The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal by a group of gun rights advocates seeking to overturn Maryland’s ban on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines under the Second Amendment.
The decision, a major win for gun safety advocates, leaves in place a ruling by the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals which ruled that the state may constitutionally prohibit sale and possession of the weapons.
The state legislation, enacted in 2013 after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, specifically targets the AR-15 – the most popular rifle in America with 20-30 million in circulation. They are legal in 41 of the 50 states.
You must be right since every other country who’s already solved this problem solved it in the way you’re saying doesn’t work.
You’ll never convince me that guns aren’t the problem, because places that don’t have guns don’t have the problem. The evidence is thoroughly and definitively not on your side.
There are literally dozens of countries that allow private ownership of semi-auto long guns with a permit (Canada is one of them - I see your home instance is .ca), many of them don’t even require a stated reason. The legal difference in the US is that one of our founding documents specifies access as a right. Access to guns is not why we’re a violent county. We’re a violent country because we’re a genocidal settler-colonialist racial slaver society with no health care and piss-poor education. If all of our guns were to poof vanish tonight we’d just have more euro-style mass knifings in our schools and department stores. This shit is like water pressure, you can put your thumb on the hose with piecemeal measures but it’s going to burst out somewhere else so long as it’s still flowing.
Ok, let’s try it and see if you’re right.
The second amendment has four clauses, each separated with commas. The way I interpret it (the way it was originally interpreted for over 200 years) is that it guarantees states the right to maintain well regulated militias of its citizens, and that the federal government can’t take away the firearms of those militias.
It’s only relatively recently (2008) that we’ve reinterpreted the amendment to basically forget about the first two clauses and the third command. That’s why the NRA only has the second half adorning their office buildings.
The text:
How I interpret it:
How republicans interpret it:
The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
Quick question: where else is “the people” interpreted to mean “ostensibly the states, but ultimately the federal government for all practical purposes. Either way, definitely not individual persons.”?