Federal Court Finds California Magazine Ban Violates the Second Amendment

I'm also somewhat conscious of the second two words, "law" and "enforcement". They are personnel with a specific professional role to fulfill which the average citizen does not. They have legal powers and allowances in their toolkit which support the fulfillment of that role. They have access to other resources which, again, a civilian does not.

By your logic the average civilian should have the right to own the means to detain and question a suspect, as the cells, legal powers, administration and infrastructure required for that task are, after all, part and parcel of the toolkit of civilian law enforcement. They should be able to drive in a manner which disregards the law if they see fit, they should have full powers of arrest, they should have the ability to gain a warrant to enter a premises or the right to do so anyway with probable cause.

The presence of a police force is linked to a safer society, the presence of civilian guns is not. Incidentally the presence of a minimally armed police force is (counter intuitively, but nonetheless true) on balance of the evidence more effective than a more militaristic one. There are two sides in an arms race and raising the stakes also raises the consequences. Reducing them has time and again shown to be the safest option.

spot....maybe I need to remind you...."minimally armed" means different things in different countries. Maybe you don't know much about the criminal history of the US but bad guys were often armed better than the cops, the trend really kicking in after WWI and the development of portable fully automatic weapons. So in your country where few bad guys have guns of any description a cop with any gun is "minimally armed" but armed enough to deal with most bad guys.

In the US many bad guys carry some high-octane guns and have HOLY SHIT high-octane guns in their vehicles and homes. Thus for some situations a cop with a standard hand gun will not get much compliance. Go figure!

So what looks like "militarization" to a society (like yours) where the average person has little actual hands-on experience with guns looks rational to the average person where criminal gun violence is a daily or nearly daily thing. It's a matter of perspective.

Civilians can face the same threats as police. The difference being , of course, that it's the police officers' job to go into harm's way regularly and often. Nevertheless, a civilian can encounter a similar threat at any time, totally unexpectedly. After all, we're the ones who have to call the police in when the threat pops up. If we can.

That's why my HOA is currently pooling funds for our first fighter jet.

Those would be the fully portable automatic weapons people never really got hold of because we had a much more sensible system in place and therefore no foothold available for a gun lobby to control our politics?

Seriously though I do get your point, it was the reason I left "minimally armed" vague because you're right it does mean different things in different places. However arming civilians does nothing to assist the police, it simply raises the ante for violent encounters and thus the likelihood of deaths occurring. That in turn increases the risk to law enforcement who are having to deal with criminals who instead of using the bare fists or (yes, knives) are in what effectively amounts to an arms race with homeowners and the police themselves.

Escalate your home defence measures and you incentivise an escalation in the use of serious violence by criminals. It's an incredibly irresponsible way of dealing with violent crime and exactly why the US has such an awful murder rate.

And no, we're nowhere near getting even within an order of magnitude of that rate even with our knife epidemic.

okay let me get this straight:

"Escalate your home defence measures and you incentivise an escalation in the use of serious violence by criminals. It's an incredibly irresponsible way of dealing with violent crime and exactly why the US has such an awful murder rate."

If I get a weapon sufficient to protect myself from the local criminals it only encourages them to get more powerful weapons?
So by that line of reasoning if I deescalate my home defense weaponry the criminals will do the same? So it's better for society if I sacrifice my safety to show the criminals that they can still rape, rob and pillage using less deadly means? Hey, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

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He won't have to. She just accidentally shot herself right between her smokey eyes because she had her booger hooker on the trigger.

And if by some chance she pulls that trigger right next to her head and misses her eardrum is going to explode.

Enjoy your theory.

The practise is I'm much safer than you, because that's the way it works in the real world away from the Rambo fantasy the 2nd has become.

In what way was that a fantasy @Captain X ?

That you are safer being disarmed during a home invasion? Pretty obvious I should think.

oh SNAP! Good call though. Maybe she needs "a hitch in the service" to teach her safe weapons handling! Then again when my son was in army AIT a female National Guard soldier had two accidental discharges (blanks thank goodness) and threw her weapon at a bee or wasp that was flying near her. The old Superman approach - when they ran out of bullets they threw the gun at him! She just skipped the shooting and went right into the throwing.

It's actually the other way around, Spot - the bad guys already have 15-shot 9mms, therefore we need to have them too. What NY, NJ and CA have done is put us defenders at a disadvantage to crooks who don't care about mag cap laws.

thanks Forbin! Now spot261 is going to give a 20 minute lecture (filled with impressive scientific sounding terms) on why you are mistaken and how the armed criminals are only responding toward your raw aggression. If you would just run over all your weapons with a steamroller then home invasion, car jacking, store robbery, and plain old fashioned homicide rates would plummet from coast-to-coast. At a minimum every level of law enforcement in New Jersey would be made null-and-void!

