I agree with the sentiment of your post, but as a non-American this one jumps out at me. I don't think it fits the rest of your argument, adding more control and checks for something as dangerous as gun ownership is a good thing.. in particular, it would take a lot to convince me that private ownership of assault rifles is anything but bad news.
I have read some arguments about private protection against excessive government excesses, but I don't really buy it.
Civilians haven't been allowed to buy new assault rifles in the US since 1986. As a result of the severely restricted supply, they're very expensive and rather rare. But even before the registry was closed to civilians, registered machineguns were only used in a handful of crimes since they were regulated in 1934.
In the US, there is a pattern of politicians pushing for their pet gun control measures after some mass shooting, regardless of whether or not it would have stopped the incident that justifies the legislative push. The most recent example is the reaction to the Charleston church shooting, where some politicians pushed for an "assault weapons" ban (which is political term about cosmetics—these are not machineguns) and background checks for private party sales, despite the shooter not using a weapon that would have been covered by the proposed ban, purchased from a licensed gun dealer after passing a standard background check. While universal background checks are arguably a good thing regardless of what motivated the push, the "assault weapons" ban is pure political nonsense. Such guns are almost never used in crime and previous bans were shown to not have any effect on crime. When a gun is used in a crime, it is almost always a handgun.
Yeah, I wish we would stop pushing for assault weapons bans and instead push for a similar sort of safety and usage training, psychological and temperament screening, waiting period, and background checks that a police officer might go through before they are presented with a gun and a badge (that may even be an opportunity to re-think the sort of training we give our police!).
It would be costly, but that sort of licensing, even if done rather clumsily, would make it far more difficult for the wrong people to acquire weapons, while staying in line with the 2nd amendment and preserving gun ownership by law abiding citizens.
Oddly, the NRA seems more even more opposed to licensing than they are on restricting magazine capacity. Maybe they agree that it would be [too] effective!
The problem I have with the whole background checks philosophy is that it sounds like a good thing, but most of the mass shootings we're all familiar with were committed by people who would have passed the background check anyways, or who stole the weapons from someone else, which means the whole exercise was pointless (i.e. didn't meaningfully increase safety from baseline, i.e. security theater)
"Psychological and temperament screening" is a tremendously subjective thing (psych is a pretty soft science on the best of days), and not something I'm comfortable with hanging a constitutional right off of.
It needs to be strictly objective criterion, along the lines of if X then Y.
Now being able to demonstrate safety, I would be 100% cool with, because then we're licensing people, not weapons, and doesn't carry the possible abuse factor of firearms registries. The FCC example given upthread is a great model. You go to a safety class, demonstrate that you know how to operate a gun safely based on objective criteria, and you get a card or a paper or something that entitles you to buy whatever. You have to re-up it every 10 years or so.
Hell, let the NRA run it and charge a token fee. Would give them an actual meaningful place in the discourse instead of the "government's coming for your guns!" scare tactics that they play every few years.
>In September 2012, Rodger visited a shooting range to train himself in firing handguns.[12] In November 2012, he purchased his first handgun, a Glock 34 pistol, in Goleta, after doing research on handguns and judging the Glock 34 to be "an efficient and highly accurate weapon", as documented in his manifesto.[16]
>The Glock 9mm pistol used in the shooting was legally purchased by Vargas in 2010 from a local gun shop, and he had a concealed carry permit for it.[8][18][3]
>On May 22, 2012, Holmes purchased a Glock 22 pistol at a Gander Mountain shop in Aurora. Six days later, on May 28, he bought a Remington 870 Express Tactical shotgun at a Bass Pro Shops in Denver.[64]
> Following an incident later in 2007 involving his stepfather, a restraining order was filed against him, barring him from possessing firearms. The order lasted a year and had expired at the time of the shooting.
(Seems to imply the guns were his? Can't see in article)
> Items found on Wong's body included a hunting knife, in the waistband of his pants;[13] a bag of ammunition, which was tied around his neck;[27] and two semi-automatic pistols (a .45-caliber Beretta Px4 Storm and a 9mm Beretta 92FS Vertec Inox, matching the serial numbers on his New York State pistol license)
So of these 7 rampage shootings, 5 were done by people who used their own gun, one is implied (possibly not?).
