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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Fuck Reagan. He created this shithole of a situation and ruined this country. I'm happy he died of Alzheimers and simply pray he was terrified and miserable in the last moments of his life.
Reagan dismantled the mental health institutions which were commonly abusive to patients and featured no objective pathway to release for those committed. They were basically prisons for the mentally ill and undesirable that hadn't already committed crimes. They did successfully isolate a handful of truly dangerous people though.
On the off chance this question was asked in earnest:
The typical deflection from the US right is that the real problem is that we need to put more effort into addressing mental health. (and IMO there is some truth to that)
However, Reagan (R) dismantled funding for our mental health infrastructure and was responsible for the closing of many mental health treatment centers, and Republicans since then have (to my knowledge) voted against every effort to resurrect it.
They won't support restrictions on gun ownership because they say the problem is mental health, but they won't support spending on mental health either. (Most likely because they seem to oppose anything that would actually help people who suffer.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980
https://sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas.html
This last one is a ddg search - you can just pick which article you want to read about Republicans voting against mental health funding.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=republicans+vote+against+mental+health+funding
The system is fucked and lacks funding, oh well let's throw it out. Regan was okay with this because he, and almost all politicians, don't have to live amidst it. I'm not a fan of electing people who say "it doesn't work and it doesn't have a chance of working so let's not do anything about it".
There are plenty of examples of systems that work, if ours doesn't work then I expect elected officials to do something about it, not spit into the wind.
Dismissing the issue as saying all mental health institutions were shit back then and he got rid of them for good reasons is just as bad as saying mass shooters issue is mental health not guns. You're hiding behind the obvious solutions. Manage the amount of access to guns, especially for people with mental health problems. Put funding, work, policies, mandates into those mental institutions, don't just fucking get rid of them who the fuck is that gonna help in the end?
The Second Amendment is possibly one of the most frequently and wilfully misinterpreted pieces of writing in the history of humanity. Right next to the bible.
The 2a doesn’t, or didn’t until 2010, make reasonable gun control outside government legislation.
It was a sharp shift to the constitution first in 2008 at the federal level and then applied to the states under the doctrine of incorporation in 2010.
Gun nuts like to pretend it is some eternal constant, or more likely most of them simply don’t know the law here and are just parroting the gun lobby take on things, but it’s a straightforward fact that the individualized right to own guns didn’t even really exist until 2008 and the near complete inability to pass any gun laws didn’t exist until 2010.
The 2a was reinterpreted very recently. Before 2008 it wasn’t well defined and most assumed the bit about militias had something to do with it. Scalia basically is the one who decided to edit out that part of the constitution by calling it a preamble, which is extremely against the fundamental principles of constitutional interpretation which is to assume every word was written for a reason.
And for the record I like guns and am for gun policies that allow sane and healthy adults to have guns.
I have been to a lot of gun shows in my day and for all I know, what you wrote might be the modern legal argument or whatever as far as libs on the joke of our SCOTUS; but I can personally vouch for the absolutely confirmed existence of insane "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" gun libertarians, sov cits, white supremacy, tree of liberty watered with the blood of the patriot, cult compound guys since at least the 70s, and undoubtedly before that, and I've seen the typewritten manifestos to prove it.
If anything the 2A guys are WAY more moderate than they used to be. The old guard of rednecks before my time all had a bunch of basically illegal shit that was grandfathered into being quasi legal, not because it was a good idea, but because the ATF didn't feel like losing all their field agents.
Could not disagree more with what you said. Reagan doing a heel turn on his nut job electorate and dramatically restricting gun rights as governor because of the black panthers is def peak radicalized shit for libertarians working their way into a more coherent political systems theory, though.
I didn’t say anything about Reagan. If you are saying “Fuck Reagan” then we don’t disagree about anything important so far as Reagan is concerned.
