General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRude Pundit: Once Upon a Time, the US Believed in Genuine Gun Control
The LBJ Quote is Cash Money.
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2016/06/once-upon-time-united-states-believed.html
Nearly fifty years ago, in the wake of the assassinations of MLK and RFK and not that long after JFK, there was a moment when the United States Congress actually considered, seriously, strict gun control laws. As part of an omnibus crime bill that was debated in June of 1968, shortly after Bobby Kennedy was shot dead, gun registration and licensing was on the table. It was a fascinating debate in the nation, with bizarro bedfellows, as well as organizations and the media taking stands that not only seem surprising now, but are considered downright un-American in many quarters.
One extraordinary moment was President Lyndon Johnson's message to Congress on gun control as the bill was being debated. "I propose, first, the national registration of every gun in America," Johnson said. "Registration will tell us how many guns there are, where they are, and in whose hands they are held." He also proposed licensing. And, in case anyone wanted to fuck with the man with the big dick, he continued, "Nothing in these proposals will impair the legitimate ownership or use of guns in this country...Nor are they threats to the mystique of manhood or to the heritage of our people...The only heritage that is harmed is the record of violent death and destruction that shames our history."
Preach it, LB
passiveporcupine
(8,175 posts)Shame, indeed!
yurbud
(39,405 posts)like "You give me what I want at home, and I'll give you your damn war."
jmg257
(11,996 posts)Huh...wonder why it didn't pass.
Lydia Leftcoast
(48,217 posts)But seriously, there was a window of opportunity after the assassinations.
I was in high school in the 1960s, and I recall our 12th grade social studies (a bit of poli sci, a bit of economics, a bit of sociology) teacher, a hunter, a Goldwater conservative, and a member of the American Legion, arguing for gun control.
A lot of people in Minnesota hunt and always have, and this particular teacher had deer strung up in the trees in his front yard every fall, but he said, "Why does anyone need a gun whose only purpose is to kill people?"
jmg257
(11,996 posts)There was a hunting editor for Outdoor Life magazine a few years ago who called ARs and AKs "terrorist rifles" and said they "had no place in hunting" in his blog.
He said that on Friday; by Monday he was fired due to the huge backlash from sportsman.
Times change. (Including the word spreading about things people don't like online, and their reaction to it.)
maxsolomon
(32,983 posts)fear is not a good reason for anything. starting a war, for example.
HOW do times change? 30 years of NRA BS is how these times have changed.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)and it keeps us from doing all kinds of stupid things.
Don't underestimate it.
maxsolomon
(32,983 posts)"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." - Frank Herbert
Thanks for illustrating the difference between those who believe they NEED firearms, and those who don't.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)Lifeguards, and fences around swimming pools for fear of drowning.
Speed limits, seat-belts, air bags, and infant car seats for fear of accidents.
Fire extinguishers and smoke detectors for fear of fires.
etc. etc. etc.
What a bunch of pussies came up with these.
maxsolomon
(32,983 posts)and there are people who let their fears override facts.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)And their reactions may be different, and not for you to justify for them.
There are "facts", which may become irrelevant, because not all situations are the same.
maxsolomon
(32,983 posts)that's pretty par for the DU Gun Debate.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)Including points about registration.
Cheers!
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)"And there is experience, which means their fears may be different then yours.."
Who then experienced a national gun confiscation whom you allege many gun owners are frightened of?
jmg257
(11,996 posts)I do however allege that many gun owners fear govt confiscation based on registration.
Angel Martin
(942 posts)beevul
(12,194 posts)CanonRay
(14,036 posts)Firearms should be licensed and registered and insured just like cars. I'm sick to death of these nonsense gun hamper arguments. Enough already. You've had your way for 30 years, with a toll of unending blood and death.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)With illegal gun running/high volume straw purchases.