Furthermore, some of these had past known mental health issues: Elliot Rodger, Scott Evans Dekraai had a restraining order filed against him, Jared Lee Loughner was told to get his mental health evaluated if he wanted to return to university (later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic), Eduardo Sencion was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia a few decades before the shooting, James Eagan Holmes was seeing several psychologists of which one tried to warn his campus police, the others have unknown motives.
Unless you have a foolproof method of determining criminal behavior a-priori OR you're fromthe department of pre-crime, how exactly do you expect this to work in practice?
I think many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of the enumerated rights of the amended Constitution. I don't need permission to exercise any of those rights and they AREN'T granted by the government, only recognized by it.
I don't need a First Amendment license. Why would I need a Second Amendment license?
> Unless you have a foolproof method of determining criminal behavior a-priori
I don't need one, and never claimed to have one. A method does not need to be foolproof in order to be effective.
The existing procedure for screening police officers, though it has some flaws, works remarkably well overall. Thus, I suspect that a similar procedure, applied to average citizens, would also be effective.
> I don't need a First Amendment license. Why would I need a Second Amendment license?
When your free speech impacts others in your community, you often do. For example, amateur radio licensing is required to broadcast your free speech, and you may need permission from a zoning board to make a large religious display in your yard. Here is Scalia from DC v. Heller, a landmark case in the right to bare arms:
> nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms
It seems to me that a reasonable condition and qualification for the purchase of a weapon is to be of a stable mind, and have the proven ability to operate it safely and accurately.
The license would not restrict any law abiding citizen from going through the qualification process, and the cost would be subsidized, so how exactly are your rights being infringed?
Your understanding of basic civil liberties is so fundamentally flawed that I can't even understand how you arrived at those conclusions.
> The existing procedure for screening police officers, though it has some flaws, works remarkably well overall.
I don't have a constitutional right to be a police officer. I would also argue with your characterization of "works remarkably well overall". You're making an assertion with no supporting facts but since we're going to play that game. There are close to 300 MILLION legally owned firearms in the United States today. Contrary to popular belief, we do not have a rampant gun violence problem with legally owned firearms. So I'd argue that the existing regime works pretty damn well for civilian ownership.
Now compare that record with the record of accidental police shootings (not unarmed suspect shot; think...I didn't hit the right person or/shot killed a person even given my training) and let me know which looks worse to you.
> When your free speech impacts others in your community, you often do.
NO. YOU DON'T. That's PRECISELY the point. The impact of my speech on my community is EXPRESSLY protected by the Bill of Rights. Political speech is given the HIGHEST level of protection. That's why racists can march down main street and call for all minorities to be expelled from the USA. It's why someone can picket a legal business and complain about its actions.
> The license would not restrict any law abiding citizen from going through the qualification process, and the cost would be subsidized, so how exactly are your rights being infringed?
Would you like an example of how this infringes rights?
The radio license has more to do with not misusing finite resources (only so many radio spectrum frequencies/amplitudes available, etiquette has to be followed on HAM/amateur radio because other people are using it too, and you can't just start a radio station without having a channel reserved for your use that doesn't overlap or disrupt someone else), than free speech, else you'd need a license to run a podcast/blog.
This is code for "we need a reason to ban anyone we don't like without that pesky requirement of convincing a court".
Example 1 of this is Alabama's concealed handgun license scheme, which up until recently was may-issue (the state is permitted to give a license, but not required). In practice, that meant that if you were white, you always got one. If you were black, not so much.
Or David Cameron's recent gem: 'For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.'
They tried that in a few places, it usually just translated to "black people can't own guns" or discrimination based on the screener's impression of that person. "Screening for temperament" is akin to literacy or other such tests before voting.
Anyone can lie/spin a form test, similar to the customs form you get when you fly into the country, everything else is subjective and grounds for a discrimination law suit.
>> Oddly, the NRA seems more even more opposed to licensing than they are on restricting magazine capacity.
That's probably because licensing creates a list of who has them. They're afraid such a list will make it easy to take them away at a later date.
