The utility of 2A in an armed insurrection / resistance of the US Government.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Right, that is what I was trying to say. Realistically, it won't happen. Realistically, people will just keep giving up freedoms, both parties will maintain their dominance, and not much will change. Judicial review and voting don't guarantee keeping our liberties, after all how long has the NSA been wiretapping every phone call? Almost 10 years now? To get that to stop it seems like the only options left are try to be patient for another 10 years to see if anything changes or armed revolt, but it won't happen. So it 'might be necessary' to keep our liberties with zero erosion, but realistically people will just give them up.

Or possibly continue to fight for their rights to party using peaceful means...
There was a great suggestion in the gun control thread that the people who are so afraid of losing their rights would do far more to protect those rights if they donated all the money they spent on guns and ammo to the ACLU (I'd add the EFF as well).

Perhaps it is because I am an ethnic minority and have pretty vivid memories about how it felt growing up in a mostly white neighborhood, but, at least to me, the very idea that we are less free than we were 40 years ago is simply absurd on its face.

Robear wrote:

Really?

There's a lot more going on than a one-way erosion of rights. There have been moves in the right direction as well.

As for the NSA, the surveillance law and oversight need to be revisited. From what I understand, they are not *wiretapping* every call; instead, they are tracking who talks, where and when, to create a social web for analysis. If they dip into content, they need a warrant. I'd like to make sure that that is actually enforced, and not being ignored.

By definition isn't it one-way erosion? I shouldn't require a court or law to re-affirm rights I have already been granted, or that are claimed to be inalienable. By requiring that aren't we tacitly agreeing we don't have rights we haven't been explicity granted? But anyway, I never said it was one-way, the statement was "protect our liberties", just because one right is protected while another is eroded doesn't mean there is no erosion.

For the second part, I guess it depends on what you mean by wiretapping, maybe I should have said 'surveilling', but from what I remember reading they are analyzing content. If only what our government was doing supposedly on our behalf was public then we would both know for sure. Either way, to me, keeping track of who I talk to and when is bad enough.

Stengah wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

Right, that is what I was trying to say. Realistically, it won't happen. Realistically, people will just keep giving up freedoms, both parties will maintain their dominance, and not much will change. Judicial review and voting don't guarantee keeping our liberties, after all how long has the NSA been wiretapping every phone call? Almost 10 years now? To get that to stop it seems like the only options left are try to be patient for another 10 years to see if anything changes or armed revolt, but it won't happen. So it 'might be necessary' to keep our liberties with zero erosion, but realistically people will just give them up.

Or possibly continue to fight for their rights to party using peaceful means...
There was a great suggestion in the gun control thread that the people who are so afraid of losing their rights would do far more to protect those rights if they donated all the money they spent on guns and ammo to the ACLU (I'd add the EFF as well).

I agree, but just on the face of the statement "necessary to protect our liberties" when all other means fail what do you do? You either give up and live with it or take up arms. We have already seen that almost always the former is chosen. People acceded to requiring papers to drive, to registering firearms, to limits on what kinds of firearms you can own, to drug laws, etc, etc... all of those limited liberty. I am not arguing this was good or bad, just that it did. People chose to live with it. The president promised to close Gitmo in a year and stop imprisonment without representation, I seem to remember he also promised to stop the NSA surveillance program? He reversed both those positions and now the gov wants to fly drones over us. Apparently voting doesn't work and the courts have not stopped them either, at least yet.

I agree I do not expect a revolt, it is not realistic for it to happen. I do think though that our liberties will be further eroded and that we will just move on with our lives. All I am trying to say is the way the statement is written I can see why people would agree with it, you can agree without wanting to pick up guns and go shoot people, there is a big difference between "for x to happen y must be done" and "I want to do y".

Paleocon wrote:

Perhaps it is because I am an ethnic minority and have pretty vivid memories about how it felt growing up in a mostly white neighborhood, but, at least to me, the very idea that we are less free than we were 40 years ago is simply absurd on its face.

It's not a 'freedom scale' Paleo where you are cumulatively more or less free, we can re-affirm or expand liberty in some areas while taking it away in others. You still had liberty taken away. Also, I wonder in 1973 how much of what you experienced was written into the law rather than how people acted.

Stengah wrote:

Or possibly continue to fight for their rights to party using peaceful means...
There was a great suggestion in the gun control thread that the people who are so afraid of losing their rights would do far more to protect those rights if they donated all the money they spent on guns and ammo to the ACLU (I'd add the EFF as well).

Yeah that was mine. http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/5...
I think the more important part of that post is... If you are willing to go to war (any of these people actually SEEN a civil war?) are you willing to put equal effort into getting the legislation corrected? If not what moral right do you have to start a war.

