London now has a higher murder rate than NYC, which gives a different perspective. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43610936 I've never owned a gun but I respect the second amendment which seems to have been cleverly crafted primarily to give the citizens options to overthrow a future oppressive government.

I find the whole pressure to 'ban guns' sinister in Trump's America...

>The Met Police has launched 44 murder investigations in 2018, 31 of which have been as a result of stabbings.

If you look at gun homicide rate, then the U.S. has 30 times the homicide rate of the U.K.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604

Do you still say a 30x gun homicide rate a "sinister" reason to 'ban guns'?

Of course you're going to get lower gun homicide rates by banning them. You'd get lower knife homicide rates by banning knifes (I think it's time to consider an assault-knife ban), but aren't you "fixing" the wrong problem? Shouldn't we be trying to stop murder?

Nobody is promoting murder here so why would you even ask that?

Guns make killing far easier than weapons like knives.

I'm not equating guns and knives at all. My entire point is about what we are measuring, and what we are trying to prevent.

>I find the whole pressure to 'ban guns' sinister in Trump's America...

Edit: yes, you appear to be quoting olivermarks

Does it, though? The homicide rate in NYC has dropped hugely in the last couple of decades (an order of magnitude!); it's still much higher than London's when you look beyond a timeframe of two or three months. Meanwhile other large cities in the US, including LA, fare much worse than either London or NYC.

Now, there is no militia to speak of. The federal government and its assets span the width of the continent. It's hard to imagine how civilian guns would help overthrow that. Obviously, things would come down to guerrilla warfare. 231 years have changed the situation a lot. The assumptions that were made then don't really apply...and the interpretation of the amendment, and the discussion around it, have shifted in that time, as well.

..

I used to think that too, but I think the assumptions made then still do apply. We have a heavily militarized police and an increasingly oppressive surveillance state. It's a grim thought but surrendering the ability to rise up en masse has happened before and not ended well...

My point was that I think that maintaining citizens' gun rights wouldn't be sufficient to allow the people to overthrow the government, giving its overwhelming advantage in resources.

Nor was that the intent. Gun rights were viewed as a necessarya sufficient condition for that; the sufficient condition was the dependency of the government on the citizen militia to enforce its will; the Constitution presupposed (but did not mandate, which led to this presupposition becoming invalid) the absence of large permanent standing armies and permanent professional paramilitary police forces at the federal and state level, and they both federal and state government would be dependent on mobilizing the armed citizenry to deal with internal threats to order and external security threats.

The guaranty of liberty wasn't “the people have smallarms to fight the government's armies of professional troops with the weapons of large scale warfare”, it was “the government may have stockpiles of weapons of large scale warfare, but absent mobilizing the armed citizenry can't actually effectively employ them and has very few troops to do anything”. The envisioned asymmetry in effective power was the reverse of what it is now, with or without gun rights.

The US constitution was framed expressly to overthrow the colonial rulers and keep them out...

The Swiss are all armed for the same reason

'the long-standing practice of a militia organization of the Swiss Army in which soldiers' service rifles are stored privately at home' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Switzerland

No, it wasn't, throwing out the colonial rulers was done under the Articles of Confederation.

The US Constitution was framed several years after that effort was completed, to deal with the problem that that the government under the AoC was too weak to get anything done outside of the imminent life-or-death struggle of the Revolution.

   Assault by gun:                      1 in 370
   Riding inside a car, van or truck:   1 in 536

"Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than many leading causes of death combined"

My claim was a car accident not strictly, riding as a passenger. I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive and provide the mortality rates from all vehicle related deaths:

"Any motor vehicle incident 1 in 114"

So yes, Americans are 3 times more likely to die in a car accident than by a gun. For Americans, use your own life experience: How many people do you know who have died in or by cars vs gun violence. Which one is fear mongered more?

Assuming you have 400 friends/acquaintances the probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a car accident ~ 3%[1]. The probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a gun accident is 47% [2]

Center for Disease Control has more comprehensive figures: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

[1] (113/114)^400

[2] (535/536)^400

And the comment I replied to specifically talked about car accidents.

I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive...

http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...