Crepuscular
(1,057 posts)The Vietnam war and the Nixon presidency caused a sea change in this country, in terms of how much people trusted the government to look out for our best interests. The willingness to voluntarily surrender constitutional rights diminished as trust in the government declined.
maxsolomon
(32,983 posts)our other rights come with limits. even the 2nd is (currently) limited: we don't have automatic firearms (yes, I know you can get them if you jump through hoops), we don't have RPGs.
Crepuscular
(1,057 posts)everyone has an opinion and they are mostly irrelevant, unless you happen to be a member of the SC.
The attempts in LBJ's era to enact licensing and registration failed, as they likely will in this era.
maxsolomon
(32,983 posts)this era will end, too. wayne lapierre and his cursed ilk will die comfortable and rich in their beds, and this high tide of guns fever will ebb. it will take 30+ years, because it's taken 40 years to get to this point.
i won't see it probably, but i believe i will see this massacre exceeded. it's a competition for infamy amongst maladjusted young men at this point.
and the SC is going to change until Clinton. Heller v DC may not outlast it.
Crepuscular
(1,057 posts)the types of firearms in question will likely be obsolete to the point that restricting them will become moot.
As far as hopes that the court will overturn Heller, unlikely. And even if they did, believe it or not, civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons was legal prior to Heller and it's highly unlikely that even the most liberal court would rule otherwise.
The President acknowledges that the 2nd amendment is an individual right, I won't question his interpretation.
brentspeak
(18,290 posts)is completely irrelevant, as SCOTUS has never ruled that all attempts to license and register firearms are unconstitutional.
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)As with many other 5th amendment cases, felons and others prohibited from possessing firearms could not be compelled to incriminate themselves through registration.[1][2] The National Firearms Act was amended after Haynes to make it apply only to those who could lawfully possess a firearm. This eliminated prosecution of prohibited persons, such as criminals, and cured the self-incrimination problem. In this new form, the new registration provision was upheld. The court held: " To eliminate the defects revealed by Haynes, Congress amended the Act so that only a possessor who lawfully makes, manufactures, or imports firearms can and must register them", United States v. Freed, 401 U.S. 601 (1971).[3] The original Haynes decision continues to block state prosecutions of criminals who fail to register guns as required by various state law gun registration schemes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes_v._United_States
Emphasis added.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)If you weren't already barred from possessing weapons, and you failed to register one you possessed, you could be charged with failure to register.
In both cases the weapon could be easily determined to be un/registered or not, and if so to whom?
And taking away from the criminal/would-be criminal in both cases.
What's the downside?
DavidDvorkin
(19,404 posts)I suspect there's a correlation between adoration of guns and adoration of the military.
maxsolomon
(32,983 posts)during the Vietnam War?
i was born in 1963; I don't remember a time when the MIC didn't control our federal budget and (most of) our minds.
DavidDvorkin
(19,404 posts)It changed around the time of the Mexican-American War, but especially during the Civil War.
struggle4progress
(118,039 posts)By Ross Collins
History News Service, Summer 1999.
... The editor of the Black Hills Daily Times of Dakota Territory in 1884, called the idea of carrying firearms into the city a dangerous practice, not only to others, but to the packer himself. He emphasized his point with the headline, "Perforated by His Own Pistol."
The editor of the Montanas Yellowstone Journal acknowledged four years earlier that Americans have "the right to bear arms," but he contended that guns have to be regulated. As for cowboys carrying pistols, a dispatch from Laramies Northwest Stock Journal in 1884, reported, "We see many cowboys fitting up for the spring and summer work. They all seem to think it absolutely necessary to have a revolver. Of all foolish notions this is the most absurd."
Cowboy president Theodore Roosevelt recalled with approval that as a Dakota Territory ranch owner, his town, at the least, allowed "no shooting in the streets." The editor of that town's newspaper, The Bad Lands Cow Boy of Medora, demanded that gun control be even tighter than that, however. Like leaders in Miles City and many other cow towns, he wanted to see guns banned entirely within the city limits. A.T. Packard in August 1885 called "packing a gun" a "senseless custom," and noted about a month later that "As a protection, it is terribly useless.
