OT: Ideas For Gun Owner Accountability

[KIBU]

1. Gun Licensing: residents must take a gun safety course, and pass a written test on gun laws. Annual license fee applies.

2. Gun Registration: all firearms must be registered. A background check, training, and testing of the gun owner are required.

3. Mandatory Liability Insurance: victims of gun violence need to be compensated for the direct harm caused by gun. There is a great risk that guns can be misused and it need to be taken into account with liability insurance.

4. Guns, Bullets, Magazine Sale or Transfer Surtax: Tobacco products surtax in CA is about 31%. The cost of society to maintain liberty for people to own guns should be accounted for and partly compensated for with surtax on guns, bullets, magazines.

5. Change: get the 2nd amendment out of America’s way. Nothing is all perfect all the time, including the constitution. Eventually, America will have to be practical and real in its dealing with avoidable deaths every year. If it can not protect its own children, that is the most terrible failure of any country, culture or civilization, I don’t care how rich you are.

[scaredyclassic]

co-equal criminal liability for any crime committed with your gun.

psych testing bi-annually.

[Huckleberry]

Gun registration is such a BAD idea on so many levels…

First:
You have armed service members, 10’s of millions of them that feel the same way as this guy:
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-902515

Second:
You have media outlets such as these clowns posting your address in the newspaper so that criminal elements can come to your house, kill you and steal your guns. Then instead of the guns being in safe hands, they ARE now being used for lawlessness.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/02/16305432-ny-newspaper-that-outed-gun-owners-hires-armed-guards?lite

Third:
As livinincali stated on this thread:
http://piggington.com/ot_repeal_the_2nd_amendment#comment-224303

“The bills rights was primarily adopted to prevent tyranny of government. The colonists had just fought a revolution war against perceived acts of tyranny (I.e. taxes without representation). Almost everything in the bill of rights is a check and balance against acts of tyranny by the government. Free speech, rights to bear arms, protection against unwarranted search and seizure, etc. Obviously we’ve been pretty far removed from a tyrannical government but should we really give up those checks and balances because of a small percentage of criminals.

Honestly what’s the first thing you would do if you were a dictator that wanted to push the US to a hard core socialist/communist government? Remove the guns so the producers couldn’t realistically fight back. Then you start removing protections of search and seizure and free speech. Basically everything in the bill of rights would be quickly removed because those are the primary checks and balances to oppose your takeover.”

Gun bans work well for tyrants. They worked well for Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao, to name just three.

Gun haters and gun control advocates need to give SERIOUS consideration to these “proposals” they put forth. The unintended consequences have a high potential to come back around and bite them just as badly (if not worse) as the gun owners.

In a serious calamity (martial law, gov’t tyrannical takeover, etc.) a gun owner most likely will not have any interest in protecting a non-gun owner as they probably will not trust them to not “squeal” to the authorities. This in hand may lead to the non-gun owners being lead to slaughter, as they have no means of defending themselves, and nobody to defend them…

If you want to stop/severely hinder gun violence, wake-up! Get rid of the banksters, their puppet-politicians and all gun-grabbers; allow CCW (concealed carry) arm teachers and ban gun-free zones.

[Huckleberry]

Oh, and to “get the 2nd Amendment out of America’s way”!?!?! This is absolutely idiotic on sooo many more levels, I’m not even going to dignify it with responses…

[scaredyclassic]

The constitution is not what holds this nation together.

[Huckleberry]

[quote=squat300]The constitution is not what holds this nation together.[/quote]
Another absolutely ridiculous statement…

Really consider at it’s core what you are stating here. Really think about the context!

Then, please explain to this entire board the premise of your theory.

[LuckyInOC]

[quote=squat300]The constitution is not what holds this nation together.[/quote]

I think I will take the word of George Washington, who actually fought to create this country, and other forefathers.

Luck In OC

“Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.”
George Washington

“The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon.” George Washington

“It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.” George Washington

“It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a Free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it.” George Washington

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” George Washington

“Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.” George Washington

“When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.” George Washington
Citizen First – Soldier Second

“Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.” George Washington

“A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.” Thomas Jefferson

[meadandale]

I’ve heard the liability insurance canard floated before and it’s just silly.

What you’re suggesting is a victim’s fund that law abiding gun owners who have never harmed and will never harm anyone would be force to pay. This doesn’t meet the definition of ‘insurance’.

