https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2020/07/massachusetts-city-begin...
For animals, there's the Harkness Test.
It doesn't literally have to be the exact same issue over and over.
Compromise implies both sides give and take, and in the case of gun rights, democrats have only taken.
Sure, we can compromise on the background check requirements such that certain types of sales don't require background checks... well, ok, but then that just means that the people who would fail a background check will buy privately or from a gun show, and their access isn't really diminished, so the so-called "compromise" was little better than not passing a law at all.
It still boggles my mind that if I want to drive a car, I have to be tested and licensed, and carry insurance, but if I want to buy a device specifically designed to kill, I can just walk into a store, and after any weak legally-mandated waiting period, walk out with a gun I don't even know how to use, let alone use safely.
And all this because it has to do with an amendment to the constitution that was never intended to mean what people have since "decided" it means. The current legal interpretation of 2A only exists because of lobbying groups like the NRA.
On your automotive analogy - anyone can own a car. I can gift one to my 5 year old and so long as it stays home, he's 100% legal. Driving it is a privilege that's regulated. Likewise, carrying a gun is often regulated as you wish - and beyond reasonable levels in several states.
The "gun show loophole" is nonsense. Very few guns are transferred that way, and essentially zero "crime guns" were purchased this way. They were all either acquired via straw purchases (already highly illegal) or completely above board in a state with lax reporting requirements to the background check system. Ironically, the gun industry and gun community are, generally, huge supporters of addressing both of those issues.
Not everywhere; in some (many?) states, even cars intended to sit idle on private property must be registered (usually for a lower fee), and you can't put a 5 year old's name on the registration. Regardless, giving your 5 year old a car and saying he "owns" it is laughable.
Your analogy doesn't really make sense, either. You could give your 5 year old a gun to keep in his room, and while that's a terrible idea, it'd be difficult for you to get in trouble for it. Either way, your 5 year old isn't gonna be able to walk into a car dealership and buy a car any more than he could walk into a gun store and buy a gun.
> Likewise, carrying a gun is often regulated as you wish - and beyond reasonable levels in several states.
No state regulates guns as I wish. I won't elaborate much because I doubt we're going to find any form of agreement there. I will say that I support the repeal of 2A (not like that will ever happen), and at the very least I'd like the states to have the power to regulate firearms in whatever ways they see fit.
> This idea that we've only had gun rights since Heller is itself a modern invention.
I don't think anyone's claiming that we didn't have gun rights before 2008. But Heller (and other cases over the last 80? years or so) have narrowed the kinds of restrictions that are considered constitutional. Heller finally taking the position that 2A protects gun ownership regardless of participation in a militia was a big deal as well.
Let's take a state like Hawaii - what additional restrictions would you like to see them place on guns? It's already about impossible there.
This is a gross misunderstanding of the law. If you run a firearms business, you must have an FFL. If you have an FFL your must perform background checks for transfers regardless of where they occur.
Private party transfers are only from one non-dealer to another and must be infrequent / not a source of income for you. Purchasing a gun on behalf of another (such as to avoid checks) is called a straw purchase and is illegal regardless.
This is actually a very good point. I wonder what the response would be to a Democrat-authored bill that (say) demanded universal background checks and proof of a firearms safety course completion and mandatory insurance like a driver's license that ALSO banned any restrictions on large magazine size and removed any restrictions on fully-automatic weapons, or something similar.
Imagine carrying free speech insurance.
Most accept drivers licenses however the constitution grants the absolute right to travel in the same way it grants the right to speech. This has actually been used by the ACLU in an attempt to challenge no-fly lists, and hopefully drivers licenses will also be challenged.
The American political system doesn't support a la carte ordering, it only has prix fixe options. If your priority is some main course, you might not be able to get the side you want with it.
America has by far the most relaxed gun laws in the western world. Most other countries simply ban ownership of most guns outright.
The current situation IS the compromise. And it's pretty stupid I agree. But, there are no states that ban guns and plenty of them want to.
There is no hyper political, highly targeted, industry funded political action group just like the NRA on the side of banning guns.
After every mass shooting in this country democrats have to fight tooth and nail to get even a tiny consideration of regulation in response to human tragedy. And even that usually fails. In what world is that rational? In what world is that not compromise from the left?
At every step, law-abiding gun owners have given up rights and gotten nothing in return.
The great irony, to me, is that almost all of the "successful" gun/weapon control campaigns have been rooted in nearly blatant racism. Yet repealing those laws born of racism isn't something the left is willing to entertain.
Supreme court opinion on gun ownership was that it could be far more restricted (and it was in many cases!) until Heller.
Miller was dead by the time his case was decided, nobody argued his side, and the courts argument was was dishonest at best.
No, it wasn't. The current legal interpretation that most gun-rights advocates swear by has existed for a relatively short time, after the lobbying efforts of groups like the NRA.
According to this article[0], the early US adopted numerous restrictions on guns based on preexisting English common law, and during the revolutionary war even forbid anyone from owning a firearm without first swearing a loyalty oath to the government[1].
And of course 200 years ago, slaves weren't allowed to own guns for obvious reasons[2]. Of course, slaves weren't considered persons at the time either.
It doesn't appear that there was ever actually a time in the US when gun ownership was completely unrestricted.
