Colorado’s Democratic-controlled House on Sunday passed a bill that would ban the sale and transfer of semiautomatic firearms, a major step for the legislation after roughly the same bill was swiftly killed by Democrats last year.
The bill, which passed on a 35-27 vote, is now on its way to the Democratic-led state Senate. If it passes there, it could bring Colorado in line with 10 other states — including California, New York and Illinois — that have prohibitions on semiautomatic guns.
But even in a state plagued by some of the nation’s worst mass shootings, such legislation faces headwinds.
Colorado’s political history is purple, shifting blue only recently. The bill’s chances of success in the state Senate are lower than they were in the House, where Democrats have a 46-19 majority and a bigger far-left flank. Gov. Jared Polis, also a Democrat, has indicated his wariness over such a ban.
Right or wrong it’s a constitutional right for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with hunting.
Similar to GOP and abortion, dems need to drop this fight. Let’s fix healthcare and save/improve more lives than almost everything else you could spend time on.
You’re right. It has to due with being able to call up a militia. I don’t see any of these gun stores asking for militia papers before selling.
Militia didn’t mean the same thing back then. It meant “any able bodied adult to be called up at a moments notice.”
There’s also a (not surprisingly) racist background to the 2nd as well:
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers-the-racist-roots-of-the-2nd-amendment
“It was in response to the concerns coming out of the Virginia ratification convention for the Constitution, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason, that a militia that was controlled solely by the federal government would not be there to protect the slave owners from an enslaved uprising. And … James Madison crafted that language in order to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias — and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts. … The Second Amendment really provided the cover, the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to be able to put down these uprisings.”
Context also matters. The authors also thought that a standing army was part of the park to tyranny, opting for a militia system in place of it. The purpose of the Second Amendment, by its own words, is to ensure that nothing could legally stand in the way of regular and irregular militia being able to protect the fledgling nation.
As it stands now, the Second Amendment is an anachronism that’s sole purpose for existing is no longer applicable. It needs to be re-evaluated and amended to fit the needs of a nation that has both a standing army and a problem with civilians shooting each other (police are civilians too).
The constitution was specifically written to allow a standing army to exist. Not having one was a major failure of the articles of confederation. The second ammendment doesn’t exist for some obscure military purpose, it exists to give people the right to bear arms.
This is factually incorrect.
Casual reading of contextual documents by the authors of the Constitution makes it very clear that the reason for the time limit is the belief that standing armies ought not to exist and are tools of tyranny. The context of the Second Amendment is not done obscure military one, it is blatant in the Amendment’s text that it concerns militia, which was the founders’ alternative to a standing army. In that context, yes, it does require that all people be able to bear arms because the irregular militia was basically anyone capable of shouldering a musket.
However, as the country did move to have a standing army and police forces, the militia system is mostly obsolete. The closest thing to a militia in the country in modern times is the national guard but, they are closer to a “select militia” that was also looked upon unfavorably by the founders.
I’m not placing a judgement on the Second Amendment as being right or wrong but that it was written for a context that is mismatched with our own. It needs to be re-evaluated and updated to account for the difference in context in order to have a logical place in the law of the country.
The US has always had a standing army, so even the people that wrote the constitution voted to keep a standing army. The notion that it was intended to not have a standing army is a wilful misrepresentation.
You know what? I don’t think that you’re correct but am not a historian, though I did study a bit of early US history in university. Fortunately, there are historians that we can ask to figure this out. Will edit with a post if they’re willing to comment on the issue.
I don’t think that’s actually what we would want. Militias at this point would just be indoctrination machines.
Like public schools aren’t already?
Agreed! That’s why we need to send more kids to CATHOLIC SCHOOLS!
I like how you specify public schools, as if private schools have no bias. 😂
Unless someone runs an LGBTQIA+ militia and pays for range days and safety classes every month, most militias people look to join are run by obese Right wing nutcases.
I wish beyond wishing that O’rourke would have just shut the fuck up and deferred about coming after people’s guns in Texas. I really wonder if he could’ve squeaked a victory and Texas would be quite different today. Guns are a losing issue. Even more so than abortion or ‘the gays!’, guns bring single-issue voters out from everywhere.
Yes, it was definitely a self-inflicted wound, or maybe a tacit acknowledgement that the campaign was doomed anyway, before the public numbers made it obvious. There is a career path to being on the record with that position, though not in statewide political office in Texas.
I grew up in Florida and lived most of my adult life in Texas, and guns have always been a presence. I still own several, but they’ve been locked in my father-in-law’s garage for several years now; I’m ambivalent about what to do with them, and I don’t find any joy in “target practice” or fetishizing them as a hobby. Skeet shooting with cheap bird-shot might still be pretty fun, but my single-shot 12ga will be perfectly adequate for that if I ever take it back up.
Chronic gun violence is a tragic, horrific thing that is a fact of life in the US, which is unique among stable democracies. It should be low-hanging fruit to regulate guns very heavily, but due to weird quirks of history and even fuckin’ grammar, it’s not. The only solace is that while gun violence in this country should be near zero, like it is in almost every other stable country in the world, it’s not actually a daily threat for most people. It’s a statistically significant cause of death for people who shouldn’t normally be dying, but it’s possible to overstate the impact of the actual numbers. It’s still rare, though unlike the other equally rare things on the list (e.g. cancer, heart attacks), it’s completely preventable, in theory, and therefore even sadder and more frustrating.
So theory is nice, but the history and legal framework around guns in this country means anything beyond baby steps is a political nonstarter and very nearly as hard as “curing cancer”. While I acknowledge it literally costs lives not to act, it will cost more, including more from gun violence, over the medium term, to campaign in ways that lose close elections to people who would love to dismantle the already inadequate social safety net and encourage “old timey” open racists and even worse foreign policy than we have now. Those who feel passionately about guns should not be silent, but if you’re running a surprisingly competitive campaign in a stubbornly red state, you should consider the political implications before committing to unrealistic goals that piss off people who could be persuaded to vote for you if they don’t think guns are your priority.
Yeah, except that’s also not the US.
The other stable countries in the world have things like much lower rates of income inequality, single-payer health care, solid funding for education at all levels so that people aren’t going into eye-watering levels of debt, and so on. And the countries that do suck in many of the same ways that the US does also have staggeringly high rates of violent crime in general, if not an significant gun crime.
Yeah, this is something I stand firmly behind. Fundamentally, our issue is social and cultural. We are armed, and so when we lash out, that has greater impact.
That doesn’t mean we should disarm. We are armed for good reason. But we should address the underlying cultural issues.
One hundred percent agree.
It is my CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to own a ROCKET LAUNCHER! You CAN’T Discriminate between Firearms! Also TRANS PEOPLE shouldn’t get Free Speech!
I agree with you wholeheartedly.