If you're seeing this topic then another mass shooting hap…

On May 11 2019 11:00 JimmiC wrote:
This was a shower thought so it might have a millions holes.

But I was thinking if the second amendment is so important for freedom against the government, do you think that the USA has the most protection from their government?

And if you think it is a personal protection issue, why is the USA so much more dangerous then many of the countries that don't allow guns? It more seems like it created the problem it is now trying to solve.

On May 13 2019 03:58 Doodsmack wrote:
There's actually some really interesting history about early America and conscription. In the years after the Constitution was ratified, the organized state militias as well as other groups resisted conscription by the federal government. Immediately after ratifying the Constitution and the Second Amendment, Congress made it law that every able bodied male must own a gun for purposes of milita service. Then when various rebellions and war occurred (War of 1812), Congress' attempts to exercise conscription powers under those laws were resisted by the various militias that existed. They didn't want to be drafted into the army. This forced Congress and the President to turn to Congress' "raising armies" powers, and simply conscript people right into the federal army. As well as making it a crime to resist the draft. Thus they went to the "nuclear" option, whereby the federal government could enforce criminal sanctions if anyone resisted the draft. This may have actually happened during the Civil War (i.e. that was teh first time such a conscription system was actually used).

But the Supreme Court, in its role as enforcer of the Constitution, should have stepped in before Congress went nuclear, and acted in support of the executive's commander-in-chief function by making clear that the Constitution did not permit anyone to resist conscription. Conscription was part of the supreme law of the land. Of course, people cried "states' rights" and made up arguments that the militias were limited to their own state's boundaries, and the federal government didn't have the power to make them go beyond state lines. But the plain text of the constitution as well as the constitutional structure dictates that the federal governemnt can call up the milita - and by inference, that must be for national purposes rather than purely intrastate purposes.

Of course, the only way the Supreme Court could have "stepped in" would be if a case came up through the lower courts raising the relevant legal issues. Which means Congress should have brought a case asserting their right to conscript people.

Had the Supreme Court stepped in, we might have a very different conscription system than we do today, because it might be more tied to the militia concept. The mlitias that initially resisted conscription wuld have had to stop resisting (which of course is a big if, since they were armed militias who could actually defend themselves from the federal government), and the system of conscription that Congress had in place at that time would then go into operation and it would remain the system.

On May 13 2019 04:01 Doodsmack wrote:


I would definitely agree that the US created the problem it is trying to solve. We have an absurd amount of guns, and also an absurd amount of gun violence. That's not a coincidence.

On May 13 2019 04:52 Sermokala wrote:

We don't have an absurd amount of gun violence. There are hosts of other issues that would save more lives if people cared about them more. You are brainwashed along with the rest of us to belive there is a gun violence issue because of the news media.

On May 13 2019 06:22 Neneu wrote:


May I ask which western countries you are comparing yourself to, in order to draw the conclusion that you do not have a gun violence issue?

On May 13 2019 08:48 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


You're going to need to define what you mean by "absurd", because most people would probably disagree with you after looking at our gun violence statistics. I suspect your threshold for absurdity is much higher than the average person's.

Even most gun advocates I know agree that we have an absurd amount of gun violence; they just have different solutions on how to fix that problem than those who are not gun advocates.

On May 13 2019 04:50 Sermokala wrote:

I don't think your argument has a basis in historical context. Other countries had conscription explicitly laid out there was never any concept of conscription in the constitution and the founding fathers were well educated on the concepts of conscription. The clear print of the constitution was that the militias would merely be "called" up. That the Militias would resist this would be obvious to anyone as they would be organized from the city level up. They wouldn't want to march their entire male population off to a war, especially one where the militias on the frontier would be needed to resist the native American allies of the British. To believe that conscription was an expected part of the militia model would be to have the government telling their new army to abandon their families to death in order to fight a war based on the economies of the coast. No sane federal authority would charge someone for this and so there wouldn't be a mechanism for the supreme court to intervene on the federal government's vague authority over the militias of the states.

