What to tell your Uncle Harry the gun nut about the 2nd Amendment at the next family reunion

James Madison wrote the 2nd Amendment to make it ambiguous on purpose, to make it noble-sounding when in fact it was a compromise demanded under the table by the slave states led by Virginia. The Brits had attempted to confiscate American individual arms, but that wasn't a big deal when the 2nd Amendment was written, because America had been a separate nation for over a dozen years and thus the Brits had no say in who had guns here.

Who did have a say was the South, and the white oligarchs depended on white militias to keep black insurrections in check. But Madison couldn't come out and so this because the non-slave states would go ballistic.

So he had to come up with an ambiguous, pretty-sounding compromise that gave the slave states what they wanted--to keep their boot heels on black necks, while at the same the non-slave states could accept the 2nd Amendment as something all rugged frontiersman-y that fed into American mythmaking.

In other words, things haven't changed much from then to now. Look down this thread and you'll see that white Southern men are still obsessed about black men--particularly the one in the White House.

"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

(the more it changes, the more it stays the same--Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1808-1890)

For a clear, well-written article about all this see The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, from the UC Davis Law Review, published in 1998.aAvifrom the from thestory ofabout thisaboutoclear, wello...See More

 

The problem you face talking to Uncle Harry the gun nut

If you want to understand what happens when you try to reason with a gun rights zealot, you need to

remember that Gary Larson cartoon "What dogs hear."


It shows a man lecturing his dog about getting into the garbage. Of course all the dog recognizes is his name.
Similarly, in an argument with a gun nut (as opposed to a responsible gun owner), all your arguments sound like to him is "enemy tribesman speaking, therefore is all lies."

Then when he responds, mostly with stuff from the NRA's Fake Fact Factory, to you it sounds mostly like nonsense that anyone could refute with a few minutes' research of nonpartisan fact checking organizations such as factcheck.org and politifact.com.

But the gun guy would reject anything from those sites because it doesn't support his tribe--what we imagine to be the Republican Party, but now reconstituted as a primitive tribe--100% of the time.

The fact that the fact checkers challenge liberals daily for their own exaggerations and misrepresentations means nothing to Republican tribesmen, because everyone and everything is either friend or enemy, and anyone and anything that isn't 100% friend is 100% enemy.

And they don't actually know how to think. They were raised to take in ideas worshipfully, in church. They really have no idea what analytic thinking is. It just looks like defective worshipful thinking to them.

Add to this the fact that they usually know a lot more about guns and how they operate than liberals do. They use their superior knowledge of guns as further proof that no one who doesn't agree with them has anything useful to contribute, and that they're speaking ignorantly.

So you won't even get a foot in the door, metaphorically speaking, unless you educate yourself about guns. It doesn't take long--it ain't rocket science,  folks. And it's worth it just for the confused look they get on their faces when you show you see through their malarkey (they frequently lie about guns to liberals, figuring that they can get away with it).

Something to say to your uncle Harry the gun nut...

If you're a gun owner and want to address this topic, do your side a favor and address the actual laws being considered now in Congress.  
 
So don't rant about how you have a constitutional right to bear firearms. You do. OK? Now the issue is what firearms under what circumstances, and what do we do about the issues of bad guys getting their hands on guns. 
 
For example, don't you think it's reasonable to have a federal law making it a felony to sell or give a firearm to someone who would fail a background check because he's a felon or a psycho and has been officially judged not to qualify for firearm ownership? 
 
After all, it's becoming clear that the average thug with a gun got it from a "straw man" buyer or one of a minority of gun shops that sell guns by the truckload to criminal syndicates and then "lose" the paperwork. 
 
Seems to be that the best way to maintain the right of good guys to bear arms is to try much harder to disarm those who have no such right. And the states, by themselves, haven't been able to do it. Modern transportation makes it all to easy to buy a gun in Virginia and take it to D.C. 
 
Bottom line: it would allay the fears of the majority of Americans who don't own guns if gun owners would start publicly stating that they agree that the Second Amendment does not confer a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. And that they agree that the Second Amendment supports laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. And that the government can and should ban the sale to civilians of particularly dangerous and unusual weapons. 

