Quote:
Originally Posted by mapuc
Would it be seen as altering it, if the government or the President put some restriction into it.
Such as
Every American has the right the bear arms but only up to a certain caliber
and/or
Each American has the right to bear arm but only one per citizens
Markus
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There is precedence for this. There are limits to the types of firearms that people can own. Machine guns and most types of artillery are all regulated by the government. So what you wrote is possible and if done properly might get past the SCotUS.
But
Who decides what is an acceptable caliber .22LR can be quite deadly. Is a .22lr more or less dangerous than a .32acp? I would opine that the .22lr is more dangerous. So I don't think that limiting the caliber would do anything.
I am not sure that restricting ownership to one firearm would accomplish much. If a bad guy wants to kill people, only having one firearm won't be that much of a hindrance.
The problem with some of these shooters is the same problem we have with terrorists. Our law enforcement structure is designed around the presumption that a criminal wants to get away with his or her crime. This places a lot of restrictions on the criminal and allows us to implement protective schema.
But, like a terrorist, what do we do to protect ourselves from a shooter who either does not care if they survive or deliberately wants not to survive the crime?
The answer may be that we really can't protect ourselves against someone who wants to kill us and who does not want to survive the encounter.
Which gets back to my premise of trying to understand why someone would choose to kill strangers before killing themselves. We have to understand this abhorrent mindset if we are going to defend it.
We, as a nation and a culture, have to come to a compromise between privacy and safety. Currently, our medical history is protected and kept private. There may be indicators in people's medical history that would tip off the authorities that a person may be at risk.
Concerning mental health records, how can we balance privacy with safety? This is not an easy question nor one that should be solved by an extreme measure. The risk of abuse is considerable.
One thing we can't have is an attitude of "everything necessary to protect the public" as that can easily lead to a police state.
After the fact, it is always easy to see the "red flags" to the point where some complain, "why didn't someone do something, it was clear!". Well absent the advantage of hindsight, finding these red flags is not always easy.
The problem is that in the US, we have about 50,000,000 gun owners who every single day of the year do not commit firearms related crimes. But we do have a hundred or so gun owners who do end up committing firearm related crimes.
How do we find the latter without infringing on the freedoms of the former?
The problem with "red flags" is that they are only diagnostic after the fact.
What we need are diagnostic indicators that we can use before the fact. Much easier written then done
It is easy when the criminal cooperates by posting "Next year I am going to kill everyone at my school". That's considerate of the criminal. But what about criminals that are not so considerate?
What indicators can we have that can serve as a tip that this one person out of 50,000,000 needs to be looked at?
It can't be a single indicator but would have to be a combination of indicators. Otherwise we will be wasting our time investigating people who won't commit firearm crimes and not get to those few that will.
The solution may be using AI, to continually sift through the various data sources and prioritize. This may be a cure much worse than the disease. I don't think there will be too many people eager to have such a schema. Especially at the federal level.
I wish I knew what the solution is. I also wish that people would stop saying that we are doing nothing. We are doing stuff. An argument may be made that we are not doing enough or what we are doing is wrong. Any of those may be true. But, at the state level, things are changing. At the federal level, the change is much slower... as it should be.
There is no single reason why people choose to kill other people. There is no single solution to this problem. Problems are always easy to solve if the solution is to get rid of people's rights and limit their freedom. I hope we never get to that mindset in the US.
In my opinion, we are focusing on the wrong issues. I wish I knew what the solutions (plural) would be. If I had the answer, I would not be wasting my time posting on a video game website, that's for sure