BTW, I kind of regret bringing up such a hot topic as an example rather than thinking harder for examples. Now I recall the attempt by media companies to get DRM into every A2D converter to plug the "analog hole" - that's technically impossible and it never went anywhere, but it's another example of the thinking.
Some rifles are classified as unrestricted don't have to be registered, while other rifles which accept the exact same rounds and magazines are classified restricted. Licenses must be obtained to even move them, let alone lend, give, or sell to someone else.
At least advances in manufacturing technology will make this nonsense impractical eventually.
Just because all of the proposals from legislators to make background checks mandatory for all purchases involve de facto registries doesn't mean that it's impossible to implement it without registries.
Maybe that's technically true, honestly I doubt it, once you give information to the gov, it keeps it. Legal or not. Evil-doers care not about whatever law anyway, it's just a burden and an obvious infringement on the people's right to keep and bear arms.
What's next? Background checks for 3D printers? Maybe some DRM to keep us safe?
Are these people that just have the "evil bit" flipped to true? Tossing around the word "evil" just seems like you're asking for a politicized "debate."
An assault rifle is a select-fire (having the option of more than one shot per trigger pull) rifle shooting an intermediate cartridge. An AR-15 is not an assault rifle because it isn't a select-fire. The M16, which the AR-15 is based on, is an select-fire weapon and is thus is an assault rifle.
The main difference between an AR-15 and a hunting rifle is that the hunting rifle tends to use a more powerful cartridge. The rest is cosmetic.
I'm not trying to be obtuse but don't most hunting rifles still work on a bolt action model thus requiring an operator to chamber a round manually whereas the AR-15, and rifles like it,
'automatically' chambers the next round in a fraction of a second.
Depends on your definition of "hunting rifle". A lot of hunters use bolt-action rifles, yes. But a lot of (at least American) hunters also use semi-automatic rifles.
The labels on these things end up being one of the core problems. What is an assault rifle? What is a high-cap magazine? Certainly these terms are familiar to those of us with experience with firearms. But to hear politicians throw the terms around, you'd think they had no clue (and I suppose they often don't), even though they supposedly have "experts" on hand to help them make their decisions. What it (usually) boils down to is people with a decision already made going into the "decision-making process" and justifying their already-made decision with whatever materials and personnel they have on hand.
Which is the wrong way to run anything, let alone a government.
I can't say "most" but there are plenty of semi-automatic rifles used for hunting, at least in the US.
The legalities of what kind of rifle you're allowed to use to hunt what where and when and the particular ammo and how big of magazine can be used are somewhat arbitrary and vary from state to state and game animal to game animal. I think at least 48 at states allow some form of hunting with semiautomatic rifles.
In some parts of the country "Bubba'd" SKS guns are pretty popular for hunting deer I think. (Google image search "bubba gun sks" for a general idea of what's going on - converting a wood stock and 10-round stripper clip magazine to polymer with detachable box magazines, which is a pretty good illustration of how the same gun can look a lot different.)
Hunting rifles range all over the place. Deer rifles range from semi-automatic, to pump-action, lever-action, bolt-action, break-action single shot, and others I'm probably not familiar with. Semi-auto rifles are not a new development- there are a huge number of M1 carbines and M1 Garant rifles in private hands dating from WW2, and there were Browning and Remington semi-auto hunting rifle models earlier than that.
Actually it's the other way 'round - the AR-15 came first; the M16 is based on it. Also, detachable magazines are often cited as another requirement for classifying a rifle as an assault rifle.
Adding to what user wl already said - 'assault rifle' is a really vague term, but historically it is defined as a rifle that soldier can use to provide a covering fire to himself while assaulting an enemy position. Before first 'assault rifles' appeared comrade soldiers where supposed to provide suppressive fire during an attack. And from that definition it is clear that semi-auto weapon cannot be considered an 'assault rifle'.
I think this comes down to the difference between banning things that nobody really wants (lead in paint) versus things that people really want (drugs, alcohol). In America, guns are in the second category.
Politicians think encryption is in the first category.
