Worst take today. The 2nd amendment was the SECOND thing the founders put in for a reason. They just got done fighting a war against the government with WEAPONS OF WAR. It was written specifically to enable fighting against tyrannical government, which is VASTLY worse than all mass shooters combined.
The 2nd amendment specifies "well regulated militias", but somehow this part is always left out by gun enthusiasts. The idea was to ensure states can have militias, and that those militias would be allowed to have guns. Somehow this has been stretched by the gun lobby to "everyone should be able to have a gun with absolutely no restrictions", when that's absolutely not what is stated in the 2nd amendment.
The members of militias at the time of the ratification of the 2nd amendment were required to supply their own guns by statue, which is how you get the individual right - from the duty to be a member of the militia. Which still exists today (though in statute it is often called the "unorganized" or "state" militia to distinguish it from the National Guard, which is actually a branch of the US Army by statue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_(United_States)...
The bill of rights are about personal freedoms, as is made clear during the discussion leading up to them. All states copied these in some form into their own constitutions, and if you go look at those, most are quite explicit this is a personal right. The claim otherwise is a very recent claim.
Congress around 1982 had the Library of Congress issue a study about this in great depth, with millions of citations to historical documents, which give ample evidence and quotes. You may have to dig to find it, but it's a good read to gain more understanding.
Also the second militia act of 1792 actually required all able bodied men to own guns, and this was the law for well over the following century.
The founders had no qualms about everyone having arms.
I've read the Bible at least four times. I'd rather not stone people for being born different. Nor inspire PTSD in children or adults with silly stories about punishment in eternal flames.
Good and evil are even more subjective than how people perceive colors. I hope we can at least agree that murder is wrong, and the tools which facilitate the most murder should be the most heavily regulated.
Might have read it but clearly didn't understand the point of the sacrifice and the new covenant. You shouldn't be telling young children they're going to burn in hell for eternity any more than you should talk to them about sex.
Murder is wrong.
Every citizen worth a damn should own guns and the idea that they should not be regulated by the government is enshrined in the 2nd amendment to the US constitution. Every gun law created since is an abberation that should be abolished.
The first three words of 2A is "A well regulated...". IDK where this idea comes from that guns cannot be regulated.
Shall we say prisoners have the right to bear arms? Felons with a violent past? People with mental illness? Surely there must be limits. Few rights are absolute in every circumstance.
If a person shouldn't have firearms, then they shouldn't be on the street. They should be in jail/prison. Period. I don't know that anyone that has argued that prisoners should have guns. You would have to be a fool. If a person shouldn't have access to guns, then they shouldn't have access to any other freedom. The ultimate purpose of owning firearms is to fight a tyrannical government. For that purpose, less limits is better for the people. This right is absolute, and anyone espousing otherwise is a tyrant or a fool.
I'm not personally against individuals owning guns, but the part that is somehow vehemently opposed is the "well-regulated" part. There's effectively no regulation, and somehow the 2nd amendment has been warped to leave out the part of regulation, to make folks believe they're entitled to guns without limit.
"well regulated" applies not to guns but to militias, and has nothing to do with legal restrictions. It means well functioning, well trained, efficient. It has nothing to do with legal regulations.
The word has many meanings. Learn which one the phrase in the Constitution is using.
So you're saying that we should be able to add training requirements to use a firearm, if well-regulated means "well functioning, well trained, efficient". Similar to how we require folks to show they know how to properly drive a car before we allow them on the road?
[As a necessity for a free state, A well trained and in good working order group of able bodies citizens capable of fight for defense of self and state, is required], the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Militia is just the people. Oxford 1800s has well-regulated to mean “in good working order”.
100%. The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force. Same in Vietnam.
The US populace is vastly larger and better armed and capable than Afghanistan.
The US military requires a massive economy to function. If it tries to attack itself, those little armed people could stop it, the economy would crash, and the US military would crumble without needed support and supplies.
A final issue is the US troops would lose a lot of soldiers if they were told to go attack fellow citizens. The soldiers would quit, would hesitate, would not want to kill people they view as their own people.
So armed citizenry absolutely have major power against the govt.
Finally, if you were in a country where the govt set out to kill its citizens, would you rather have arms or be completely unarmed?
>The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force.
We had no military objective in Afghanistan.
Our only goal there was to enrich contractors who had stockholders working at the highest levels in the Pentagon and White House. That goal was achieved spectacularly.
The US military would be the defending force, though, which would put The People at a disadvantage. Pushing through the defenses of a multi-trillion dollar military with AR-15s seems unlikely. I don't even think that China's armed forces could defeat the US military, let alone civilians armed with AR-15s
All being said, I am no military guru and I could be wrong
Citizens should be allowed to own UAVs, nukes, tanks, helicopters, and jets. It says in the text: "shall not be infringed."
Besides that, who do you think is going to do the fighting, exactly?
The US is an outlier in how many guns we own, with about 1/3 of American adults owning guns, and we are also an extreme outlier in mass shootings unless you compare us to places that lack rule of law. How many more people need guns before that mass shooting number goes down to 0, do you think?
Given your link, I'd say every shooting where the bad guy didn't get shot is evidence in the opposite direction? Seems to me there's more of those than your 11 examples.
That would only be true in a world where every single human is able to regulate their angry emotions immediately. But that is so far away from human nature...
