«"Sound empirical evidence" would show that it is far cheaper to euthanize the weak, the sick, and the old.»

Where do I report for liquidation?

Yet he keeps trying. You haven't presented a single fact. Not one. "Common knowledge" is generated by propaganda, not facts. Do you have any facts to back up your assumptions?

You want to arbitrarily infringe on the rights of others. The only reason you can articulate are expenses to unnecessary government programs. "The government needs to restrict the freedom of law-abiding adults because, if they make bad decisions, the government will have to spend the hard-earned(then seized) tax money to fund their mistakes." That's circular reasoning. The government needs control because, without it, the bad government programs that require control won't work? Pure BS.

My suggestion: provide facts, respond to the refutations with less BS, or EDIT: Taking the advice of AR.

I appreciate your argument, but you have taken the issue of driving cars v. carrying guns out of the context of my argument. It is not about the U.S. Constitution v. state statute. The issue of right v. privilege is also misplaced. As it stands now, your MN CC "rights" are subject to the capricious whim of every nonleasing property owner as provided by statute. Think about it. By your logic, your elected state congressional representatives abandoned your 2nd Amend. rights to the hands of every picayune property owner you encounter. But don't you want the "right" to make your own election as to who comes into your property with a gun? Whether you choose to allow them to or not is beside the point. I frankly am nonplussed by these arguments.

Also, many of you are shifting both your levels and units of analysis; i.e., from a specifically targeted population in a narrowly defined context and environment, to the general population of all 18+ permit holders.

The issue is about pairing youthful immaturity with alcohol and dangerous instrumentality in a narrowly defined environment ,and in a set of circumstances that evoke public health, safety and welfare considerations. Regardless of the fact that 18-y.-o. permit holders drinking in bars in college towns and shooting people is a statistical rarity, the statistics surrounding the above defined causal nexus, generally, clearly favor increased scrutiny and control in situations where all three variables are likely to meet in elevated frequency, intensity and duration, e.g., the typical college party-school town.

Think about your 18+ CC argument. Minnesota is a 21+ state. Why the difference? Because despite the lack of statistics (see my point below), it is the legislative wisdom of reasonable foreseeability playing out in a state that had experience with allowing 18+ drinking (I was among them, and simply because I have never had a DWI, DUI or alcohol-related accident, etc., doesn't mean that my drinking age group as a class wasn't a menace on the road). MN quickly reverted back to the 21+ drinking standard.

Your statistical argument is misplaced. Try giving every 18 y.o. licensed driver a gun to carry (after the required training, of course) and see what happens. Think of all the training that goes into getting your drivers license as opposed to a permit to carry; then look what happens when they drink and drive. The logic is irrefutable and is a valid substitution argument. It's clearly a case of the statistics not catching up with the phenomenon simply because the population pool is so small. It likely never will. That does not mean that the public policy to ban guns from bars in college party-school towns is flawed.

Your ad hominem attacks are both pointless and rude.

The issue someone raised as to when the Bill of Rights was subsumed within the Constitution is so far historically removed from the present day, and the fact that the conjoining of these two documents occurred within such a homogeneous political, cultural and historical setting, more than amply supports my point, with logical sufficiency, about the constitutional origins of the right to keep and bear arms; i.e., that it was not contemplated within the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable, i.e., basic, fundamental human right. Likewise, it is clear from the wording of The 2nd Amend., i.e., "... in the form of an organized militia...," that it was a right created by constitutional fiat for the express purpose of providing security to states, territories, settlements and outposts on the American frontier.

I appreciate the references others to philosophy, e.g., Thomas Paine (I have read parts of "The American Crisis" and "Common Sense"). These two documents are Paine's works that most closely associated with his exhortation to establish America as a nation state independent from Great Britain. "Common Sense" was published in 1776 before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and was in fact, "... the first work to openly ask for independence from Great Britain." Moreover, a close comparison of "Common Sense" to the Declaration of Independence reveals that the latter borrowed significantly from the former in both theme and substance. I just completed text searches of these two documents for the terms "bear arms" and "gun", and I did not find a single, plausible reference to a [i]fundamental or basic human right to bear arms. I suspect the same would be true of J. S. Mill's work as well.

