There is expansion of the ban every time they add new types of "felons." The government has focused the past ~60 years years on greatly expanding who is a felon, and then enshrining that they do not have the same civil rights as others after serving their sentence.
I, for one, believe that felons should lose some rights. Personally I think felons should keep speech and voting rights, but anything related to violence should be prohibited.
But it does show a lack of respect for the rule of law, as well often a lack of empathy for others. The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
I think the hardest one to talk about is the non-violent sex offender -- CSAM and the like. They have a high re-offending rate, and rehabilitation efforts aren't very effective in this area. On one hand they're only a handgun away from being a violent offender, but on the other we don't want to lock them up for life.
>The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
This is called recidivism and it’s a product of fuckwads like yourself who write people off for life the first time they run afoul of the law. It’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy that people return to crime when society deems them as subhuman when they return from prison.
> On one hand they're only a handgun away from being a violent offender
You’re only a handgun away from being a violent offender by that simple logic. You’re literally talking about non-violent people suddenly becoming violent for no reason.
1) The deterrent effect of gun-laws on felons are questionable when obtaining arms is trivial for anyone. Although I won't argue the punitive aspect of "justice" still remains. Note that just because laws don't always work doesn't mean we shouldn't have them, but see below.
2) If the punishment does actually have a deterrent effect (which is questionable, but lets presume it is true), then it should have a deterrent effect on the underlying violent crimes like murder or assault with a deadly weapon. Assuming the punishments for murder and assault with deadly weapon are worse than felon-in-possession (and I would hope they would be), one would conclude the marginal deterrent effect against violent crime is minimal for felon-in-possession laws. On the other hand defending genuine threat to life with a weapon is generally legal, so the deterrent effect for felon-in-possession is nearly all constituted of felon-in-possession laws. That is the felon-in-possession laws likely have little to no marginal effect on preventing violent crime while they may have significant marginal effect on the ability of felons to legitimately defend themselves. Put simply, it moves armed self defense from "legal" to "super illegal" while moving violent crimes from "super illegal" to "more super illegaler" -- which just seems like an extremely poor tradeoff.
3) In a world where arms are trivial to obtain (felon or no), if people can't be trusted in public not to kill others they should not be released from jail. The idea people would be ok with killing others (or other armed violence) but too scared to break the law to 3d print a gun just seems ridiculous. Releasing people who legitimately are believed to be a threat to the public in the event they obtain weapons just seems bat-shit insane to me. If you want a half-step of probation under which no weapons are allowed while they are closely monitored by a PO, to me that makes more sense. But a free man off probation can be assumed to be able to get weapons whenever they like, so we can't be releasing people to be free if we expect them to kill others with weapons.
4) >The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
I mean that's probably true. If someone owns a pot plant today, it's not unreasonable to guess they will own one tomorrow. Which if they own guns at the same time, is federally a felony. Of course many of those people were never a particularly worrisome threat, that is until you made that illegal which in your own words turns them into people likely to commit crime again. It's the government taking peaceful people committing a victimless crime and damning them into situation where by your own admission makes them more likely to be trapped into a world of crime in the future (perhaps because felony record hurts their job prospects).
> CSAM and the like.
And here's the nuke everyone likes to drop as a bad faith effort to force others to specifically defend CP offenders rather than generically non-violent criminals. If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children, then they need locked away forever or somehow gone from society. Otherwise, they need their rights restored when they are returned. I'd really prefer not to have a conversation revolving around these kind of offenders, because I find it is often just a clever trap to try and make someone out to be a supporter/defender specifically of people involved with materials involving disgusting acts to children. And of course even these people have civil rights, but defending them is so incredibly unpopular (I admit I don't enjoy advocating for their rights), so it's a cheap and easy win to introduce in a debate system with upvote/downvote to grey out comments.
I'm of the personal opinion that crimes against children should require some nexus to the physical abuse (i.e. the person that did the filming, abused the child, etc) because digitally planting evidence for this kind of crime is so incredibly trivial for police and so rapidly turns the opinion of jurors and everyone against the subject that in effect it's almost like a blank check for police to put anyone they like in jail for a long time without finding an immediate nexus to the abuse of a child or even any witnesses / claims by the child or their family. People merely found with a photo and the cop says "I promise I did not put it there, I am a good honest person" always sat very poorly with me, and I can't help wondering how many innocent people have been convicted of these offenses.
5) If we're going to cherry pick offenses, I'd like to point out owning scary mushroom or an undersized lobster is a felony as well. You may argue crimes such as even those make one more predisposed to violence, but even if that were true I would argue there must be _some_ amount of time (10 years? 20 years?) without committing further crime when there is a regression back towards, within the noise of error, of the general public.
6) >But it does show a lack of respect for the rule of law
When it comes to matters of armed violence I'm far more interested in whether the person respects human life against unjust violence than I am generically about all laws such as whether they used a stock instead of a brace on a "pistol" (felony) or stood in front of a mining truck during a protest (felony in Arkansas I believe, if not one of the adjoining states). One could argue by your (and my) standard the US government should be disarmed.
I don't think you did a great job of arguing your point, because you conflated me with whoever you argued with in the past, and then are dumping your angst from them upon me.
I do think my post triggered you though. You may want to think about why you reacted so strongly to this.
