purchase limits, background checks for ammunition purchases, and new registration requirements.

Go on guys, keep telling me the Democrats don't really want to ban firearms.

hey it is a dream of the republican party.... a state, the people making the decision. Not that big bad federal government enforcing the 2nd amendment. Seriously though there are many states governments that just are not going to this. you have just chosen to live in a state that is totally stupid about gun laws.
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pgg said:
In my opinion, and it's just an opinion, SCOTUS has been derelict in its duties since McDonald. There have been a number of cases appealed to SCOTUS since then concerning carry rights and "assault weapon" bans, including cases involving clear circuit splits, and they have declined to hear the cases.

The cynical side of me believes that's because both political wings of SCOTUS weren't sure of what the outcome would be before they even heard the cases, and wanted to wait in the hopes of a new appointment shifting the balance toward their side. Win or lose, we really deserve an answer from them.


Also, in my opinion, it's absolutely impossible to reconcile any semi-automatic rifle ban with the Court's ruling in Heller and McDonald regarding common use, and the 2nd Amendment's protection of an individual (not collective) right to possess a firearm for the explicit purpose of self-defense (not to resist tyranny or foreign invaders ... self-defense). But we have to count on lower courts to do their jobs, and unfortunately the lower courts are just as political as SCOTUS.

We're lucky we got Heller & McDonald when we did. Those votes were close, 5-4 each time. Have no doubt, the Democrats will seek to undermine, ignore, and overturn it at every possible opportunity, the same way the Republicans have been aiming at Roe v Wade for decades.


In the end, it's the Right's fault as much as the Left's. The Republican party has become so completely incompetent, so evangelical, so hostile to minorities and immigrants, that there's been a huge and persistent shift that favors the Democrat party. It's even more significant than national polls suggest, because the shift is disproportionately large in swing states. Clinton has a huge, huge, huge advantage on the electoral map. If she wins even a tiny popular majority, she's likely to win the electoral college in a Reagan-sized landslide.

I think that gun rights are the last thread holding the Republican party together, and that if the Democrat party dropped gun control from its platform, the GOP would cease to exist in a national sense, with only pockets left in strongly evangelical regions. (The NRA is the only organization that is even running a credible ad campaign against Hillary Clinton right now. The presumed GOP presidential nominee can't even be bothered to do it!) We'd still end up with a two-party system ... but it'd be more Europe-like, with a very far left / progressive wing with Sanders and his kind, and a moderate left with the Clinton establishment types (who are actually pretty conservative from a global perspective).
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the court as a rule really hates to imtervene and prefers that the states make the decision until it becomes a real issue. Seeing as most of the country just loves firearms and the rights for people to carry them I suspect the court will be silent until ther is a real NATIONAL groundswell for and against. Now it is mostly the zealots left and right screaming.
 
deepstate2016 said:
hey it is a dream of the republican party.... a state, the people making the decision.
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Perhaps before the Civil War, "states rights" were really a force for defending the rights of individual people. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 is a good example of federal overreach that prevented people in one state from doing the right thing, by requiring them to return escaped slaves to their owners in other states.

Unfortunately since the Civil War the "states rights" mantra has too often been an excuse for oppression. Remember that "states rights" was the justification for slavery in 1/2 the nation; "states rights" opposed desegregation; recently "states rights" opposed gay marriage in the guise of religious freedom.

Only fools and the disingenuous think the Civil War was about "states rights" and not slavery, but one lasting effect was that we got a more powerful federal government out of it. The next 150 years went pretty well, on the whole, largely because we had a strong federal government.

We don't have to look much past last week to see how poorly things can go for a loose confederation of generally-allied states (the EU) when they can't be bothered to create a central government with teeth.

9 times out of 10 today, when someone starts a sentence with "states rights" they're going to finish it with something that'll be an affront to someone's civil rights.

Armed self defense is a civil right. Moreover, it's a civil right specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Civil rights shouldn't be left up to local majority opinions, and SCOTUS has generally agreed on this ... it's the basis of their multiple decisions to incorporate most of the Bill of Rights.


deepstate2016 said:
Not that big bad federal government enforcing the 2nd amendment. Seriously though there are many states governments that just are not going to this. you have just chosen to live in a state that is totally stupid about gun laws.
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I don't live there any more. I was there on military orders from 2009-2014, and then I left. In part because of the gun laws.

If the federal government is big and bad in this case, it's because it's not doing its job, it's not forcing the states to respect Constitutional protections.

SCOTUS should be hearing cases related to circuit splits. The executive branch should be suing states that infringe on Constitutionally protected rights. The federal legislature should be passing laws specifically protecting those rights, preventing states from infringing upon them (they actually did in 1986 with FOPA; it's time they did so again and went further).

