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> limit voting rights. The Constitution does very little to regulate voting or define the election process: substantial responsibilities are placed upon the St
by 15155 3y ago
> limit voting rights.
The Constitution does very little to regulate voting or define the election process: substantial responsibilities are placed upon the States and Congress to establish the parameters around the exercise of this specific right.
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." is highly explicit and unambiguous. (without delving into the legal shitshow that is "shall"..)
> So just to stress test this idea
This sounds dangerously like the setup to a strawman generalization: I was postulating specifically on suffrage and why people might not be presently "lamenting" a widely-accepted-as-positive increase to liberty.
> you would be in favor of any additional liberty that went through the amendment process?
Generally, yes! I trust our 50 state legislatures to make the right choices. All of these hypotheticals probably would never survive the process: whether I alone think it's "beneficial" isn't relevant.
- bumby 3y ago>widely-accepted-as-positive increase to liberty. This is applying a hindsight bias. Do you think it was widely-accepted-as-a-positive when first implemented? Similarly, I don’t know that we can pretend to know a-priori whether changes to the status quo on gun rights may be seen as a “widely” accepted positive or negative. I think your personal opinion is relevant because it gives context. Forums aren’t the greatest when it comes to nuanced discussion, and understanding someones thought process helps to understand if they take an appropriately nuanced view. When it’s clear they do not, there’s not much interest in further discussion because they lose some credibility.
- 15155 3y ago> Do you think it was widely-accepted-as-a-positive when first implemented? No, but again we were talking about the present. > we can pretend to know a-priori whether changes to the status quo on gun rights We don't need to pretend, thankfully: we have mountains of historical data on arms regulation we can cite - many of these regulations currently exist or existed for some substantial amount of time (and possibly ran/run afoul of current liberty-preserving SCOTUS 2A interpretation.) The typical argument is: "Well, if we just banned them all it would work! We didn't go far enough, that's why!" If this were a widely accepted idea, we would have ratified an amendment repealing the Second already.