Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Pattern-chaser]

I would like to know what you and PatternChaser propose changing. The Founding Fathers created the constitution vaguely to fit a variety of futures, so I would be interested to know what is wrong with it.

I would prefer to say what I know. So I wouldn't try to describe what is wrong with your Constitution. Instead, I would offer empirical, repeatable and verifiable observations of your country and the way it works, and observe that guns are an issue. A big issue.

Perhaps a change to your Constitution might help in some way? I don't know; that's for Americans to decide. But the gun problem is real, and so are the deaths that result. Over to you, Americans...

[CIN]

And perhaps we [UK] should also consider not having a 'Royal' family at all, and becoming a Republic?

And end up like America? Seriously?

There are many other republics, some of which might be considered to be more desirable, as examples, than the USA.

Looking at the people who have recently been Prime Ministers in the UK, would you really want any of them to be our Head of State? Do you think the country would unite behind any of them?

Are there any grounds for thinking the British people would be happier in a republic than in a constitutional monarchy?

[CIN]

I am not an expert in American politics. But I think updating is necessary to any field, even to a constitution. It can hurt the minds of the traditional fellows, but in the long run the updates are necessary and will do more good than harm, if the changes and updates are done with a good will.

Have you never heard that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions?

Maybe it will help you to understand if you consider that England has a monarchy, which gives it tradition and stability. America does not have that, so our Constitution is what gives us tradition and stability. Suggesting change to the Constitution is much like me suggesting that England acquire a new royal family as this one has become a disappointment.

Gee

We do occasionally modify the monarchy here in the UK, to bring it more into line with modern views. The Succession to the Crown Act in 2015 made three changes: removing male primogeniture (where younger brothers succeeded to the throne before elder sisters), removing the disqualification of those who marry Roman Catholics, and changing the rules whereby the monarch has to give approval to royal marriages. None of these amounts to scrapping our royal family.

If we can make changes like this to our monarchy, you can make changes to your Constitution. All you need to do is think outside the box.

I would like to know what you and PatternChaser propose changing. The Founding Fathers created the constitution vaguely to fit a variety of futures, so I would be interested to know what is wrong with it.

Being British, I haven't made a detailed study of your Constitution, but my initial suggestions would be:
- you need a more effective separation between the executive and the judiciary: the ability of the US President to appoint judges of a particular political bias is clearly undermining the independence of the judiciary, as we see in the recent reversal of Roe V. Wade
- in my personal opinion, it isn't a good idea for the Head of State to also be the CEO, and therefore generally an ex-politician; it means your Head of State is invariably either Republican or Democrat, which means they've lost the support and affection of half the population before they start
- the Second Amendment should go: the ability to raise militias was necessary for national defence in the 18th century, but it isn't appropriate now, because you have the most powerful military in the world, and anyone attacking your country these days will do it with weapons so powerful that hand guns and assault rifles will be irrelevant. The 2008 Columbia v. Heller decision 'that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home' (https://www.britannica.com/event/Distri ... a-v-Heller) is surely a misreading of the 2nd Amendment, which only talks about militias. And you pay a very high price every year in lives lost for the 'right' to bear weapons. The whole thing is a sad anachronism.

[UniversalAlien]

CIN wrote:

The 2008 Columbia v. Heller decision 'that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home' (https://www.britannica.com/event/Distri ... a-v-Heller) is surely a misreading of the 2nd Amendment, which only talks about militias. And you pay a very high price every year in lives lost for the 'right' to bear weapons. The whole thing is a sad anachronism.

"The whole thing is a sad anachronism." -

So you say.

We just saw a Presidential election in the United States where the former President thought and tried to enforce that type of policy on
the Presidential election of 2020 - Insisting his opponent had no legal right to win and therefor the election results where fraud. To him the electoral process was a 'sad anachronism'

Point being there are criminal minds that would like nothing more than to decimate the American Constitution to suit their own
power hungry ends and objectives.

Getting rid of the Second Amendment would facilitate the process.

"The right of the people to bear arms" is the central point of the Second Amendment - And militia back then meant the general population.

I think Thomas Jefferson, one of our founders, said it best:

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824

Of course only a fool would deny there is a gun problem in the United States {and elsewhere} and reasonable gun control is necessary.

But I ask you who is really most responsible for the recent Uvalde school shooting in Texas {Nineteen children and two adults were killed in a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde County}
- Knowing there is currently an epidemic of terrorists {in my opinion every one of these mass murderess is a terrorist},
and having a state that allows easy access to purchase of almost any type of firearm..........Isn't that State guilty of
gross negligence in allowing a school with mostly younger kids to sit there as a 'soft target' with no armed security, and wide
open to terrorist attack

In fact, every school in the United States should be required to have top notch security and an 'armed militia' to protect its pupils


Do any of you from the UK really think that Americans would accept your type of strict gun control in the United States?