Matter-of-fact criminals wouldn't have to be armed with so much as a pointed stick if their victims would just cooperate fully with their demands!
We should all carry razor blades just to slit our throats on demand, so criminals won't be forced to kill us if the robbery goes south.

Who specified "during a home invasion"?

I'm making an overall statement about the safety of a society which doesn't rely on armed civilians to deter crime, dumb rep by all means but you can't avoid the simple fact that the numbers bear me out.

They had them in Australia too.

Look what happened.

Yeah, that word "confiscation" right there in the chart ain't gonna fly here.
And a lot of us have trouble with "buyback" as well - like, what do you mean 'back'? - like the gov't owned it in the first place? Will I get market value? Nuh-uh.

binary thinking much? There's a lot of ground between exercising your right to self defense in a nation where many criminals are armed and a "Rambo" fantasy. The reason you think you are "much safer" is because most of your criminals are not armed. But granted when it comes to gun violence you might be right! You have a .00001 percent chance of getting shot whereas I have a .00002 percent chance of getting shot. I'd say we are about even on getting struck by lightning though.

I have higher chance of that, being agnostic.

Yet miles apart on the chances on being murdered.

I don't care whether it's a gun that's used to do the deed, societies with those guns are more dangerous across the board than societies without. The mere presence of those guns in society escalates the severity of violent crime whether they are actually used by the assailant, the victim or not at all. They don't reduce the chances of violence, nor do they increase it, they just increase the stakes when it does happen so one way or another you're much more likely to die as a consequence

Removing those guns reduces the risk of a violent death, which is exactly what has happened in Australia despite all the people raising exactly the same objections and making the same dire predictions as you are. The wave of gun fuelled violent crime didn't happen, people didn't become helpless prey to marauding gangs of armed criminals.

If that weren't the case, if having guns did in fact hold up under scrutiny as a valid and effective deterrent to violent crime I'd quite happily cede the point, but the fact is that they don't. It just seems like they should and well meaning people such as yourself defend the mantra that they're a valuable and necessary part of society when in fact they're actually increasing the danger they're supposed to reduce.

Violent crime didn't stop, but it did become less severe which is exactly the point I keep making. Guns don't cause violence, they don't prevent it either. They do, however, increase the societal norm for the severity of violence. It's the same thing that tends to happen in practise when advanced nations implement gun bans, murder rates drop regardless of the theories people put forward to the contrary.

I know, which is a crying shame and exactly what is being illustrated by this case. The US political system is heavily influenced by commercial entities which have no place in the corridors of power at all. The gun lobby saw the 2nd and played a blinder rebranding it as a marketing ploy. It's a damned effective marketing ploy but like many such ploys it is based on a persuasive but demonstratably false premise, in this case the idea that armed civilians deter violent crime.

https://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/armed-citizen/

Want to see something really interesting? This is from the Australian government, BTW:

No it most certainly does not. Did I say anything about the power of arrest? Did I say anything about speeding car chases?

Why no, I did not. I said, "Every adult citizen, except those prohibited via due process, should be able to purchase the same tools used by civilian law enforcement to defend themselves." I specifically limited my statement to defensive tools, and the lawful use thereof. So, you didn't read what I said or you're intentionally misrepresenting my position.

I think you may have put the wrong graphs up?


Those show a decrease in both usage and deaths resulting from guns and knives, which sits very neatly alongside the decrease in murder rates.

Murders are down dramatically.
Use of guns down significantly, as are consequent deaths
Use of knives down moderately, as are consequent deaths.

All of those things have reduced over the period the buyback took effect.

How does that cast my position in doubt?

And using a cell to detain a violent suspect isn't defensive? Of course it is.

When I use a seclusion room (essentially the same thing, give or take) it's very much defensive, I'm putting a big heavy door in between a volatile, dangerous person and others to whom I have a duty of care (including myself). I'm putting a signature to that decision and putting the legal processes in place which differentiate it from an act of illegal detention. Once they stop being a danger the door is opened.

Likewise when you as a police officer put a violent suspect in a cell you did so because that was safer than keeping them in a place where they could do harm to you or your colleagues whilst in custody. That door is a defensive tool, as is the legal power to use it.

If I use my legal powers to detain someone under the mental health act, that can be a defensive act where I'm safeguarding the well being of the public. That legislation is (or can legitimately be) a defensive tool where the rationale is to reduce the danger of violence.

Those are all defensive tools, both the legal powers and the physical means to employ them.

Should all civilians have access to them?

They show that knives have always killed more people in Australia than guns. They also show a very gradual decrease that goes back to before the "buyback."

Also, thought I'd Post this here.

okay spot261 clear this up for me......you are saying (okay and every single person on the planet except for US citizens of course) that just the mere presence of guns in a society makes people commit more murders with weapons other than guns? I would think people are murdering people with weapons other than guns because they don't have access to guns - thus a drive-by shooting with five people shot becomes a walk-by shooting with two people stabbed for example. Thus the murder rate would drop. What am I missing here?