If you have enough people to win an armed rebellion or whatever your name for a bloodbath is, then don't you have more than enough working full time to correct your personal pet law/practice through peaceful means?
Anything in our government, from judges to the constitution can be changed with enough people behind the effort.

And if the majority oppose you what right do you have to take up arms?

LeapingGnome wrote:

He reversed both those positions and now the gov wants to fly drones over us. Apparently voting doesn't work and the courts have not stopped them either, at least yet.

But voting for president is hardly the only thing that can be done short of armed revolt. You said 'all other options' must be exhausted.
I don't remember 40% of the American population marching on Washington demanding the impeachment of the president and every congress person who voted for warrantless wiretapping because it is unconstitutional? Did I miss something?

I also seem to remember some wins in the past few years in court FOR liberty. Cases where rights were upheld.

If people want to see what it looks like when an armed rebellion is actually called for... and what one actually looks like there are some countries that they can go visit.

Robear wrote:

Really?

There's a lot more going on than a one-way erosion of rights. There have been moves in the right direction as well.

As for the NSA, the surveillance law and oversight need to be revisited. From what I understand, they are not *wiretapping* every call; instead, they are tracking who talks, where and when, to create a social web for analysis. If they dip into content, they need a warrant. I'd like to make sure that that is actually enforced, and not being ignored.

Obviously no way to prove it, and this is CNN, but this former FBI agent says that all calls are recorded.

http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisf...

Recording is much different from examining the content of those calls. One is legal without a warrant, the other is. (That's under current law, which I've said before needs to be revisited, with a public debate.)

LeapingGnome wrote:

I shouldn't require a court or law to re-affirm rights I have already been granted, or that are claimed to be inalienable.

Isn't that precisely what the courts are for? Without that, how would we challenge the constitutionality of laws or the behavior of authorities? This is *exactly* why the courts are independent.

The US has had a big 2 years since this thread was last updated. The further radicalization of the right continues unabated. Shootings have increased. Racial tensions have increased. Yet because of those things gun control is slowly being talked about again.

Where does that leave this topic? When will Texas declare independence again?

oilypenguin wrote:

Shootings have increased.

No, they haven't. The available data still indicates that mass shootings are extremely rare, random events. And examination of the data record shows that the causes of the shootings vary wildly, and there is no discernible pattern as to the motive. Further, the data on race correlates with the racial distribution across the country, so there's no pattern there either. Add to that the dubious nature of some of the list entries like Chattanooga and you further muddy the data. (it's pretty hard to declare the entire world as a battlefield against a non-state, loosely organized movement and then say that a shooting associated with that struggle is "random").

Racial tensions have increased.

Which has little to do with the violent armed right, very little to do with armed insurrection, and everything to do with the police shooting unarmed black kids.

Where does that leave this topic?

Nowhere.

That's odd, because this page paints a whole different story...

Mass Shootings 2015 - Number of Mass Shootings: 9 (so far this year)
Mass Shootings 2014 - Number of Mass Shootings: 11
Mass Shootings 2013 - Number of Mass Shootings: 15

And that's only if you take the definition that a Mass Shooting is 4 people killed or more (not including the shooter.) As such, I only counted the ones that have 5 or more people killed (I assumed one of those killed was the shooter.)

That's a far cry different from your source which says there have only been 2 mass shootings in each year for the last two years.

I followed those Mass Shooting links, and maybe they are including any incident where multiple people get shot? Like I followed #52 in 2015 because it was listed as unknown, and it links to the news article, which stated:

Neighbors said it sounded like a shootout in the common area of the apartments, and that they heard up to 50 gunshots.

LINK

when we hear "Mass Shooting" I feel like we think of someone who went out with the intent to kill a bunch of semi-random people just for the sake of killing people--something like Columbine or shooting up a movie theater showing a certain movie. That article makes it sound like there were multiple gunshot victims as part of some other kind of crime or previous hostility specific to the people involved or the location. Whether those two kinds of shootings should be lumped together probably depends on what kind of question you're trying to answer.

How do you distinguish shootings where there was an intent to kill large numbers of people from those that "just happen" to do so? That seems like a useless distinction. Guns were used, lots of people were shot... We're not arguing about whether there are too many potential mass murderers, we're discussing the use of firearms in mass casualty crimes...

And Aetius, we're also seeing more *targeted* attacks; that is, less randomness, and more purposeful shootings. I'd argue that the "violent armed right" is actually far more likely to act on racial tensions than people who are less ideological, because one pervasive element of far-right beliefs is in fact racism.

Robear wrote:

How do you distinguish shootings where there was an intent to kill large numbers of people from those that "just happen" to do so? That seems like a useless distinction. Guns were used, lots of people were shot... We're not arguing about whether there are too many potential mass murderers, we're discussing the use of firearms in mass casualty crimes...