Old West cattlemen themselves also saw the need for gun control. By 1882, a Texas cattle raising association had banned six-shooters from the cowboy's belt. "In almost every section of the West murders are on the increase, and cowmen are too often the principals in the encounters," concurred a dispatch from the Texas Live Stock Journal dated June 5, 1884. "The six-shooter loaded with deadly cartridges is a dangerous companion for any man, especially if he should unfortunately be primed with whiskey. Cattlemen should unite in aiding the enforcement of the law against carrying of deadly weapons" ...
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~rcollins/scholarship/guns.html
hunter
(38,264 posts)My last immigrant ancestor was a mail order bride to Salt Lake City. She didn't like sharing a husband so she ran off with a monogamous man and they established a homestead that's still a long, long ways from the nearest Wal-Mart, especially in the winter.
My great grandmas were all steely-eyed women of the Wild West, and our family structure is matriarchal.
Fools and their guns are soon parted.
My great grandmas were hunters. It's also a family name, my name too. They killed animals for food. Their husbands were more head-in-the-clouds dreamer sorts. So am I. One of my great grandmas was still bitching about my great grandfather's radio habit when I knew her, decades after his death, never forgiving his enthusiastic support for rural electrification, still cursing his damned radio and her trivial electric bill. Her house had two forty watt lights she rarely used, and a damned radio she kept around to spite. I remember her chewing out my mom's cousin when he bought an electric pump to please his wife, so she could have a water tap in her kitchen and not have to pump water by hand and carry it in from the river well.
My mom is the designated destroyer of fool's guns in my family, but she hasn't been called to service for a long time. I suspect my brother's wife will take on that duty if she has too. But for now, gun fuckery is extinct in our line.
My wife's family has a much more ferocious American Wild West history than I do. Hers were the people the U.S. Army and English Protestants were shooting at.
struggle4progress
(118,039 posts)struggle4progress
(118,039 posts)No need to check your firearm today in the Arizona town famed for the gunfight at the OK Corral.
January 23, 2011|By Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Tombstone, Ariz. A billboard just outside this Old West town promises "Gunfights Daily!" and tourists line up each afternoon to watch costumed cowboys and lawmen reenact the bloody gunfight at the OK Corral with blazing six-shooters.
But as with much of the Wild West, myth has replaced history. The 1881 shootout took place in a narrow alley, not at the corral. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday weren't seen as heroic until later; they were initially charged with murder.
And one fact is usually ignored: Back then, Tombstone had far stricter gun control than it does today. In fact, the American West's most infamous gun battle erupted when the marshal tried to enforce a local ordinance that barred carrying firearms in public. A judge had fined one of the victims $25 earlier that day for packing a pistol.
"You could wear your gun into town, but you had to check it at the sheriff's office or the Grand Hotel, and you couldn't pick it up again until you were leaving town," said Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West Magazine, which celebrates the Old West. "It was an effort to control the violence" ...
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/23/nation/la-na-tombstone-20110123
struggle4progress
(118,039 posts)By Mark S. Mellman - 04/17/13 12:22 AM EDT
... In many frontier cities, the law required those entering town to turn their guns over to the sheriff. In the Dodge City of 1879, a large billboard announced to residents and visitors alike The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited. Communities from Juneau to Wichita adopted similarly restrictive gun laws ...
There were no polls then, so there is no way to be certain how citizens reacted to those laws, but there were no lobbies working to overturn them, no organizations mobilizing gun owners, no popular revolt against those who passed or enforced gun safety laws. Indeed, they seemed pretty popular. The first law promulgated by the good people of Dodge City banned the carrying of concealed weapons.
