Shooter incident at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas

Shooter incident at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas - 19 children and 2 adults dead

Heathen Saint said
This is the reason things like Uvalde won’t stop….in my opinion. Not saying you in particular have this view, but I think most Americans are against any drastic changes to the 2nd amendment. And as such, this land of gun culture simply won’t change. The math doesn’t work out. A hard reality we must consider…

Here's the thing though - it is true that the 2A won't be repealed or "changed", but there are many aspects of the gun issue in the United States that can be governed without going to the right to gun ownership. The 2A lobby has been so successful at treating all gun-related measures as existential threats to gun ownership that we can't even have these discussions without people framing it that way . . . but it's not accurate. One can easily envision a basket of reasonable efforts that could indeed help the situation that would not violate the Second Amendment. At some point we have to be critical of the arguments used against these measures and legislators have to have the courage to take the heat from the 2A lobby in trying to do something about it.

Some examples of areas open for change (but there are certainly others):

- Rules about gun access for dangerous or mentally ill people could be instituted to try to limit gun access to people with demonstrated histories of serious concern. This would not violate the 2A (note that laws restricting gun access to domestic abusers have been upheld as constitutional). But the 2A lobby resists this by using strawman/doomsday scenarios where state psychiatrists conspire to rule that everyone is crazy. These tactics have to be resisted in the name of sensible approaches with checks/balances and backstops to avoid abuse.

- Making particularly dangerous weapons like assault rifles harder to acquire by raising the age to 21 and requiring other demonstrations of competency. Limiting the market in which such weapons can be acquired. Or even making limitations on capacity and firing speed. The major 2A cases from the Supreme Court in the past 30 years have clearly noted that the right is not unlimited - there are to be expected reasonable limits on particularly dangerous arms, and I think that well-tailored limits and rules in this area would be upheld. The 2A lobby resists these on the basis that (1) changing acquisition rules are just a slippery-slope toward prohibition - but this is false and one need only look at Heller and McDonald to see just how false it is, so it is only a tactic of resistance by the lobby. And (2) that limitations on the weapon's capabilities themselves are arbitrary and easily modified so we just shouldn't consider them at all . . . but this again is not a reasonable approach to regulating a problem area. The AR is the weapon of choice in mass-murder incidents in the US and it isn't even subject to debate. We can work on the issue of access and capability without meaningfully impacting the lawful citizen's right to own these weapons.

These are just a couple of examples, there are others. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms and protects against government infringement of that right - but like all constitutional rights there is a framework of analysis of when a law actually does this and when it does not. We can be fairly confident that some approaches to regulating the gun issue in America will not violate that framework but it is political (and not legal) resistance that keeps these things from happening. One can certainly argue that these things may not have much impact but that thinking only reinforces our national paralysis on the issue.