This would not work in America - Most Americans still view the Second Amendment as 'the right to bear arms'
which means the right to defend yourself - If American Liberal politicians understood this they would win far more elections.

Many people of all political persuasions, left, right and middle still accept the old saying:

"WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED - ONLY OULAWS WILL HAVE GUNS"

And again to quote Thomas Jefferson:

"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787

[Pattern-chaser]

There are criminal minds that would like nothing more than to decimate the American Constitution to suit their own
power hungry ends and objectives.

Wow! Is this just your opinion, or is there evidence to back this up? I have to admit, from where I'm looking, it resembles paranoia...

...

Or do you refer to billionaires, and their schemes to maximise their own personal wealth, regardless of the cost to other people, countries, or whatever? Some might consider them "criminals"...?

[Pattern-chaser]

And perhaps we [UK] should also consider not having a 'Royal' family at all, and becoming a Republic?

And end up like America? Seriously?

There are many other republics, some of which might be considered to be more desirable, as examples, than the USA.

Looking at the people who have recently been Prime Ministers in the UK, would you really want any of them to be our Head of State? Do you think the country would unite behind any of them?

There is no necessity for our PM to become our President, if we decide we want one. Our President could be a purely ceremonial role, as 'head of state', or it could involve significant intimacy with the politics and governance of our country. All of these possibilities would be open to us if that's the route we chose to travel...?

Are there any grounds for thinking the British people would be happier in a republic than in a constitutional monarchy?

None that I know of. Are there any grounds for thinking the British people would less happy in a republic than in a constitutional monarchy?

[CIN]

CIN wrote:

The 2008 Columbia v. Heller decision 'that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home' (https://www.britannica.com/event/Distri ... a-v-Heller) is surely a misreading of the 2nd Amendment, which only talks about militias. And you pay a very high price every year in lives lost for the 'right' to bear weapons. The whole thing is a sad anachronism.

"The whole thing is a sad anachronism." -

So you say.

We just saw a Presidential election in the United States where the former President thought and tried to enforce that type of policy on
the Presidential election of 2020 - Insisting his opponent had no legal right to win and therefor the election results where fraud. To him the electoral process was a 'sad anachronism'

So your argument is:
1. Trump regarded the electoral process as a sad anachronism, and he was wrong.
2. Therefore if anyone says any other part of the Constitution is a sad anachronism, they must also be wrong.
That argument is transparently invalid.

Point being there are criminal minds that would like nothing more than to decimate the American Constitution to suit their own
power hungry ends and objectives.

So here your argument seems to be:
1. There are people who want to change the Constitution for their own ends.
2. Therefore everyone who wants to change the Constitution wants to do so for their own ends.
This is another invalid argument, and your attitude here is one of the things that is feeding the worsening tribalism in your country. The US Constitution is man-made. Like all man-made things, it is (a) imperfect, and (b) may require changing from time to time to suit changing circumstances. If you refuse to accept these obvious points, you immediately set yourself up against reasonable Americans who accept them.

Getting rid of the Second Amendment would facilitate the process.

Really? You're claiming that removing the right to own guns would enable people to change the Constitution more easily? How does that work?

"The right of the people to bear arms" is the central point of the Second Amendment - And militia back then meant the general population.

No, it did not. It meant a defensive force made up from the general population. And my point was that that is no longer an appropriate way to make up such a force.

I think Thomas Jefferson, one of our founders, said it best:

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824

Of course only a fool would deny there is a gun problem in the United States {and elsewhere} and reasonable gun control is necessary.

And what do you think constitutes 'reasonable gun control'? Since it would have to be consistent with the Second Amendment, it is unlikely to address the basic problem, which is that ordinary citizens have the right to have guns. Once you have that, you have an insoluble problem, because people are emotional beings, and sooner or later someone is going to lose their rag and go out and shoot someone.

But I ask you who is really most responsible for the recent Uvalde school shooting in Texas {Nineteen children and two adults were killed in a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde County}
- Knowing there is currently an epidemic of terrorists {in my opinion every one of these mass murderess is a terrorist},
and having a state that allows easy access to purchase of almost any type of firearm..........Isn't that State guilty of
gross negligence in allowing a school with mostly younger kids to sit there as a 'soft target' with no armed security, and wide
open to terrorist attack

In fact, every school in the United States should be required to have top notch security and an 'armed militia' to protect its pupils

We've never needed that in the UK, because few of our citizens have guns.