And Aetius, we're also seeing more *targeted* attacks; that is, less randomness, and more purposeful shootings. I'd argue that the "violent armed right" is actually far more likely to act on racial tensions than people who are less ideological, because one pervasive element of far-right beliefs is in fact racism.

I feel like your second paragraph answers the questions in your first paragraph? Like you asked me:

How do you distinguish shootings where there was an intent to kill large numbers of people from those that "just happen" to do so?

and the answer would be what you said in the next paragraph:

less randomness, and more purposeful
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

when we hear "Mass Shooting" I feel like we think of someone who went out with the intent to kill a bunch of semi-random people just for the sake of killing people--something like Columbine or shooting up a movie theater showing a certain movie. That article makes it sound like there were multiple gunshot victims as part of some other kind of crime or previous hostility specific to the people involved or the location. Whether those two kinds of shootings should be lumped together probably depends on what kind of question you're trying to answer.

There isn't an official government definition of a mass shooting. There is only a definition of mass killing, which is three people killed at one location (not including the killer).

The FBI's analysis of what they called "active shooter incidents" specifically excluded shootings that were gang or drug violence related.

Cheeze_Pavilion wrote:

I feel like your second paragraph answers the questions in your first paragraph?

Your post made it sound like you thought that was a reasonable distinction. Too many "I think we think whether that's what kind *you* think" clauses.

Robear wrote:
Cheeze_Pavilion wrote:

I feel like your second paragraph answers the questions in your first paragraph?

Your post made it sound like you thought that was a reasonable distinction. Too many "I think we think whether that's what kind *you* think" clauses. :-)

Well, I do think it's a reasonable distinction. Or at least worth considering as part of this conversation. Lumping in mass shootings where the people are linked to other kinds of crime and the shooters have the social connections to get guns illegally are one thing. When someone who resembles the characters from Office Space who look up "money laundering" in the dictionary shoots a bunch of people, that's another. Even if gun control measures could not prevent the former, that doesn't mean they might not prevent the latter. Even "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have them" doesn't recognize that not all shootings are done by 'outlaws'.

Or the "violent armed right" you're talking about. What proportion of mass shootings are they responsible for? Is it going up or down? Mass shootings of all kinds might be up, but "violent armed right" shootings could be down. Or vice versa. The definition of "mass shooting" shouldn't be some kind of semantic quest for a platonic form. It should be a functional definition suited to answering the question being asked.

Maybe "outlaw" is a code word.

LarryC wrote:

Maybe "outlaw" is a code word.

Maybe "mass shooting" is a code word.

Also, now that I think about it:

Aetius wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

Shootings have increased.

No, they haven't.

Tkyl wrote:

That's odd, because this page paints a whole different story...

Mass Shootings 2015 - Number of Mass Shootings: 9 (so far this year)
Mass Shootings 2014 - Number of Mass Shootings: 11
Mass Shootings 2013 - Number of Mass Shootings: 15

And that's only if you take the definition that a Mass Shooting is 4 people killed or more (not including the shooter.) As such, I only counted the ones that have 5 or more people killed (I assumed one of those killed was the shooter.)

That's a far cry different from your source which says there have only been 2 mass shootings in each year for the last two years.

15 then 11 then 9 doesn't paint a whole different story. In fact, it backs up the point that shootings have not increased. Shootings are falling according to those statistics. They might not be as low as two, but it does mean they are falling.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Also, now that I think about it:

Aetius wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

Shootings have increased.

No, they haven't.

Tkyl wrote:

That's odd, because this page paints a whole different story...

Mass Shootings 2015 - Number of Mass Shootings: 9 (so far this year)
Mass Shootings 2014 - Number of Mass Shootings: 11
Mass Shootings 2013 - Number of Mass Shootings: 15

And that's only if you take the definition that a Mass Shooting is 4 people killed or more (not including the shooter.) As such, I only counted the ones that have 5 or more people killed (I assumed one of those killed was the shooter.)

That's a far cry different from your source which says there have only been 2 mass shootings in each year for the last two years.

15 then 11 then 9 doesn't paint a whole different story. In fact, it backs up the point that shootings have not increased. Shootings are falling according to those statistics. They might not be as low as two, but it does mean they are falling.

Using the traditional 4+ people killed definition, we get:
2015: 24 by the end of July
2014: 30 (a significant drop, to be sure) total, 17 by the end of July
2013: 51 total, 26 by the end of July.
So we're two behind 2013's numbers (as far back as the linked site provides info for), but we're up 7 over last year.

To get back to right-wing extremist violence as opposed to all mass shootings, regardless of motivation, the former has had quite the rise over the a decade and a half (this is good, long read, although it only covers up to 2012; all the charts are towards the end).

Robear wrote:

How do you distinguish shootings where there was an intent to kill large numbers of people from those that "just happen" to do so? That seems like a useless distinction.