Possibly you didn't read what I posted. I made it quite clear that I wasn't just talking about deaths directly attributable to guns. Yes the trends were downwards already, but the fact they carried on going down after the populace disarmed should give you pause for thought. In the scenario you put forward where disarming would leave you helpless at the mercy of gangs of murderers and rapists there should have been an increase, not a continued decrease.

Couple that with the fact that there was a notable drop in murders overall which has continued to this day and you are now looking at a situation where they have a murder rate in the order of a third of yours. It's still quite high for a developed nation, but yours is, by contrast, absurdly high. That's pretty hard to square with the idea guns are keeping you safer.


so in answer to @oldfella1962 ....sort of.

The pattern holds around the world, countries with permissive gun laws by and large have no more or less violent crimes committed overall compared to their peers, but the chances of dying in those crimes is greater - regardless of whether the actual murder implement was a gun. Europe by and large has more non lethal violent crimes reported than the US, but less murders. Think about that, what do you call an assault which goes so far as to result in a dead body?

Clue: it's no longer an assault

It could be that people are more acclimatised to the idea of lethal force, it could be due to fear of reprisals from surviving victims, it could be due to the known or suspected presence of guns raising the stakes when violence of any kind is employed.

I'll freely admit I'm speculating there but it's speculation about ways to explain the facts, facts which simply don't fit the "good guys with guns" narrative. The US has a ridiculously high murder rate for a developed nation, an order of magnitude higher than her disarmed cousins. Of course there's the chicken and egg question there, but that becomes hard to maintain when you have a clear example of a major nation with an established gun culture disarming and seeing such a dramatically positive outcome and no sudden anarchy where criminals take control of the streets.

@Captain X,

Ok, so I read your link and it was admittedly very interesting.

In no way did it actually have any bearing on the point being made, but it was informative.

What it established was that someone competent with a gun is likely to reduce the risk in the event of an active shooter event, which is fair enough. I don't think anyone posting in this thread has claimed otherwise. However consider these disclaimers from the article:

So no domestic incidents, no gang related incidents, no incidents where the killer used a weapon other than a gun and no comparison on the likelihood of those attacks occurring compared to national jurisdictions where guns are prohibited or tightly controlled.

That means no professional or lifestyle criminals, no crimes of passion, no armed home invasions or aggravated burglaries, no scenarios where the armed citizen was incapacitated (check point 4 - that's a biggie which is quietly let slide), no assessment of the impact on overall murder rates, merely the impact on what are colloquially termed "mass shootings".

Remember here a key fact.

Those mass shootings are almost exclusively committed using legally obtained weapons, weapons which wouldn't have been available in the first place in most of the developed world. In other words the best that article can establish is that legal guns have a reasonable (but far from perfect) success rate in reducing the impact of (but not preventing) one specific class of crime which they are the cause of in the first place.

So yes, I'll grant you there's a good chance an armed civilian will lessen the death toll at a mass shooting, but without armed citizens those events by and large wouldn't happen anyway.

spot - maybe some countries have more people that are just plain meaner and more vicious in general and have no respect for human life. In England some street toughs might knock you out cold, breaking your nose in the process and call it a day. In the US they might knock you out cold, breaking your nose in the process then continue to kick you in the head until you are in a coma and crippled for life or six feet under.

This is but one reason why all your "it works in X and Y countries, so it will work in the US" talk is just that......talk. You might fool yourself or your peers but you obviously don't really the "not giving a bit of a fuck" attitude that seems to be hard wired in many US residents for various reasons.

We are not a people who believe in moderation for the most part. It's bigger, better, louder, stronger, faster 100 percent of the time. "Go big or go home" tends to push things further than they should go - not in all cases but when things do get out of hand they get way, way out of hand here.

The US has also had a steady decline for something like 30 years. Even with the mass shootings. And gun ownership has gone up in the meantime.

Really? Where? Because I'm not seeing that on the graph. It looks like a steady decline that has remained more or less the same since even before 1996.

It kind of depends on what weasel words are used. Kind of like how there tends to be a hyper focus on "gun deaths" which are usually padded with suicides and accidents to artificially inflate the numbers, when it would be far more accurate to look at violent crime overall. And as noted in the graph I posted, homicides committed with knives was always higher than those with guns, yet the focus was on guns.

Because that's what the topic was about for that study. Everyone trying to get more gun control laws passed has focused on mass shootings, and they all tend to ignore shootings which were stopped by the presence of another armed person. This study illustrates that they are wrong to do so. Further, this would extend to other examples of personal defense, which is precisely very much what the the Second Amendment is about - the ability to defend one's self. It's rather absurd that you'd try to argue that armed civilians would work in the case of a mass shooting but not other examples. But at least you got something out of the article, I guess.

Which is why so many mass shootings take place at "gun free" zones, right?