Do any of you from the UK really think that Americans would accept your type of strict gun control in the United States?

This would not work in America - Most Americans still view the Second Amendment as 'the right to bear arms'
which means the right to defend yourself - If American Liberal politicians understood this they would win far more elections.

Many people of all political persuasions, left, right and middle still accept the old saying:

"WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED - ONLY OULAWS WILL HAVE GUNS"

And again to quote Thomas Jefferson:

"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787

All you are saying here is that gun control won't work in America until enough Americans want it. That is obviously true, but my answer to it is that Americans ought to want it. They are failing in their moral duty to each other in not wanting it. The feeling of safety that each gun-owning American gets by owning a gun is paid for by 30,000 unnecessary gun-related deaths every year of his fellow Americans. That is immoral.

[UniversalAlien]

CIN wrote:

All you are saying here is that gun control won't work in America until enough Americans want it. That is obviously true, but my answer to it is that Americans ought to want it. They are failing in their moral duty to each other in not wanting it. The feeling of safety that each gun-owning American gets by owning a gun is paid for by 30,000 unnecessary gun-related deaths every year of his fellow Americans. That is immoral.

Au Contraire - Gun control can and often is a first step to........

"Gun Bans & Genocide:
The Disarming Facts"

America's 1st Freedom, August 2006. PDF version on this article. This article is a condensed from David B. Kopel, Paul Gallant & Joanne D. Eisen, Is Resisting Genocide a Human Right? 81 Notre Dame Law Review 1275 (2006). More articles on gun prohibition and Sudan are available here. More articles on genocide and gun control.

The international gun prohibition lobbies and their United Nations allies insist that there is no personal right of self-defense--that people should be forced to rely exclusively on the government protection. The prohibitionists also insist that there is no human right for people to possess the means of self-defense, such as firearms. But what are people supposed to do when the government itself starts killing people? The genocide in Darfur, Sudan, is the direct result of the types of gun laws which the United Nations is trying to impose all over the world. Millions of people have already died because of such laws, and millions more will die unless the U.N. is stopped.......

.........In Guinea, the National Alliance for Democracy and Development warns that, "There is a looming Rwanda-type genocide..."

The gun prohibition lobbies have so thoroughly penetrated the United Nations that, at the U.N. anti-gun conference which begins on June 26, gun prohibition lobby staff which actually be serving as delegates from various governments.

The prohibition lobbies and their U.N. allies will tell you that people never need guns for protection--not for protection from rapists, and not for protection from genocidaires. Governments and the United Nations will protect everyone. The tragedy of disarmed victims in the Sudan, and all over Africa, shows the deadly falseness of the prohibitionist promise. For decades, millions of Africans have been slaughtered by genocidal tyrants while the rest of the world stood idle. Now, the United Nations has become objectively complicit in genocide, by trying to ensure that never again will anyone targeted for genocide be able to use a firearm to save herself or her family.

https://davekopel.org/2A/Foreign/gun-ba ... nocide.htm


NOW IF WE GO BACK IN TIME WE WILL SEE THE REAL BLOODY NATURE OF GUN CONTROL AND GENOCIDE

"Lethal Laws: Gun Control Is the Key to Genocide Paper – July 1, 1994
by Jay Simkin (Author), Alan M. Rice (Author), Aaron S. Zelman (Collaborator)

5.0 out of 5 stars "GUN CONTROL" IS THE KEY TO GENOCIDE
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2004
This book gives you hard proof that the downside to "gun control" is genocide, not inconvenience to firearms owners. Lethal Laws contains the authentic original texts of "gun control" laws -- with facing translations -- that cleared the way for seven major genocides between 1915 and 1980 in which 56,000,000 persons, including millions of children, were murdered. The book also shows how America took all but the last step of a major genocide just over 50 years ago, with the approval of the Congress and the Supreme Court. This work proves that "gun control", which is really civilian disarmament, delivers not safe streets but mountains of corpses.

- Chris W. Stark


So tell me CIN, and the rest of you we pity you poor Americans 'right to bear arms' while we are safe and sound and well protected by governments that would never even think of such a thing like genocide - until.....it happens


I say NEVER AGAIN and have 56,000,000 dead bodies {estimate} in evidence to show you about the real dangers of gun control

Remember two key points:

1. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
and
2.