[0]https://theconversation.com/five-types-of-gun-laws-the-found...
[1]https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-03-02-0016-...
[2]https://www.sedgwickcounty.org/media/29093/the-racist-origin...
Which is not what I was talking about. I was talking about gun types not regulations to get a gun, store a gun, registration or anything like that.
>And of course 200 years ago, slaves weren't allowed to own guns for obvious reasons[2]. Of course, slaves weren't considered persons at the time either.
I wasn't clear. I meant any free adult not anybody.
Some slaves were slave drivers. White slave drivers had access to guns. It is not clear if slave drivers who were slaves had guns but it is possible. This of course would be an exception if it did happen.
The average slave of course would not own a gun.
>It doesn't appear that there was ever actually a time in the US when gun ownership was completely unrestricted.
Again, that is not what I was arguing. There doesn't appear to be any restriction on the type of gun you could own. There were other restrictions like not shooting cannons inside of city limits for example. People were allowed to own cannons though.
You may be unaware because this isn't an important issue to you but just off the top of my head the Brady Campaign, Everytown for Gun Safety and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence all have major financial backing and support firearm bans in one form or another.
There are plenty of states that have attempted to but the courts have stated the laws are unconstitutional.
And if you want an example of the Democrats doing something similar, maybe the immigration situation? It is also nuanced and complicated, but the appearance isn't that the Democrats are consistently working to uphold the consensus position as found in the law. There is a lot of demonising.
Objectively, Republicans are not compromising, they are often explicit that they are waging a scorched earth zero compromise negotiating style. The heritage foundation wrote the template for the ACA in the 70s as an alternative to Medicare expansion. It was then Bob Dole’s plan when he ran against Bill Clinton, and was Dole’s alternative to Clinton’s health plan. Then Romney passed it in Massachusetts. But when Obama consciously tries to compromise and meet in the middle instead of participating they say it’s communism. They spent a decade to repeal a plan they invented.
Similar with global warming. Cap and trade was a republican idea. Where have they compromised? Instead they are demonizing all of science to shift the conversation to absurdity.
How about the 2008 stimulus. Obama has to fight tooth an nail for 800 billion even though economists say the output gap is $1.5 Trillion and the stimulus needs to be bigger. But Obama agrees thinking when it’s clear more is needed more will be available. He underestimated how much Mitch meant it when he said “the single objective is to make Obama a one term president” and was willing to let the economy struggle if needed. Then Trump gets $3 trillion with Democrats compromising all over the place.
Citation needed.
I have seen this claim about the left at least as much as about the right. I would definitely appreciate someone who could bring facts to the discussion.
And a one sided list of things that party X did is just emotion.
(Also, a good rule in honest debate is to never argue unless you have at least two advantages to the opposing position. Such that I hate Windows, but I wish Linux had their GUI... This helps bridge the "us" and "them", and gets to a much more accurate result)
It seems that the vast majority of comparisons of left/right in the US are comparing either how many people identify with one side, or how each side views the other. This particular chart however was part of an article that tried to enumerate the actual political stances of major parties (in the US, and I think it included UK ones as a reference point, but not sure about that - may have been a separate part in the same article) and show how they changed over time.
The structure of this chart was a vertical line graph, where "now" was at the top and the past was at the bottom. I think it went back to around 2000, maybe a little earlier. Being vertical it was rather distinctive and I'm hoping this jogs someone's memory so it can be found again.
On it, over the past 10 years or so, the Republican party has only shifted slightly to the right, while the Democratic party veered way way way to the left.
Edit: Found it: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunda...
The specific chart I'm remembering is halfway down the page, and right below it the methodology is described.
The republicans have led for decades. They are responsible for each vast increase, especially during Obama. Always pushing it further and further toward nothing getting done in the name of never compromising.
> According to the system, both parties have been on a trajectory toward more “extreme” positions since roughly 1970, the natural result of which is more polarization. However, the parties do not quite share equal responsibility for this: Republicans have moved about twice as much to the right as Democrats have to the left. Also, while the Democrats’ leftward shift was essentially a one-off event, the result of many moderate, Southern Democrats losing their seats in the early 1990s, the Republicans’ rightward transition has been continuous and steady.
Although to caution too-credulous interpretation, the DW-NOMINATE scores are derived from roll-call votes, so they may be biased by the issues brought up for such votes.
Approval voting is a much simpler system that gives better results.
Not voting for someone who can win is "wasting your vote" so people won't do that. Which, essentially, locks us into two parties. When the two parties know they are safe from a third, they're naturally going to be driven by the extremes and not the middle ground, because the national, fast-paced media lives off controversy between the extremes, which just ratchets it up farther.
IMO, the fact that we had political parties rise and fall (via third parties) in the past was more a historical artifact of not having a national, near-instant media to make sure things were polarized the same way nationally, nor could they let you know that a third party vote was a waste. In a sense it was more like local politics today, in that things weren't uniformly hyper-partisan, and a third party could make headway regionally and become a real contender before the rest of the country knew they were a wasted vote.
Unfortunately, that just isn't so. The evidence of the last three decades has been that every time the Democrats compromised a little, the Republicans just moved further to the right and re-entrenched themselves.