Edit: given how this discussion is going, I think we're back to the idea that encryption should be classified as a weapon in the US and subject to second amendment protection, as the 2nd is much more strongly defended than the 4th or 5th or even the 1st. (This argument obviously doesn't make any sense in the UK, where we should lean on article 1 and 6 ECHR). A country where you can have an AR-15 but not AES-CBC makes no sense, but we have to work with the politics as they are.
> Politicians think encryption is in the first category.
Not necessarily; I don't think they're quite stupid enough to think that encryption is not needed. (Perhaps once upon a time that was the case, when encryption was a munition regulated by ITAR.)
Rather, politicians are under the impression that it is, or should be, possible to have encryption that protects against anyone except their own government, that that's something they should get to ask for in the first place, and that that's just as good as un-broken encryption. None of those things are true, but good luck telling a politician that something necessarily needs to be beyond their control in order to function correctly.
The first amendment is actually far more strongly defended than the second. It's settled law at this point that exceptions to the first amendment must pass strict scrutiny, which means that there must be a compelling government interest in play, the restriction must be narrowly tailored to protect just that interest, and the restriction must be the least restrictive way possible to protect that interest. In practice, few laws pass strict scrutiny. In contrast, courts are still hashing out which level of scrutiny must be used when deciding second amendment cases.
> This -- until people realise that their online banking is not secure without encryption.
For some time, only online banking was allowed to use strong encryption on the web. There was a special kind of certificate, which could be issued only to financial organizations, which told browsers they were allowed to use strong cipher suites.
(It's my experience that people are more worried about their money than their dick pics.)
For one thing, most people have at least some money, while the desire to photograph one's genitals (and especially, after having done so, to keep the results private) is relatively rare.
First of all, assault rifles are not on the open market in the U.S. and haven't been for quite some time.
U.S. armed violence has a lot more to it than the availability of weapons; statistics are easy to misinterpret as well, since they're really just the proportion of violent crimes that are committed with one particular tool.
Here in Canada, we have higher instance of violence with knives, but unsurprisingly almost the same proportion of violence with guns, despite fairly hefty controls.
The U.S. really just seems to have more violent crime in general than many other countries, and my understanding is that this has been true since well before anyone else had harsh restrictions on the legal ownership and use of firearms.
> I have read some arguments about private protection against excessive government excesses, but I don't really buy it.
The theme of the article is these excesses; if you're not making the connection here, you're never going to make it. Also, incidentally, that's the reason it's in the constitution; I hear that it's an important document over there, but what would I know?
The other good reason for widespread private ownership of firearms is protection against occupation by an invading force, which history has shown to be an unpopular tactic; though perhaps this is not comparable. IIRC the imperial Japanese even stated this as why they weren't interested in occupying U.S. soil.
I once read that the largest standing army on the planet is in the U.S. on the opening day of deer season. Not sure if that's factually accurate but it does sound formidable.
Consequently the best firearm a guerrilla fighter can own is a high powered hunting rifle with a good scope. Also, the average hunting rifle sold in the U.S. is better than the sniper rifles we recovered in Iraq. Nothing is more demoralizing to an invading force than snipers, except perhaps anti-personnel mines.
Are all those rifle owners regular active hunters? How many of the hunters possess military caliber marksmanship? Stalking a deer through a forest and sniping members of an invading enemy both involve shooting rifles at moving targets. Being holed up in a sniper's nest during a shooting war and taking out human targets that are aware of your presence and either shooting back directly or trying to relay your position to better placed or equipped comrades and all the while moving fast and erratically would be extremely challenging for non military trained folk, hunters and otherwise.
More significantly, which countries do you think are in a position to attack the lower 48 states? Canada and Mexico. Can't see that happening any time soon. Sadly, an American on American conflict seems far more likely than a foreign invasion, but even that would require a a civil society and social order break down of unprecedented scale.
| Being holed up in a sniper's nest during a shooting war and taking out human targets that are aware of your presence and either shooting back directly or trying to relay your position to better placed or equipped comrades and all the while moving fast and erratically"
I'm just going to compare murder rates between Canada and US. Murder is harder to fudge. Using data from different years. Maybe that invalidates the conclusion, but I'm guessing it holds in general.