The Militias were never organized on a federal level and were never regulated on a federal level. You also try to make the argument that the government "calling up" the militia is any way means that they are under the authority of the federal government in any way before they join the order of battle of any federal army. They were named from the state and city that they came from. They carried battle flags with their state on them in the same order that professional units had unit flags. How that means that they must be for national purposes takes a stretch of the imagination a yoga practitioner would be impressed with.

On May 13 2019 09:02 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


But his statement that we have an absurd amount of guns and gun violence is a pretty typical understanding of the situation. We have more guns than people in this country and upwards of 100,000 cases of gun violence in this country each year, ranging from murders to mass shootings to suicides to nonfatal injuries... and that's wayyyyyy higher than any other first-world country. Both the number of guns and the number of gun-related incidents are disproportionately higher than all other first-world nations (both as a whole and per capita), which is where the word "absurd" gains its relevance. So I can see why someone would say it's absurd, but I don't know your metric for why it isn't absurd. What else needs to happen to have it be absurd for you?

protecting their rights but rather protecting businesses sales and profits.

On May 13 2019 11:38 Doodsmack wrote:


The problem with what you're saying about the militias being conscripted is the text of the Constitution. The plain text of the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and it defeats all other possible arguments. Congress can call up the militia to defend against insurrections or invasions; if Congress do so, the president becomes the militias' commander in chief. Therefore, Congress can conscript the militias into the service of the federal government (but only to defend insurrections or invasions).

On May 13 2019 12:37 Sermokala wrote:

No conscription is not the text of the constitution. Conscription was a thing at the time the founding fathers wrote the constitution and they would have understood what conscription meant and the differences between ordering the militia to do things and "calling" the militia to do things. The constitution explicitly delineates between the different levels of government. Even in the most generous interpretation of gun ownership being tied to a "well-regulated militia" it would be the height of idiocy to mandate a specific right being tied into a concept that is never mentioned or elaborated in any way in any part of the rest of the text. There is no specification on what the militia is in the text or the regulations the militia should follow. That they are called and are THEN to be placed under federal authority can only mean that they were an entity whose organization and regulations were left to the cities and states from which they took their name and took their officers and took their flags and took their weapons and took their replacements from. The federally called and conscripted units took their officers and took their flags and took their weapons and took their replacements from the federal organization and regulations.

You keep insisting that the constitution dictates conscription in its text and I keep asking for where you get that. There are examples of conscription from the period before and after the constitution is written and what the constitution describes is nothing near those examples.

On May 13 2019 13:12 Danglars wrote:

Conscription is not just missing in the constitution, and other methods and processes proscribed, but also precisely called a bulwark against a federal army than just another tool of it. My post on Federalist 46 So in addition to all this, the people reading the text of the constitution and wavering on whether to ratify it were reassured by the authors and supporters that the militia would have their arms and act in the interest of the States and not the Fed in the event of danger. I've never heard a cogent argument for the salesman of the constitution both writing a federal militia accidentally, but also defending it as everything opposed to the concept. Were they schemers marveling at how dumb the state representatives were, to believe all the lies they said about the text and misread the text itself?

On May 13 2019 12:37 Sermokala wrote:

No conscription is not the text of the constitution. Conscription was a thing at the time the founding fathers wrote the constitution and they would have understood what conscription meant and the differences between ordering the militia to do things and "calling" the militia to do things. The constitution explicitly delineates between the different levels of government. Even in the most generous interpretation of gun ownership being tied to a "well-regulated militia" it would be the height of idiocy to mandate a specific right being tied into a concept that is never mentioned or elaborated in any way in any part of the rest of the text. There is no specification on what the militia is in the text or the regulations the militia should follow. That they are called and are THEN to be placed under federal authority can only mean that they were an entity whose organization and regulations were left to the cities and states from which they took their name and took their officers and took their flags and took their weapons and took their replacements from. The federally called and conscripted units took their officers and took their flags and took their weapons and took their replacements from the federal organization and regulations.

You keep insisting that the constitution dictates conscription in its text and I keep asking for where you get that. There are examples of conscription from the period before and after the constitution is written and what the constitution describes is nothing near those examples.