“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”

- George Santayana

[Sy Borg]

Poor old America. What a situation. They surely must realise that the rest of the world is looking at them in bewilderment. What the rest of the world knows is there is no way in hell that they would want to follow US policies, which are obviously self-defeating. Other western nations have high gun ownership to ward off aggressive nations like Russia.

High gun ownership promises much militia inconvenience should a hostile power choose to invade. By contrast, Americans own guns to use on other Americans, not foreign invaders. It's the old story. If a society becomes so dominant that no one is a realistic threat, then they fight with each other.

[CIN]

So tell me CIN, and the rest of you we pity you poor Americans 'right to bear arms' while we are safe and sound and well protected by governments that would never even think of such a thing like genocide - until.....it happens

You make not even the slightest attempt to assess the probability of genocide in the UK. You simply assume that it could happen here as easily as in Rwanda and the Sudan. This is unbelievably naive (culturally and historically, the UK is absolutely nothing like Rwanda and the Sudan) and also very lazy.

A rational approach to the issue of gun ownership in the USA would involve estimating likely deaths in the two situations. On the one hand, you have deaths resulting from possible genocide (Dg), times the probability of that genocide occurring (Pg). On the other, you have deaths resulting from gun ownership (Do) times the probability of those deaths occurring (Po). Your position is only rational if we estimate that (Dg x Pg) > (Do x Po). Now we know what (Do x Po) is for the US, because that's the actual situation you have, and we can look at the statistics for gun-related deaths over the last few decades. I believe it's around 30,000 deaths a year. So your position is only rational if (Dg x Pg) > 30,000 per year. If you can't give at least a rough estimate of Pg, you can't work this out, which means your position is not rational. Simply tossing into the argument 56 million deaths in countries very different from your own is irrelevant.

If I apply this reasoning to the UK, I conclude that Pg is so low, and Po is so high, that it would be irrational for us to allow ordinary citizens to own guns here. Could I be wrong about these probabilities? Yes, of course. I am only human. But we have to make the best estimate of these things that we can. Not to do so is a dereliction of duty.

Apparently you think Pg for the USA is high enough to justify 30,000 deaths a year from gun-related incidents. I think you're probably wrong, but it's your country not mine, so in the end, your ethical problem is not my business (thank God). I'll stay here and risk the genocide. Compared with dying of heart disease or being knocked down by a car, I don't think it's much of a risk.

[Sculptor1]

Does the 2nd amendment give me the right to keep and maintain battlefield nuclear weapons?

[LuckyR]

Poor old America. What a situation. They surely must realise that the rest of the world is looking at them in bewilderment. What the rest of the world knows is there is no way in hell that they would want to follow US policies, which are obviously self-defeating. Other western nations have high gun ownership to ward off aggressive nations like Russia.

High gun ownership promises much militia inconvenience should a hostile power choose to invade. By contrast, Americans own guns to use on other Americans, not foreign invaders. It's the old story. If a society becomes so dominant that no one is a realistic threat, then they fight with each other.

Exactly. The problem in the US isn't guns, it's the advertising to sell guns through fear tactics that puts guns in the hands of the low information fearful, instead of hunters and sportsmen, who are very unlikely to use them against people.

[Sy Borg]

Does the 2nd amendment give me the right to keep and maintain battlefield nuclear weapons?

It would depend on the yield. It's hard to imagine the US Supreme Court having a problem with American citizens at least keeping small explosives.

After all, if law-abiding Americans can't keep their own bombs, then they are vulnerable to criminals with black market bombs. What hope does a family armed with mere AK-47s have against criminals that can send bombs into their property?

If you deny people the right to keep bombs then you are just rewarding criminals!

[Sculptor1]

Does the 2nd amendment give me the right to keep and maintain battlefield nuclear weapons?

It would depend on the yield. It's hard to imagine the US Supreme Court having a problem with American citizens at least keeping small explosives.

After all, if law-abiding Americans can't keep their own bombs, then they are vulnerable to criminals with black market bombs. What hope does a family armed with mere AK-47s have against criminals that can send bombs into their property?

If you deny people the right to keep bombs then you are just rewarding criminals!

[CIN]

Does the 2nd amendment give me the right to keep and maintain battlefield nuclear weapons?

It would depend on the yield. It's hard to imagine the US Supreme Court having a problem with American citizens at least keeping small explosives.

After all, if law-abiding Americans can't keep their own bombs, then they are vulnerable to criminals with black market bombs. What hope does a family armed with mere AK-47s have against criminals that can send bombs into their property?

If you deny people the right to keep bombs then you are just rewarding criminals!

Actually, I think ordinary families in Ukraine could do with their own bombs right now. And rocket launchers.