> Here in Canada, we have higher instance of violence with knives, but unsurprisingly almost the same proportion of violence with guns, despite fairly hefty controls.
Firearm homicide in the US per 100k: 3.55 [1]
Firearm homicide in Canada per 100k: 0.51 [1]
Homicide rate in the US per 100k: 4.7 [2]
Homicide rate in Canada per 100k: 1.6 [2]
Proportion of homicides from firearms in the US: 3.55/4.7 = 76%
Proportion of homicides from firearms in Canada: 0.51/1.6 = 32%
Not sure what to make of the numbers. But it doesn't seem like Canada has "the same proportion of violence with guns".
That you can so easily switch between murder and homicide makes the numbers really easy to fudge to most people who don't consider the differences between the two.
Simply put, homicide can be constructed to include suicides as well as accidental deaths. While these are issues with guns, they aren't the same issue as murder and should be treated differently (consider how often you see "pool related homicides" when discussing accidental drownings of children). Even if one was going to include them, then they should be clear when they are using terminology that is not only often misunderstood by readers but which has been knowingly used by others to mislead.
This is not to say that these other issues should be ignored. Having a gun in the home is more likely to make a suicide attempt result in death and that is an issue that should be discussed and dealt with. But it should be done so openly and recognizing it is a separate, though related, issue.
The problem is that you people like to extrapolate from one small scenario where the law will work without considering the greater practicality or long-term effectiveness of the law. The scenarios ignore basic facts about humans and technology. The simple fact is humans are resourceful and criminals have proven to be very dedicated.
Consider two things,
a) Regarding:
> in particular, it would take a lot to convince me that private ownership of assault rifles is anything but bad news.
The technological different between an 'assault rifle' and a semi-automatic hunting rifle is very small. As Cody Wilson has demonstrated, with a few 3d-printed parts you can turn a simple rifle - which is already restricted by law from being an assault rifle - into a fully blown assault rifle with a relatively small amount of technical knowledge.
The same was true for decades with anyone with metal machining skills.
So how much of a difference will it make if the tech available is merely restricted and not banned? If you can easily modified the technology?
b) The proposed encryption laws must insist that they won't interfere with American corporations from creating, selling, and exporting encryption to valid purchasers. The development of better-and-better encryption will not stop. It will still be one of Americas greatest exported technologies. An industry the US dominates (software).
So now taking that into consideration, will it be feasible to stop criminals from getting access to encryption?
Similar to encryption, America is the largest exporter of weapons in the world - unlike the UK or Scandinavian countries.
The simple fact is that there will be a huge market of both weapons and people (with specialized-skills) which will leak their guns/knowledge onto the black market. Combine that with the internet and decentralized tech and you have a very challenging regulation environment.
At best, it will be become yet another 'arms race' between criminals/police that is ultimately a net-negative investment for society (see: drugs).
> The same was true for decades with anyone with metal machining skills.
This. Also consider there are people with machine shops all over the country that make AR-15's from scratch. These are so-called "custom" firearms. Would we have to go around shutting down all machine shops if we outlawed "black" (named for the blueing) guns?
I just wanted to throw that in there for variety and because the existing controls don't actually stop the problem (I don't deny that they may help). Any place that still has guns in some form can still have those kinds of incidents. The guy at Sandy Hooke used someone else's legally obtained gun. Or in other words, the previous attempts to legislate away the problem didn't work in that case. There are other less controversial examples, but they don't come to mind as quickly.
I am not american either, so what? you completely disregard that any handgun, including these mythical "assault rifles" (which is stupid term by definition, it's usage which defines purpose, so why there aren't any assault pistols?) is just a tool, needing a trained hand to be used. as described below, automatic weapons are not purchasable for civilians, only their modified versions that allow single shot per trigger pull, thus making them effectively small caliber hunting rifles. If you need those, only with special hard-to-get permits, or you need to join the army (and kill few poor people for free)
if you want to stop some crazy people killing with these "assault guns" (why not called home defense guns?), you should focus on removing given dangerous individual from society, and not trying remove their access to weapons. Anything can be used to kill, including scissors, saw, pipe, baseball, knife or just good old pure hands. with current logic, all these things should get outlawed too.