How things have changed. Eighty years after the OK Corral/Fremont Street fracas, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on pistols and revolvers, while only 36 percent wanted citizens to be able to holster such weapons. By last year, just 24 percent favored and 74 percent opposed a ban on handguns ...
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/mark-mellman/294353-even-the-old-west-had-gun-control
jmg257
(11,996 posts)in homicides & violent crime during the 70s and 80s, until things started dropping off in the mid 90s back to where those levels were.
People might have been more and more fearful, and more self-determined about their own safety.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0873729.html
http://www.wanttoknow.info/g/violent_crime_rates_reduction
"In 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on pistols and revolvers, while only 36 percent wanted citizens to be able to holster such weapons. By last year, just 24 percent favored and 74 percent opposed a ban on handguns.
Partly as a result, today no one is seriously contemplating such a move. But there are several gun control measures that have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, widespread public support...."
struggle4progress
(118,039 posts)By LEONARD PITTS
Published: 08 June 2014 08:48 PM
Updated: 08 June 2014 09:00 PM
... This idea that everyone in Chipotle should be armed is neither some holdover from the Old West nor some time-honored value inextricable from conservatism. No, it is wholly new. And wholly mad.
While some gun rights advocates must know this, they cant say it in a movement where any deviation from orthodoxy is regarded as heresy. We saw that a few months ago when Guns & Ammo magazine disappeared a columnist who wrote that gun owners should accept some form of regulation. We see it again with this NRA staffer who has been disavowed and presumably sent off to be re-educated.
This self-reinforcing groupthink stifles any meaningful debate on Americas gun problem and speaks volumes about the mind of the gun rights movement. It will fight for you to take an AK into McDonalds.
But you are not allowed to question whether you should.
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20140608-forget-that-myth-about-open-carrys-old-west-roots.ece
struggle4progress
(118,039 posts)By Anne Carole On Jul 7 2012, 3:44 am
... Fort Worth, Texas, had its share of vice in the form of gambling, drinking, and loose women in an area known as Hells Half-Acre. Prostitution and gambling attracted such notable characters as Wyatt, James and Virgil Earp, Billy Thompson, Timothy Courtright (who served as sheriff in between bouts of criminality), Luke Short (gambling proprietor), Charlie Wright and other high profile gamblers and gunslingers. By 1887, after three notorious killings, including that of Timothy Courtright by Luke Short, the citizens of Fort Worth voted in reformers as mayor and sheriff, and thus began the cleaning up of Fort Worth. Gambling was now to take place in private rooms, saloons were to close on Sundays, and there would be a ban on carrying guns in the city. Even the police officers were to replace their pistols with clubs or nightsticks. Needless to say, the reformers got their share of flack from the business interests of the town, but, by the turn of the century, all these reforms were being enforced.
Dodge City, Kansas was a wide-open town in the 1870s and 1880s and earned its reputation as a Sodom of the plains. Some of the most famous gunfighters in Americas history were officers of the law in Dodge including Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp, Bat Masterson, and Edward Masterson. The peace officers of Dodge often had gambling and saloon interests and mingled with or counted as friends the likes of Ben Thompson, Bill Tilghman, and, our Fort Worth friend, Luke Short, among other infamous characters. As early as 1876, Dodge City had a ban on carrying guns on the north side of town (the south side remained wide open), a ban that was rarely enforced. However, by 1883 the death toll from gun play had risen sufficiently for the town fathers to enact a stricter ban. Ordinance No. 67 enacted August 14th 1882 specified that no one could carry concealed or otherwise about his or her person, any pistol, bowie knife, slung shot or other dangerous or deadly weapons, except County, City, or United Sates Officers and raised the fine from twenty-five dollars to one hundred dollars, no small amount in 1882. The Dodge City Times declared: There is a disposition to do away with the carrying of firearms, and we hope the feeling will become general. The carrying of firearms is a barbarous custom, and its time the practice was broken up ...
http://www.heartsthroughhistory.com/gun-control-in-the-old-west-facts-and-fiction/