My point isn’t that rights can’t or shouldn’t be restricted. My point is that we don’t generally ask a specific group how to best restrict themselves. Sporting bodies don’t “regulate themselves in an effort to avoid regulations being imposed by law”, they generally work to make the most money by pushing the boundaries of the current law, and are eventually curtailed by more or different laws that they did not propose.

Ok, take brain injuries in American Football. Do you think the sports bodies have a responsibility to ensure their sport is safe to practice? After all, deliberately smashing someone on the head, with force and in circumstances known to reliably cause injury, is really assault.

What job do the football associations have that is more important, in the broader context, than this? It could destroy the sport.

Ideally a sporting body should set things up so that they don't have to spend much time on this, but it's a serious responsibility.

The NRA spends an inordinate amount of it's time trying to avoid legal restrictions on their member's activities. They spend huge resources on it. To me, that's a sign that they are not doing their job very well at all, or taking their responsibilities seriously as members of society. It's their problem to solve.

This is not something people who don't want to own guns should have to worry about. The fact that they have to is a clear abrogation of responsibility on the part of those that do.

There’s a couple threads here, so I’ll attempt to delineate my responses:

Regarding the football comparison: there isn’t generally speaking a right to play football, and I’d prefer if sports bodies were committed to ensuring the health of players of their sport, but no, I don’t think that sports bodies should be relied upon to enforce some arbitrary standard for safety in their sport, with the threat of banning football. The football example is interesting because smashing somebody in the head as part of a football game isn’t “really assault”. If you and I agree to play football, and during the course of the game we collide and I get injured, you didn’t assault me. The problem with sports bodies is that they have several incentives that don’t align with overall player long-term health, and the players typically (especially historically) don’t have a strong enough negotiating position to push for systematic change. So to your question: no, I don’t think we should expect sports industries to carry the weight of making their sports “safe”, I think society should agree on laws that restrict sports bodies behavior so that they’re forced to operate in ways that are safe. We don’t ask construction sites to please make worker conditions safe, we set up OSHA and equivalent orgs, with regulations to mandate safety.

Regarding the job that football associations have, that’s more important than long-term health, “profit” is the answer. The football organization isn’t a benevolent charity, they exist so as to ensure their own continued existence. They also don’t represent the players, nor the fans.

Switching gears to the NRA: the NRA has a similar job. They exist in order to perpetuate their lobbying influence and perpetuate their funding. They are not an accurate picture of the average American gun owner. They push for or against policies on the basis of continuing that power, more so than any intrinsic goal of “avoiding legal restrictions on their members”, except insofar as their members are “NRA large-scale donors”, which effectively amounts to “gun manufacturers”.

Regarding it being “their problem to solve”, you still haven’t addressed my critique of that premise. Gun ownership in America is a right, written into the foundation of US government. There’s a whole body of debate as to whether or not it should be a right, whether it should be written differently, etc, but at present, gun ownership in the US is written into the constitution at a similar level to freedom of speech or protest. We don’t tell free speech advocates to find ways to limit hate speech or we ban all free speech, why would we approach this any differently?

> there isn’t generally speaking a right to play football

Just curious, are you American? Because this comes across as a totally alien way of thinking - why would there be or why would you need a "right" to play football? Do I, generally speaking, have a right to stand on one leg? If I'm reading you correctly there's no right to perform any novel activity, because the right couldn't have been granted yet!

People don't, in the normal course of things, have a right to charge at and assault each other, with enough force to cause life changing injuries. That's the context of this discussion.

Before it was known that AF seems to consistently lead to these injuries this wasn't a problem, but now the evidence is amassing that it does, if the game doesn't get reformed there is a risk it could get sued and legislated out of existence. With that background, clearly the game doesn't have a legal right to exist, to stop that happening.

I am American, but the relevance of there being an explicit right in the US constitution isn’t as part of some hypothetical claim that one may only do things which are enumerated. The relevance is that in the US, removing a named right is more difficult than removing an unnamed right. In the absurd case, this is obviously not a risk, because an attempt to ban standing on one leg is obviously not reasonable. But if the 2nd amendment didn’t exist, gun regulation in the US would have looked very different over the past century.

> removing a named right is more difficult than removing an unnamed right.

That doesn't immediately strike me as obviously true. Many states attempted to remove the unnamed right to an abortion (by which I mean, abortion is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution); but that was struck down on 14th Amendment grounds. It wouldn't surprise me if an enterprising lawyer could contest a statewide firearm ban (assuming no second amendment) via the commerce clause, for example.

I think your point agrees with mine. In the US, the path to defending an unnamed right generally involves an “enterprising lawyer” drawing a line to try to bucket it as a part of a named right. Defending the named right directly requires strictly less mental gymnastics.

There are plenty of sports that have been made illegal, and plenty of sports that have been reformed to avid that fate. I can see we're not going to agree on regulation of sports and other activities, so ok. Not the main question anyway. And btw I appreciate your engagement on all of this.

Gun ownership is only a right because a law says so, and laws are made by people. Things change. People change. Technology changes. The US constitution has been amended 27 times, and amendments have been revised or revoked by other amendments. Just look at what happened to the 18th. If you want to keep the 2nd, you'll need a better argument than because it's an amendment.

>We don’t tell free speech advocates to find ways to limit hate speech or we ban all free speech, why would we approach this any differently?

What forms of speech are allowable or not is up for debate. There are plenty of things it is illegal to say or print, and even most free speech advocates will agree with many restrictions. Free speech advocates have to fight cases all the time though, it's a constant struggle as to what can or cannot be said. Why should firearms, which weapons can or cannot be owned or carried in public, be any different?

Nobody is talking about banning all guns. That's a complete straw man. I'm not talking about banning anything. I think most people campaigning for gun restrictions aren't trying to ban all guns, or even most guns. What I'm saying though, is this is a question for you.

What is your answer, and that of your community, to this problem?

Do you think the current rate of mass shootings in America and gun deaths in general is acceptable, and if not how does it get under control?

>Regarding the job that football associations have, that’s more important than long-term health, “profit” is the answer. The football organization isn’t a benevolent charity, they exist so as to ensure their own continued existence. They also don’t represent the players, nor the fans.

I will put forth the argument that profit is not be the sole motive for any organization. That is a relatively new and immature [1] way of thinking about economic activity which ignores the context and environment in which economic activity takes place. Profit above all else should be considered the false narrative that it is [2]. Even if we did consider profit to be a primary motivation for an organization, that ignores that the organization is composed of people who should care about their fellow man and work to reduce the chances and effects of injuries in the people who labor for them. I will go further and propose that putting profit above the long term health of players is short-termism, a disease that affects far too many today. In fact, this disease of thinking is so bad that the executives of some of the largest corporations now need to explicitly tell people to stop thinking like that [3]. Ignoring the dangers of traumatic brain injury could have negative consequences for the long-term profit of the NFL - through lawsuits, negative publicity, and less productivity from the players.

1: See more here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250185983

2: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

3: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business/business-roundta...