At least 157 people were killed and 270 were injured last year in unintentional shootings by children, according to Everytown, an advocacy group for firearm safety.
At least 157 people were killed and 270 were injured last year in unintentional shootings by children, according to Everytown, an advocacy group for firearm safety.
Militia service was for a long time a privelege (restricted to men of certain age) and the right to bear arms was always intended to be a give and take: you could own arms but you would be legally required to show up in an emergency to help and you would be trained to do so. That was always the intention.
People would call it communism or something today but for whatever reason the arms stuck around and the militia as a community resource disappeared. Realistically the idea of personal arms without any obligation to society is a completely new fiction and that is one defined by corporate intervention.
At its core the 2nd amendment was always an exchange: You get guns but if you fail to fulfill your obligations as a gun owner you lose this privelege: This is why to this day felons can be legally barred from gun ownership. Other amendments - due process etc aren’t lost when you commit a crime.
However today I can’t tell you how many gun owners complain like whiny children over the most basic obligations like licensure, training, etc. What those obligations are were up to the states but largely the second amendment was an exchange “everyone who can fulfill this basic obligation can have guns”
Militia service wasn’t a privilege; it was a requirement. If you were within a certain age group, your were legally obligated to show up and drill. But people that were not in the militia–due to age, or other limiting factors–still owned and used military arms at the time. Even trying to make a real distinction between military arms and non-military arms is largely an exercise in futility, given that all arms in common use started as military arms.
In point of fact, state and local governments are trying to ban militias. Sure, that would make the threepers illegal, but it would also likely ban things like the John Brown Gun Club and Socialist Rifle association, which are much more actively community-focused than the far-right militia groups.
Yes, and that’s a problem, isn’t it? The prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure require the gov’t to make an argument to a court that they need to be able to search; they need probably cause to deprive you of that right in even a limited way. It seems reasonable to expect that felons–once they have served the term of their sentence–should have the same rights as other people, and that the gov’t should be required to make a case as to why they should be able to continue to deprive a person of those rights. Someone that’s stolen from their employer is probably a far lower risk for committing a violent act than someone that was convicted of battery.
Make them free to the user, covered by income taxes in much the same way that the infrastructure for voter registration is (…which, BTW, only exists because anti-immigrant political agitators stoked fears of non-citizens voting; it very much mirrors the elections fear-mongering nonsense that Trump is pushing right now). Ensure that everyone has reasonable access, which means you can’t run them only during business hours M-F. But you also can’t have a failing condition, other than simply not showing up, because otherwise I guarantee you that it will turn into literacy tests for voting. That is, if a state, county, or city is allowed to set a standard that must be met in order to exercise a right, then I promise you that some places will ensure that the standard is so high that neither Jerry Miculek nor Ben Stoeger could pass it, because they will want to effectively ban firearm ownership.