I don't think the point of distinction is intent to kill large numbers of people - I think the point of distinction is deliberate intent to kill random innocent people, as opposed to killing members of a rival organization or soldiers. This is why including Chattanooga and Fort Hood in the list I linked is suspect; by the military's own definition, the battlefield is everywhere, so it's dubious to claim that those shootings were random attacks on innocents - they were specifically targeted at military personnel as part of a larger conflict. In fact, that is precisely the sort of attack one would expect during an insurrection.

Guns were used, lots of people were shot... We're not arguing about whether there are too many potential mass murderers, we're discussing the use of firearms in mass casualty crimes...

This ties back into the gun control debate, though. The argument presented is that random mass murders can be stopped or reduced by tighter gun control, because in theory those people would then have a lower level of access to firearms (and just to be clear, I don't agree). However, with a routine criminal act or a conflict-related shooting, there is no question of gun control being useful; the guns involved are illegal by definition, and thus are unaffected by legal controls on gun ownership.

And Aetius, we're also seeing more *targeted* attacks; that is, less randomness, and more purposeful shootings.

This is a pretty strong assertion to make on very limited data. Using Tykl's data, you can see that the vast majority of mass shootings (by their definition) are simply disagreements that turned violent or conflicts that occur during the course of criminal activity.

I'd argue that the "violent armed right" is actually far more likely to act on racial tensions than people who are less ideological, because one pervasive element of far-right beliefs is in fact racism.

The evidence does not back this up. Yes, there have been rare events where this is the case, but they are just that - extremely rare, and relatively consistent over time. No doubt many of the events in Tykl's linked list had some racial element to them, but the Slate/SPLC list is pretty much a comprehensive list of the last twenty years of specificaly racial violence from the armed right - and it's from a biased source, so it's likely to include everything that's even close. Given the ratio of events to people who hold those kinds of beliefs, the data support a view that people actually taking racial beliefs to the level of murder is extremely rare.

Consider that during the same period, somewhere between 140,000 and 160,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the conflict that the United States government started in 2003. Roughly 600,000 people have been killed in car accidents (~30,000/year). And police around the United States shot and killed more people in the first month of 2015 than all of those attacks combined. This doesn't make any of the deaths less tragic, but it does highlight the fact that shootings from the armed right in the United States are almost non-existent statistically, and the tiny number of incidents doesn't have a prayer of supporting statistical trending in any reasonable fashion. If anything, this data supports that police should be disarmed, and the armed right left alone.

Stengah wrote:

To get back to right-wing extremist violence as opposed to all mass shootings, regardless of motivation, the former has had quite the rise over the a decade and a half (this is good, long read, although it only covers up to 2012; all the charts are towards the end).

I'm not able to get the PDF - it just redirects back to the main page. Is there an alternate/better link?

Aetius wrote:
Stengah wrote:

To get back to right-wing extremist violence as opposed to all mass shootings, regardless of motivation, the former has had quite the rise over the a decade and a half (this is good, long read, although it only covers up to 2012; all the charts are towards the end).

I'm not able to get the PDF - it just redirects back to the main page. Is there an alternate/better link?

Page the pdf is from

Also of note: [url=http://sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/20... law enforcement agencies view anti-government extremists (typically a right-wing domain, but by no means exclusively so) as posing the most severe threat of violence they face. (site link)

A mass shooting is defined by the FBI as when 4 or more people or killed by a firearm in a single incident. I linked to the FBI source in the gun control thread a couple years ago.

Seriously? "Mass shooting" means what, 4 or more people shot in one incident. Why does it need to have any other meaning attached to it? I don't get that at all. And Chatanooga is a battlefield? Using that naive definition - "the whole world is a battlefield" - then we're all under martial law, right? Why not?

Chatanooga was a mass killing conducted via gunfire. The only reason to change that definition is to blunt the impact, to remove it from consideration for whatever reason.

All of the gun violence in the US looks "extremely rare" compared to other daily risks, until you compare it to other countries. At that point, it is clear that we have a problem that we should address, one that many other countries don't seem to have. If you want to consider it rare, then let doctors talk to patients about it (suicides by gun are rising, not falling like gun crimes). If it's rare, then gun control laws *do no harm*, because the average citizen doesn't need a gun to protect against violence (after all, it's rare). Restricting them would reduce the rates of accidents and suicides; I don't think that's in doubt. The ultimate best argument for *removing* the Second Amendment is "we don't need guns for self-protection".

The argument that gun violence based on race is "exceedingly rare" is an argument *for* more restrictive gun laws. If we don't need them, there's no reason to have them on the streets. We don't need to carry them to protect ourselves; we could probably outlaw *and confiscate* all handguns, for example, if gun violence keeps decreasing.

Certainly, historically, racial violence has been abetted by the practice of arming whites and preventing minorities from being armed. There has to be *some* way to address that without just saying "Oh, give everyone more weapons, it'll all be good."