No statistics in hand, but I am damn sure the amount of people killed by legally purchased "assault rifles" compared to say hit & run with cars is neglible. with similar logic I say ban cars! (and it would do so much good in other ways...)
P.S. one last thing - pro-gun-ban people completely disregard gun shooting as a means for hunting and as a fun activity at range. Many weapons, including mentioned AR-15 (civilian version of popular M16) will never be shot outside shooting range. Why use higher caliber guns instead of some puny .22? Because it's more fun!
Ah wait, we're talking maybe to same people that banned almost harmless marihuana and happily kept tobacco and alcohol roaming free on markets...
DISCLAIMER: I never owned any handgun that would require any form of registration, yet before having strong statements about what should/shouldn't be banned, I at least educate myself. Gun ban laws are, apart for some corner cases, just pure crowd idiocy and hypocrisy.
> including scissors, saw, pipe, baseball, knife or just good old pure hands
All the things you listed require close distance, physical contact, possibility of attacker responding, and almost literally: blood on your hands. Any range weapon provides distance, more "comfort", and a higher degree of safety for the attacker.
If we can reduce that disconnect from what people are doing, then why not?
I am Australian and mostly agree with the gun laws in my country.
>P.S. one last thing - pro-gun-ban people completely disregard gun shooting as a means for hunting and as a fun activity at range. Many weapons, including mentioned AR-15 (civilian version of popular M16) will never be shot outside shooting range. Why use higher caliber guns instead of some puny .22? Because it's more fun!
From my understanding, removing these guns will save lives, at least one. Why is having fun more important than peoples lives?
I genuinely do not understand. Things like Marihuana only `hurt` the user for the most part where guns, if they hurt someone, is almost always not the user.
I'm a Brazilian, and I completely supported the creation of the gun control laws we currently have.
That said, I think our data is clear enough. As soon as we took the guns out of the streets, violence started to increase in a much bigger rate, and we are now almost in a civil war situation. Looks like the US stereotypical idea of a good men with a gun being the best deterrence to a bad men with a gun bears some truth.
The UK and Australia had the opposite experiences. But they are islands and already had fairly strict gun control. May I suggest that perhaps Brazil's efforts to systematically eliminate guns may have been less successful than anticipated.
The vast majority of gun violence in the US is gang / drug based. We have a violence problem, not specifically a gun problem. Thats due to a number of issues like poverty, lack of education, drugs, and the cycle of poorer people going in and out of prison.
Excluding suicides, the rest is what I consider the cost of our country owning guns. We will never have the utopia of zero gun violence with 300,000,000 privately owned firearms in this country and the 2nd amendment isn't changing anytime soon.
What we could reduce though are the problems I outlined first. Poverty, education, drug use, and the jail cycle. Those are harder problems than just pointing at guns though, so they don't get suggested as much.
It doesn't matter whether you "buy" the arguments about why gun ownership is necessary. It's a guaranteed right codified in our country's founding document, end of discussion.
I think you mean an "Amendment" e.g. a "Change" to your countries founding document, subject to interpretation that pretty much throws out the first half. If you are going by the founding document, then you wouldn't have the rights anyway (and a hell of a lot less in general)
And if amendments are permanent, well, then prohibition should still be in force.
The amendments don't grant rights; they limit government. That's why we call them inalienable rights. You cant "amend away" these things. Of course that doesnt stop power from trying.
Preamble to the (confusingly named) Bill of Rights:
The Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution.
> The amendments don't grant rights; they limit government.
They limit government by defining, in the fundamental law, rights that are prortected against government encroachment. Those aren't mutually exclusive alternatives, one is the means by which the other is achieved.
> That's why we call them inalienable rights. You cant "amend away" these things.
The quasi-religious belief that there are rights that exist "in nature" prior to law and which all governments are obliged to observe is a popular one -- and was with the founders -- and part of the basis for the use of the term "inalienable right". However, the exact parameters of such "inalienable" rights are far from uniformly agreed even among those who subscribe to the belief that they exist. You absolutely can alter which of the rights that some people believe to be inalienable are protected by a government through amendments; note, for instance, that quite a lot of people from the time of the founding through (and no doubt past) the time when this was, in law, settled at the point of a bayonet by the 13th Amendment, thought that the widely-accepted-as-inalienable right to property included the right to hold human beings -- and particularly for whites to hold blacks -- as personal property.