[scaredyclassic]

Im sure the owner of the new town guns would e thought insurance was silly as she’d never use them irresponsibly

[all]

[quote=Huckleberry]
Second:
You have media outlets such as these clowns posting your address in the newspaper so that criminal elements can come to your house, kill you and steal your guns. Then instead of the guns being in safe hands, they ARE now being used for lawlessness.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/02/16305432-ny-newspaper-that-outed-gun-owners-hires-armed-guards?lite
[/quote]

The criminal element will come to your house and kill you in order to take possession of your gun? Because it’s so hard to get a gun right now and the element really needs one?

[no_such_reality]

While we’re at it, we need to address all these funky names coming out too. Teen legally known only as girl battles to use her own name

Yep, we need strong Government intervention.

[scaredyclassic]

Food for thought. Con law prof arguing against the constitution in my times this week:

andyrNYT.
AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all 13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.

No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring it. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Thomas Jefferson thought every constitution should expire after a single generation. He believed the most consequential act of his presidency — the purchase of the Louisiana Territory — exceeded his constitutional powers.

Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — 150 years ago tomorrow — he justified it as a military necessity under his power as commander in chief. Eventually, though, he embraced the freeing of slaves as a central war aim, though nearly everyone conceded that the federal government lacked the constitutional power to disrupt slavery where it already existed. Moreover, when the law finally caught up with the facts on the ground through passage of the 13th Amendment, ratification was achieved in a manner at odds with constitutional requirements. (The Southern states were denied representation in Congress on the theory that they had left the Union, yet their reconstructed legislatures later provided the crucial votes to ratify the amendment.)

In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation. In 1954, when the court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Robert H. Jackson said he was voting for it as a moral and political necessity although he thought it had no basis in the Constitution. The list goes on and on.

Let’s Give Up on the Constitution
Published: December 30, 2012
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(Page 2 of 2)

The fact that dissenting justices regularly, publicly and vociferously assert that their colleagues have ignored the Constitution — in landmark cases from Miranda v. Arizona to Roe v. Wade to Romer v. Evans to Bush v. Gore — should give us pause. The two main rival interpretive methods, “originalism” (divining the framers’ intent) and “living constitutionalism” (reinterpreting the text in light of modern demands), cannot be reconciled. Some decisions have been grounded in one school of thought, and some in the other. Whichever your philosophy, many of the results — by definition — must be wrong.

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IN the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.

This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.

Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country.

What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify military action against Iran solely on the merits, without shutting down the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as commander in chief. Congress might well retain the power of the purse, but this power would have to be defended on contemporary policy grounds, not abstruse constitutional doctrine. The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.

The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity. And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.

What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit.

If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace. Of course, that does not mean that people agree at the ground level. If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.

If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

 

[livinincali]

[quote=squat300]Food for thought. Con law prof arguing against the constitution in my times this week:
[/quote]

The constitution is a living document and can be amended. Frankly an amendment could scrap the whole thing. If the people really want that as a whole lets embark on that journey. Of course then you actually do have to compromise and come to an agreement because amending the constitution is purposefully difficult. This academic is just another person who thinks he knows what’s best for the country. If everybody can’t agree on his utopia then we should elect a dictator and give him power to take us to that utopia.

I have an idea lets go with his plan and then elect a dictator that will lock him up for treason against the country. I’m sure he won’t have a problem with that, after all we don’t need the constitution to get in the way of one man’s vision no matter how it effects you personally.

[enron_by_the_sea]

[quote=Huckleberry]Gun registration is such a BAD idea on so many levels…

blah blah blah …

[/quote]

Is it just me that finds it hypocritical when NRA says it is okay to have national mental illness registry but heaven forbid if we somehow get a gun registry!

It is also seems hypocritical for people who otherwise shout “personal responsibility” for anything else to then advocate no personal responsibility for the weapons that they have.

P.S. : Please save those links about guns saving your from tyrannical govt. In case you have not noticed, we live in the 21st century where guns don’t work against drones firing hellfire missiles…

[moneymaker]

I think before any action is taken we as a people need to ask ourselves,”would it have prevented the Newtown killings?” if the answer is no then why because of this incident are we willing to take such a stance.

[Author]

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