The answer is not to shrug, parrot "states rights", and pretend it's all OK if you just move to another state.
 
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Sorry, just like states rights mantra because it is the mantra of the GOP. It amuses me. We all know it is just an excuse for oppressing a minority group. As for the court I think you are right this is an issue that needs to be visited by a full court. But we gotta wait a little longer.
 
pgg said:
In my opinion, and it's just an opinion, SCOTUS has been derelict in its duties since McDonald. There have been a number of cases appealed to SCOTUS since then concerning carry rights and "assault weapon" bans, including cases involving clear circuit splits, and they have declined to hear the cases.

The cynical side of me believes that's because both political wings of SCOTUS weren't sure of what the outcome would be before they even heard the cases, and wanted to wait in the hopes of a new appointment shifting the balance toward their side. Win or lose, we really deserve an answer from them.


Also, in my opinion, it's absolutely impossible to reconcile any semi-automatic rifle ban with the Court's ruling in Heller and McDonald regarding common use, and the 2nd Amendment's protection of an individual (not collective) right to possess a firearm for the explicit purpose of self-defense (not to resist tyranny or foreign invaders ... self-defense). But we have to count on lower courts to do their jobs, and unfortunately the lower courts are just as political as SCOTUS.

We're lucky we got Heller & McDonald when we did. Those votes were close, 5-4 each time. Have no doubt, the Democrats will seek to undermine, ignore, and overturn it at every possible opportunity, the same way the Republicans have been aiming at Roe v Wade for decades.
Click to expand...

This is pretty much what I had gathered, thanks. Though that may also be a bit of an echo chamber as our opinions on 2nd amendment are fairly similar


In the end, it's the Right's fault as much as the Left's. The Republican party has become so completely incompetent, so evangelical, so hostile to minorities and immigrants, that there's been a huge and persistent shift that favors the Democrat party. It's even more significant than national polls suggest, because the shift is disproportionately large in swing states. Clinton has a huge, huge, huge advantage on the electoral map. If she wins even a tiny popular majority, she's likely to win the electoral college in a Reagan-sized landslide.

I think that gun rights are the last thread holding the Republican party together, and that if the Democrat party dropped gun control from its platform, the GOP would cease to exist in a national sense, with only pockets left in strongly evangelical regions. (The NRA is the only organization that is even running a credible ad campaign against Hillary Clinton right now. The presumed GOP presidential nominee can't even be bothered to do it!) We'd still end up with a two-party system ... but it'd be more Europe-like, with a very far left / progressive wing with Sanders and his kind, and a moderate left with the Clinton establishment types (who are actually pretty conservative from a global perspective).
Click to expand...

I've never identified as Republican, but it's really been frustrating to see the direction the party's gone
 
pgg said:
You'd be wrong. New semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines are illegal in California now.

Existing ones can be registered and kept (until that registry is used for a forced buyback or outright confiscation), but not transferred.

The right to own a semi-automatic rifle has been lost to future California generations.
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My first deer rifle technically had a detachable magazine (held a maximum of 4 additional rounds). Definitely makes sense that this is illegal now...
 
I think the detachable mag ban only applies to semi-autos. I think bolt guns get a pass. . . For now.

Such arbitrary and ridiculous bans.
 
SaltyDog said:
I think the detachable mag ban only applies to semi-autos. I think bolt guns get a pass. . . For now.

Such arbitrary and ridiculous bans.
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All you have to do is call a bolt deer gun in .308 a "sniper rifle" that uses a "military cartridge" and they're ripe for a ban too.

They will not stop, ever.
 
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Now.....maybe people will understand my previous post on MY reason for not owning a gun.....
 
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Twiggidy said:
Now.....maybe people will understand my previous post on MY reason for not owning a gun.....
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I was just about to post a similar statement... At least if a civilian shoots me, there is a chance that person may go on trial.
 
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pgg said:
You'd be wrong. New semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines are illegal in California now.

Existing ones can be registered and kept (until that registry is used for a forced buyback or outright confiscation), but not transferred.

The right to own a semi-automatic rifle has been lost to future California generations.
Click to expand...
That does leave a lot of guns, but our opinions on what that means obviously differ.

There are clearly a lot of doctors like yourself who feel the way you do. I would think you guys could have a powerful voice, since doctors are the ones who would have the most exposure to gun violence victims (other than law enforcement). And doctors are trusted with issues of health/safety.

I don't know if there are "doctors for more guns" advocacy groups out there, but if not, you guys should have one. Personally, the idea seem a little antithetical to the profession, but if you can advocate by presenting facts and sound reasoning then you should be doing it.
 
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