When guns are registered, we'll know where outlaws' guns came from

The NRA now opposes even doing background checks on gun buyers--any gun buyers.

It gives a bunch of reasons for this, which you can see described here.

They boil down to hassle, slippery slope, and crooks won't bother.

The hassle argument is contemptible.

The slippery slope argument is, as are all slippery slope arguments, an attempt to argue against a different proposal than the one being proposed. It's like arguing against issuing parking tickets for parking in red zones because they could lead to the death penalty.

The "crooks won't bother" argument is a baldfaced lie. People with criminal records were stopped trying to buy guns from gun stores 1.7 million times in recent years--by background checks.

What the background checks don't stop is straw buyers, and even though that's illegal, you have to prove that the straw buyer knew the real buyer wasn't entitled--and that would require requiring a background check for every gun sale (including supposed "gifts").

Nearly every gun used in a crime was purchased legally originally. So we need to focus on the people who move a gun from the legal world to the illegal one--and nail them. Universal background checks are key to stopping the movement of guns from legal to illegal ownership.

And the NRA's opposition is yet another piece of evidence to the idea that the NRA represents the gun makers, not legitimate gun owners--and that the NRA works for gun maker profits without regard to whoever gets the guns.

"That's not funny"

A remarkably vulgar animated sitcom, "Family Guy," did an episode about abortion that didn't get aired, but which is legendary in some circles. The Washington Post talked about this episode in an article. The article garned several letters griping about WaPo publishing the article that discussed the episode. Here's the comment I posted about the letters:

People without a sense of humor alway hotly deny it. They'll say "Why, I read 'Family Circus' daily" along with edgier stuff like 'Peanuts.'"

But in most regards they're deeply humor-impaired, and because, like those with Asperger's Syndrome, they don't understand its wellsprings or its social functions, they almost always criticize humor they don't like...while almost always thinking the humor's target is what they're obsessed with, while the target is actually...them.

They aim for a world in which no one ever says anything anyone might take offense at under any circumstances.

For these letter writers, it's abortion. For millions of Muslims, it's Mohammed. For gun nuts, it's their Glocks and AK-47 assault rifles. For peaceniks, it's war.

So for that last group, for example, the bumper sticker "Visualize whirled peas" is offensive because they think it trivializes war, when it fact it mocks their target fixation and general looniness.

For most people, living in such a neutered world, overflowing with teary sentimentality, would be like having died and gone to Hell.

So of course the target of abortion jokes isn't abortion itself--it's the abortion nuts who endorse the murder of obstetricians who include abortion among the services they offer pregnant women.

It's the abortion nuts who believe the Bible and/or Jesus said anything against abortion (they didn't), or that a ball of two dozen cells is a human being with a soul (ignoring the fact that identical twins and chimeras aren't formed at the moment of conception, thus making the moment of conception not the moment of soul-implantation--and as far as the Bible is concerned, it could be as late as the last trimester or even the moment of birth of a viable fetus.)

It's the abortion nuts who ignore the fact that innumerable fertilized ova are not nascent human being because of genetic defects such as anencepaly, that mean nothing with the substance of a human being is possible from that ovum--ever.

It's the abortion nuts who ignore the fact that forcing a 12 year old girl raped by her own father to carry the resulting fetus to term is regarded by a majority of Americans as pure evil, despite it being routine in nations controlled by the Catholic Church.

It's the abortion nuts who ignore the fact that their obsession with fetuses' imagined rights comes at the expense of actually born children.

But most of all, it's the abortion nuts who ignore the fact that the world's population exploded from 1 billion people in 1900 to nearly 7 billion people today--vastly more people than the world can sustain without destroying the ecologies we depend on for sustenance, such that if we took our responsibilities seriously we'd support free abortions, contraception and sterilization for everyone everywhere, and impose a 2 child limit here and if possible everywhere else, until the world's population went back to a billion.

So in response to the immoral consequences of anti-abortion nuts' efforts, despite their obviously thinking that they're way more moral than the rest of us--we make jokes.

Humor lets humans bear the unbearable, so we aren't paralyzed with grief but can actually do something about the situations that confront us.