Absolute bullshit. The Bill of Rights recognizes natural human rights. It created exactly nothing. Find one thing in the BOR restricting people. The document was written as a restriction on government. Stupid factless arguments are not a good way to join a forum. Please, for the benefit of everyone, yourself included, either go away, or spend some time studying actual history and actual facts, instead of pulling "common knowledge" from places better left unmentioned.

Somehow the "issue" seems to be shifting as the argument is met with logic, in some absurd attempt to demonstrate superior knowledge.

Is Heather Marten involved in this?

Philosophical "rights" exist only in your head. Whether you prefer them to be "recognized" as opposed to being "created" or not, rights do not exist at law until they are promulgated, i.e., codified, i.e., created by legislation, whether it be either from an act of federal or state legislature, or from a constitutional convention. Only then do rights carry the force and effect of law; i.e., an enforceable claim of right that is recognized and weighed against the competing rights of others in the formulation and administration of public policy.

Although the judiciary may chose to uphold your right, e.g., against the state in an eminent domain proceeding -- ruling as the U.S. Supreme Court did that the state cannot confiscate private property under eminent domain and then turn around and give it to another private party for a private benefit -- nevertheless, the state is still the ultimate arbiter of rights, whether they be against private parties or public entities. Hence all rights are qualified and restricted by public policy.

I think you misunderstand MN's posting law... My "rights" are not capricious to the whim of property owners, I must be asked to leave and refuse before I've committed a crime. I try to avoid spending my time or money on posted property, but sometimes there is no choice.



This all sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. How about you show me some correlation between ALL carry permit holders and a propensity for shooting people in college town bars (there, not so narrow, OK?).



This argument is also misplaced. Try giving every licensed driver a gun to carry after the required training. That would be idiocy. People carry for very personal reasons and carrying is not for everyone. Not everyone gets a drivers license, not everyone gets a carry permit. We're not advocating this. Your strawman is cute.



Are you trying to say that the right to keep and bear arms is not an individual right?

I didn't say one damned thing about law. Self defense is a natural right. It was a right before the Constitution was drafted. It has been a natural right since before the first fish developed lungs and dragged itself from the ooze to walk on dry land. Your offensive urge to curtail the right of any free citizen to protect himself is insane. Your opinions are an offense to the concept of freedom and humanity.

To the best of my knowledge, exactly one country has tried to outlaw self defense, and it isn't working out well, by any measure.

If you can't provide cites or facts, can you just go away?

18-20

Party poopers

Is that Matthew? If it is...

I think you misunderstand MN's posting law. The issue is not whether or not you commit a crime by refusing to leave if asked to do so . The issue is that the posting of a gun ban serves notice on the bearer of a firearm that they may be lawfully refused ingress to the property for that very reason, and that the land owner or their agent can legally and forcibly remove you upon your refusal to leave, because at that point you actually have committed actionable criminal trespass.

Regardless, we're getting way too far afield here. The central premise of my argument is that your 2nd Amend. right is subject to summary abrogation by the capricious whim of a nonleasing landowner. In other words, his property rights, as a fiat of legislated, codified public policy, trump your rights to remain on the property against the will of the agent thereof.

The only difference that local governmental control makes is that it usurps the discretion of the nonleasing landowner. That way the government can make a blanket policy of not allowing guns in establishments, which, as a class, are both statistically known and deemed to be at high risk for violence and/or nuisance. Later, the government can, at its discretion, exclude certain establishments based on their demonstration that their property, individually, is not statistically at high risk.




The problem does exist in as much as the underlying premise of my argument is that most high risk venues in college party-school towns will mostly be frequented by college-age students; i.e., those who are actuarially at high risk when drinking while in possession and control of dangerous instrumentality. No other permit holders need be considered, as they are not part of the calculus for formulating the policy in the first place.