Start with a clean git (even if you're just committing WIP locally). Run the tool. See the diffs in your IDE. They show up immediately in IntelliJ; use the "commit" pane. Same as if I had edited a bunch of files.
Last term it was, "He is your president you have to support him". Now it is, "The American people voted for this"
All the same meaningless phrases that do nothing to discuss issues, just an appeal to the masses.
Political sentiment has never been static. We'll see what people think when inflation sky rockets, they max out their credit, etc, and they have fewer social programs to reach out to for help.
Yep? I mean it's threatened every time by Republicans. But it's usually just grandstanding... Take Obamacare for instance. It was threatened to be repealed constantly, over and over, But even when they had full control and could do whatever they wanted it still survived.. at the end of the day, the elected officials know that it hurts their own people more to appeal it, so they just give the issue lip service and tweaks and fly a giant mission accomplished banner from the deck of their ship.
So on one side, I agree with you, who would think that they actually follow through with what they were saying over and over on the campaign trail.... And now they have.
"I never thought the party that's been saying for 20 years that they want to reduce government to the size where they can drown it in the bathtub would ever do anything drastic..."
Let's assume your first assertion is true, and I don't necessarily concede that, but for the sake of argument.
People frequently point out that Trump is doing more or less exactly what he said he would do, either explicitly or by way of Project 2025[1]—a detailed several hundred page diatribe and action plan for a second Trump term that he disingenuously claims to know nothing about, despite having employed nearly every one of its authors to work on his campaign and/or administration. That includes Project 2025’s principal coordinator Russell Vought[2], who Trump named to head the Office of Management & Budget, and who was policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee from May 2024. So it is fair to say that we were warned.
But it is worth noting that an April 2024 NBC News poll[3] showed Trump leading voters who say they do not follow political news by 26-points. Meanwhile voters who said they read a newspaper every day supported Joe Biden 70% to Trump’s 21%. They very shrewdly targeted fire hoses of wedge issues, disinformation, and fear-mongering to millions of voters who reportedly do not follow politics, and who likely just felt like shit was better for them before 2020. It worked. But I am not so sure that these voters were equipped to know about, or fully understand the implications of, something like Project 2025. There is certainly room to speculate how many of Trump’s 2024 voters were voting for this kind of radical reshaping of American governance, rather than simply desiring a return to the pre-2020 status quo, before COVID-19 and its socioeconomic consequences violently rattled society’s cage.
It is true that Trump won his reelection with 49.8% of the vote, but that isn’t the same thing as 49.8% of voters. With only 63.7% of eligible voters casting ballots last November, Trump’s share of the vote narrows to just under a third of the electorate, significantly less than half. As I mentioned before, a large bloc of those voters do not engage with traditional news media. Along with the NBC poll I cited above, a survey conducted in November 2024 by Northeastern University[4] found that just 24% of Republican voters relied on news media, while the rest said they got their news from family and friends, as well as social media.
This means that while less than 1/3rd of eligible voters cast their ballots for Trump, only ~8.3% of the electorate entered the voting booth reliably informed, and still chose to support him.
Thing is, you can't assume that the 36.3% of eligible voters who didn't cast votes are opposed to this. Some surely are, and couldn't cast a vote because circumstances prevented them. But an awful lot of them seem to have said, "Eh, it makes no difference either way."
If you ask them why, many seem to cite American support for Israel in its war against Gaza. Others cite inflation.
It's hard to restrict democracy to those who are "reliably informed". I wish we could. The whole idea of democracy is that you shouldn't have to, because informed people will be able to have influence enough to win most of the time. That fundamental proposition seems to be in doubt.
To be clear, I am talking about the approval rating. Yes, the actions are aberrational, but they're cheap pandering to the base so that so far have not materialized much.
They will soon (in next few weeks) become far more material, and you’ll see approvals fall.
And yet if you stop watching the news nothing has really changed at all.
80% of “most consequential president” is just media nonsense.
Stop following the news and suddenly things don’t seem that bad. Because in reality all the media (all media not just the media one disagrees with) does is fuck with your brain and intentionally divide people and piss everyone off.
Has anyone done these kinds of audits ever? Prices are shockingly higher than they have ever been because of the OBVIOUS AND BLATANT CORRUPTION of politicians funneling TRILLIONS of our tax dollars out all sort of various back doors.
Yes, USAID was successfully audited by an independent 3rd party financial auditor literally in November, for example.
And that was using actual GAAP accounting auditing methods!
So I guess if the “like this” you mean an ideological Cmd+F “audit” done by people with apparently zero financial experience, never mind public sector auditing, then no.
Can you share a specific instance of fraud that has been found?
Incredible lack of perspective. It's more than USAID. FBI, CIA, IRS, DOD, EVERYONE is being FULLY audited. This has never happened, ever. If you're not stunned about the corruption being revealed and eliminated by now, I'd suggest you've fully bought the narratives that the USAID media has pumped you. You are a target and a victim.
The US Treasury can't track $4.7 trillion in payments.
Medicare sent $2.7 trillion overseas to people that weren't eligible.
Pentagon lost track $2.5 trillion.
Social Security sends $100 billion a year to people with no identity.
Department of Education spends $50 billion a year to make your kids gay.
USAID spends $50 billion a year to make everybody else gay.
And you think all of that is 'not fraud'? IDGAF what it's called, people should go to prison and no other president has even tried to get in touch with this filth.