> You absolutely can alter which of the rights that some people believe to be inalienable are protected by a government through amendments
Yes and no. The point of the "inalienable rights" was that they were given to people by God, and therefore nobody - not king or president, not parliament or congress - has the authority to take them away. They may have the power to declare that we don't have them, but they don't have the legitimate authority to do so.
But now we (as a society) no longer believe in God, and no longer believe that we are made in His image. When that changed, "inalienable rights" (in the original meaning) died - except for those who still believe in God as creator of humans.
The concept of inalienable rights does not require supernatural powers for validation. Saying we have these rights merely by being born human is exactly as logical as relying upon creatures whose existence cannot be proven. Nothing has been taken away by society's turn from mysticism. In fact, I feel that saying my natural right to speak, to defend myself, to live privately as I choose, is much stronger than if it is simply derived from a posited creator. I feel these rights are clearly mine by birth, and they have never been merely granted to me, not even by a currently-favored fairy tale.
> The concept of inalienable rights does not require supernatural powers for validation.
Sure, it can stand as a moral axiom on its own (and, heck, even when it is used in the context of a supernatural power, that's not really a logical validation/justification, simply another element of the story, and they still are independent moral axioms.)
OTOH, it makes the fact that they are moral axioms and not grounded in anything else a bit more obvious than the "God says so" version. Its pretty easy for people to reject bare moral axioms that other people offer.
But why does being born give you the natural right to speak, to defend yourself, and to live privately as you choose? Looking back at the last few thousand years of human history, I see no basis for saying that those are inherent human rights that are yours simply because you were born.
A deist would say that humans inherently have those rights (from God), but that human governments and societies have illegitimately suppressed them. You (I suspect) would also say that human governments and societies have illegitimately suppressed them. But given that humans often have not enjoyed those rights, what basis (other than simply asserting that it is so) do you have for claiming that humans have those rights?
I gather that you find that argument convincing, but I suspect it's because you already accept the conclusion. To someone who does not already accept your conclusion, your argument is not likely to be very convincing.
> Do you think some people are born as subjects?
Yes, they are. Look at history; even look around today. It's not right, it's not moral, but it clearly is true that it happens.
You appear to be confusing having ones natural rights violated with not having them. As if the subject has somehow lost the right to rebel because they are oppressed. Given your initial question of "why does being born give you the natural right" it's hard to understand how on one hand you agree that being a subject is (obviously) not moral but at the same time don't accept the reason that all people have natural rights because humans should have the same natural rights (because as you noted, anything less is not moral). Pointing out that some are oppressed in practice misses the point.
I think I'm confusing you, but I don't think I'm confused.
I agree with you that people have inalienable or natural rights. However, I claim that your position does not give you an adequate basis for believing that. And your position certainly does not give you an adequate basis for persuading anyone who does not already accept it.
Perhaps I expressed this badly in my previous post, but that's what I'm trying to say.
I'm back with the signers of the Declaration of Independence: "endowed by their Creator". And that's why their inalienable - because nobody has the legitimate authority to supercede His giving of these rights.
Couldn't agree more. I was deliberately avoiding the creator angle, mostly because (I think) it's not necessary to believe in a creator to grok the morality of equal rights (oldmanjay said it better). Perhaps I misunderstood your comment about deists. I sincerely appreciate the discussion.
Not only governments do excessive excesses. In some places the government's caring hand might not be very present, in which case criminals being the only dispensers of firearms has some interesting (and predictable) consequences.
I find that most of the people calling for the control (and ultimate abolition) of gun ownership have had the luxury of never living in a place where there is a real threat of danger, either from animals or other people.
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but as a non-American this one jumps out at me. I don't think it fits the rest of your argument, adding more control and checks for something as dangerous as gun ownership is a good thing.. in particular, it would take a lot to convince me that private ownership of assault rifles is anything but bad news.
I have read some arguments about private protection against excessive government excesses, but I don't really buy it.