Notwithstanding the above, however, under my rubric, younger permit holders are not legally discriminated against in public accommodation under Title II based on age because all permit holders are banned from bringing guns in to college party-school town bars. It's a thing of beauty if I have to say so myself.




My argument is not a "straw man" in this case because it exemplifies the fact that the statistics between drinking and gun carrying by youthful permit holders would, in aggregate, likely achieve parity with those for drinking and driving youth, provided that the distribution of the dangerous instrumentality is standardized.

On the other hand, your argument that it would be idiocy to do such a thing is a straw man argument. It fails to recognize that my proposal is in all actuality a thought experiment (and no, I didn't make that term up) that I contrived for the sake of illustrating the point; i.e., statistical standardization of the independent variables. In all actuality, would the population of youthful drinking permit holders be large enough, one could use statistical controls to achieve the same result. Unfortunately, the conundrum here is that there is insufficient population size for the drinking youthful permit holders in possession and control of firearms in bars in party-school college towns. Therefore, no comparisons of statistical significance can be made. As you will see in reviewing posts entered later than the one you quoted, I flesh this argument out a little more.



[/quote]
No, actually, I'm asserting that state/territory/etc,-level protection was the compelling state interest in ensuring that people had the right to bear arms, individually. Further, I believe that the clause in the Declaration of Independence that exhorts insurrection in the event that the federal government fell into tyranny was tacitly provided for in the 2nd Amend. Does that make you happier? How was your question on point with the thread of my initial proposition?

You have no facts, no logic, no reason, no cites, no thought for consequences, bad policy based on bad data and unicorn farts, arbitrary rules that punish the most law-abiding demographic in existence and you apply your logical fallacies to anyone who successfully refutes your policy ideas with facts, cites, history and logic.

You are wrong, by all historical evidence and every statistically valid study.

I know you didn't say "one damned thing about law". I did. That's the difference between an ideologue and an empirical legal scholar, e.g., Donald Black, "The Sociology of Law". We concern ourselves not with what people think, but with what happens.

However, to give your "natural rights" argument a run for its money as it respects guns, self-defense does not imply a "natural right" to possess firearms, per se, since firearms, for the purpose of self-defense, are merely an instrument of violence that came long after the club, the knife, the sword, and the arrow, etc.; i.e., they are a fiat of technological development and evolution, and they exist wholey apart from the "natural right" of self-defense. Moreover, the use of such an inherently and highly dangerous instrumentality (e.g., over-penetration hazard) necessarily demands public policy considerations, i.e., public health, safety and welfare, in mitigating such danger.

Example: An idiot carrying a gun in his waistband negligently allowed it to fall down his pant leg and discharge as it struck the floor of an apartment house vestibule. A little school girl was shot in the leg as a result. Now one could argue that the same thing could have happened with a club, knife, or bow and arrow. The real question is to what probable effect?

Regardless, due to the countervailing public policy consideration of protecting early American frontier settlers from assaults by any number of hostile powers, the authors of the 2nd Amend. clearly and unequivocally cited state/territory/settlement/outpost protection, "in the form of an organized militia," as the impetus for, and the prime compelling state interest in, creating a right to the possession of firearms by individuals, for the purpose of warding off imminent or otherwise surprise attack by marauding hostile powers.

Frankly, from a constitutional scholar's point of view, I find the argument that the 2nd Amend. only provides for firearm possession "in the form of an organized militia" to be ludicrous. American-European settlers would never have made it past Ohio if they would have been delayed in arming themselves by having to report to a central armory in order to be equipped with a firearm. Their settlements would probably have been wiped off the map. And this was obviously such a common sense consideration that I can see why the original framers of the 2nd Amend didn't see the need to further clarify and expound on their codification.

See other posts for my argument favoring insurrection based on the clause addressing same in the Declaration of Independence.