> And here's the nuke everyone likes to drop as a bad faith effort to force others to specifically defend CP offenders rather than generically non-violent criminals.
It's not bad faith. There are roughly 750,000 sexual offenders in the US. In 2020, the US held around 1.2M prisoners, and has about 5.1M felons in the population at large.
> If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children...
I don't just believe it. There are studies to back it up. Note that the recidivism rates for sexual offenders below are vastly underreported as sexual offenses are not as likely to be reported as other offenses.
The question you didn't answer, is how to fix it -- but instead, blasting me for providing one, when you don't have a good faith solution yourself.
> If we're going to cherry pick offenses, I'd like to point out owning scary mushroom or an undersized lobster is a felony as well.
At any point in time, any passed law might be considered unjust in the future. The founding fathers said they wanted to make a "more perfect union" as a response to the punitive laws made by the Crown. MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice." as a response to the human injustices to slavery and Jim Crow.
But as a whole, we -- that is society -- believe that crimes against children should not be legal, and that's the view I take as well. Real CSAM (not any artistic rendering) means some child in real life is being abused in real life.
Yeah you focused your whole post here again on CP / child abuse, apparently your favor topic, rather than other points. It's just a cheap shot designed to try and make this about defending (or not defending) the civil rights of the most hated segment of society rather than generically non-violent felons, and you know it. If you bothered reading what I said, I did propose that if they were unfixable and a threat to children they shouldn't be released from jail, which fixes your concern about them getting firearms. I get the fact that laws are ineffective aren't an argument against them, but it is worth noting making handguns illegal does fuck all to stop those people from getting one after released. Anyone can 3d print the frame in a few hours and have the slide shipped off the internet. If they can't be trusted in public not to hurt innocents they really shouldn't be released.
> when you don't have a good faith solution yourself.
Hilarious because you clipped off the second half of my sentence in my quote where I provided the answer. If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children, then they need locked away forever or somehow gone from society.
Your obsession with CSAM is bizarre, I might add. And the fact you glossed over pretty much all my non-CSAM related points pretty much goes to show your intent here.
>believe that crimes against children should not be legal, and that's the view I take as well
My argument revolves around civil rights after full release from jail+probation/parole/community control, not whether crimes against children should be legal.
>You may want to think about why you reacted so strongly to this.
I really don't appreciate what I've seen you and many others do which is try to make someone who defends the civil rights of people who are free and released as someone who somehow doesn't want justice for children. These kinds of accusations made under the veil of academic debate are just an intelligent version of slinging shit at the schoolyard.
No ban, just increasingly restrictive laws on ownership and use that end up resulting in something tantamount to a ban. Look at gun ownership in most countries in Europe if you want an idea of what the future could look like.
Then give some thought to what Europe was like in the early 20th century!
> Most guys I know here in the Austria boonies have a hunting rifle.
First of all, Austria is the only country in the European Union where firearms are only partially licensed.
Second of all... Sorry, what I really meant was to say was that European gun ownership (broadly speaking) is very different from USian gun ownership. Europeans generally need permits, reasons for ownership, training, et cetera just to own a firearm. Carrying is heavily discouraged, and often illegal without a permit... which the state is under no obligation to give you. Magazine size restrictions are rampant.
In the United States, in many territories, we don't have equivalent policies. Many states allow for entirely permit-less ownership and carrying of firearms. We don't need to ask permission – that's the difference I'm trying to indicate here.
As always, correlation doesn't imply causation. It's not clear that gun laws themselves even enabled the rise of fascism or that they had any negative impact on quality of life. With widespread gun ownership early 20th century Europe could have been even worse.
> "The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country's population. It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of the German population. Mr. Carson's suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home. Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis, but the generals had thrown in their lot with Hitler early on."
Events such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising showed some Jews really were willing to defend themselves with arms. The Jews were not cowards and the characterization as people who won't "mount resistance" is woefully wrong. It may be true they may have not been able to successfully overthrow the Nazis, but it is possible some of the oppressed may have survived another 10 or 15 minutes (in the Warsaw Ghetto, days) after initiating self defense and even if them being armed would have made things worse for them, that should have been their choice to make and not yours.
There is some sort of fundamental honor as well to allow to allow someone the tools to at least maybe shoot a Nazi on their way out, as one last act of resistance before certain death. Arms are a right even when desperate circumstance make it almost only symbolic.
Glad to know you're distancing yourself from the absurd opinion of this wikipedia article, which totally is a quote you never meant to support even though you intentionally framed it as part of your counterargument to the "tired" nazi gun control argument. I changed it to "the" rather than "your."
That argument is a bit of a straw-man though. Nobody is realistically claiming the Jews, or East Germans, or Soviet citizens, or Syrian citizens, could defeat their government with personal weapons.
The more reasonable version of the argument is that the unofficial purges, before the evil becomes fully embraced by the government (the Nazis), or where hidden and unofficial (the KGB), can be deterred by armed civilians. If you know the Stasi are coming to take you away in the night to certain death you'll be willing to fight, and if armed you have a real chance at inflicting casualties. And if every raid leads to dead troops and PR disasters the state is less likely going to get to the point where the terrorists adopt the mantle of government (Nazi Germany) and can then bring the sum total of state forces to bear.
tl;dr the argument is more about resisting unsanctioned or non-governmental terrorism so it doesn't become governmental.