As for it not being a legal right in the USA that’s a straightforward fact. It was DC vs. Heller, a 2008 case where a Washington DC law was found to be unconstitutional which is the first case where such a law restricting access to handguns was found to be unconstitutional. There were plenty such laws prior to 2008 that survived legal challenges which is what proves the legal right to own a gun didn’t exist prior. But in 2008 the Supreme Court stated the law was unconstitutional at the federal level (DC being a federal district) establishing an individualized right to guns for the first time.
And it was in 2010 that this was extended to additionally restrict the law making power of states, in addition to the federal government, since by default the constitution is understood to restrict the federal government and not the states, but the poorly defined legal doctrine of “incorporation” basically says some bits are applied to restrict states as well.
In the sense of having an individualized legal right to own a gun, prior to 2008 it didn’t exist.
As for ruby ridge types saying shall not be infringed sure, I’m sure many of them advocated the maximalist interpretation way back when that the courts later adopted in 2008, but up until at least the late 90s the idea that weapons could be regulated wasn’t even controversial and the maximalist position could then be called mostly fringe and was only just beginning to emerge as a position a suit wearing serious legal professional would advocate. Bill Clinton banned a bunch of them in 1994 and no one really blinked an eye at the constitutionality of it and the federal assault weapon ban of 1994 survived legal challenges that it definitely would not have survived after 2008 and DC vs. Heller.
The NRA became a lot more activist in the 80s and 90s and really it was their activism that pushed the once-fringe idea that the constitution required largely unrestricted access to weapons into the mainstream.
Which requires editing out an entire sentence by calling it a prefatory clause, a preamble, which flies in the face of the fundamentals of constitutional interpretation which requires the assumption that each word was written for a reason.
I think we live in very different worlds. People absolutely lost their shit over Clinton's bans.
Legal interpretation doesn't always match up to what people see as their right and how aggressively they will enforce that right until the courts catch up to where they are. You're saying it happened with guns and we all just saw it happen with the religious extremists that run this country and abortion.
Unfortunately, this the correct way to view the legal system, as a means to an end that can be lobbied or bullied into getting what you want. Even more unfortunately, liberals view it as inviolable holy scripture handed down by God that must be honored regardless of whether you agree with it or not.
Seeing it as your right, having an expectation that it should be a right, isn’t the same as being a legal right though.
You could have said you disagreed with the court but unless you’re sitting on that court you can disagree all you want and it actually just doesn’t mean anything in terms of changing the reality that it’s not up to you what legal rights are or how the constitution is interpreted because that’s what the Supreme Court is for - and it says so in the constitution.
A legal right is a constructed and formal concept. A legal right simply does not exist unless the courts say it does even if you strongly feel it should exist. That’s what I’m saying.
And since 2008 that legal right has existed but before then it simply didn’t.
And I’m not a liberal man. I’m not even anti-guns.
I am a progressive and you probably view the terms progressive and liberal as synonyms but they aren’t.
In fact youre the one who is appealing to an idealism here, and in that sense you’re more of a liberal than I am even if I’m closer to them in the sense or being a progressive. You’re pointing to a right existing in some almost metaphysical sense, ie you’re saying that because people felt it should be a right you’re saying it in some sense existed. Which is liberal idealism.
Look, we probably aren’t actually very far in terms of what we think sensible gun policy should be since I think if you’re in Montana or whatever then yeah sure a rifle makes a lot of sense and can be a lot of fun and you pointed to the more modern and moderate 2a types which probably places you actually not far from me in terms of what we would agree sensible gun laws could be.
What I said is that the legal right to own a gun was created in 2008 and that is a straightforward fact. It’s DC vs. Heller. 2008. Look it up if you want to. Going on about how some people really felt it should be a right before then doesn’t change that, and it is also a fact that if you were to ask a mainstream legal scholar in the 80s or early to mid 90s you would have to look into some pretty partisan political camps to find someone who would have advocated the current interpretation that was established recently in 2008.
But of course since the late 90s and certainly in the late 2000s you can find a lot of them. That’s also a fact.
I'm not sharing my opinions, I'm sharing the perspective of the culture I grew up in
Well I appreciate your perspective. Perhaps in your community there was activism on this issue before it reached the halls of power.