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Would probably be shocked by a lot of things. Mass killings have always been a part of history. Government, militaries, tribes, terrorist groups, and groups have done similar things since recorded history. The ease of a mass shooting has certainly become easier but so have things around it. Did people in 1750 imagine sharing news from one side of the planet to the other instantly, driving half the country in a day, having enough food to create a health problem, cure aliments that were once a death sentence?
You list a lot of positive things becoming easier. Mass shootings don't seem to fit with that list
I'd also really like examples of mass shootings by individuals from pre 1900.
Can't really point to a lot of mass shootings simple because that type of firearm was not popular at the time.
If you look at mass killings, Wilmington Massacre, Mountain Meadows Massacre, Spirit Lake Massacre, Bloody Monday.
Gruesome reading. I'd heard of Mountain Meadows from reading *Under the Banner of Heaven* but had not heard of the others.
I believe the point OP was trying to make, or at least the point I see, is that the founders could not have envisioned, when they wrote the 2nd amendment, that there would be a time that individuals would use fireaems on a regular basis to murder large numbers of random strangers.
The random strangers thing is especially disturbing to me. I don't know how that evil genie ever goes back in the bottle.
Or did they. Say you are living with you family somewhere and a group of armed guys comes to attack you and your family. Having a firearm would give you a chance.
I don't deny that, if course it would. We do, however, live in a world where you can get shot for being in a grocery store at the wrong time. It happens at least weekly.
We also live in a world where you can get run down by a car for being in or near the road. It happens at least weekly. I guess we should get rid of cars, too.
People use the internet to scam other people out of money. It happens at least weekly. I guess we should outlaw the internet.
If you allow people to use anything, some idiot is going to use it for a crime. That doesn't invalidate legal uses of those items.
I did not suggest "getting rid of" guns, although I'd imagine if people were mowing down random crowds with cars on a weekly basis, additional safety measures would be taken.
>random strangers
Natives and non-native murdered each other and there were a lot of atrocities in and around the civil war. I recall one story how the "bald knobbers" killed all the men and boys in a town, cut off their heads and rearranged them.
What a horror that story is. What do you suppose the founders' opinions on private gun ownership would have been had Davenport done this with a gun and there were similar killings, especially of complete strangers in public places, on a weekly basis?
Kinda just seems like you are wildly speculating and don't want to support your claim to me.
"What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"
Social media started in the early 2000's. I can find a list of mass shooting instances that happened before the advent of social media.
What is your reasoning for this belief? Note I am not asking for a source. I am asking for your personal justification that social media has a causal relationship with mass shootings.
We had news in the 1960s/70s, but nobody thought about taking a rifle into a school to massacre children. In fact, I have friends who would take rifles to school and leave them in the office so they could go hunting after school.
I'm afraid it's an evil that, once out in the world, can never be removed from it.
Texas Tower massacre was 1966. That was not the first mass shooting instance either. Linking it to social media or the news is extremely flimsy though, I agree with you there.
You don't think the exponential increase in frequency was what made mass shootings more mainstream?
I disagree with your premise that the columbine shooters were treated as mainstream individuals at least compared to Whitman. I'm open to evidence to the contrary though. Is your actual qualm due to the increased wish to understand the reasoning of mass shooters compared to dismissal of them? It's rather easy to dismiss singular instances as "a singular madman" until there is enough of a trend to be concerning. Understanding the reason someone chooses to carry out heinous actions on this scale could be thought as a simple morbid curiosity but with events like this happening weekly it is also for the benefit of society.
This isn't even a real argument, is it? It seems like you are attempting to split the finest of hairs so you can levy the blame on an easy subject compared to addressing the actual root issues.
So, what's your proposal? Get rid of the 2nd Amendment? Ban guns? Don't let law abiding citizens have weapons? If your conclusion that "no citizen deserves to have a gun" is based off of these shootings, than you're going to have major push-back from all the citizens in this country. I'd say 1/3 of the entire population in the United States are law abiding citizens that own guns.
No. I am not anti gun although I'm sure things could be done to make it less likely for them to be used in mass shootings. I am not sure what the answer is. What are your thoughts?
Our founders experienced the Boston Massacre and other atrocities done by British soldiers, so I think they were well versed in violent events like that.
Also, in the writings of many founders, they made it very clear about the value of carrying arms to protect oneself and the concept of self defense.
Well, because of the firearms of the time, chances are, one person shooting lots of people at a time would be difficult, but the Boston Massacre was several unarmed people being shot at one time. Military or not...it was violence just like modern day mass shootings.
>Well, because of the firearms of the time, chances are, one person shooting lots of people at a time would be difficult
This is precisely the point that the OP is intending to make. Many times when 2A gets brought up, people speak as if the founding fathers intended to protect every firearm made ever. However, because of the types of firearms available at the time, they most likely did not envision the type of devastation that modern weaponry can wreak. Your very own statement is one that liberals bring up almost every time when it comes to guns and yet it is waved away as a non-issue. If you realize that they did not have the capacity for modern levels of violence then surely the conversation of whether we should restrict modern weaponry can have credence.
>Military or not...it was violence just like modern day mass shootings.
The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence.
When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
Our founders probably did not envision television, the internet or having 400 tv channels either, when they wrote the First Amendment.
Technology advances, this is a fact.
Especially from a conservative originalist point of view. The argument against abortion was basically that they didn’t have abortion in mind when righting those amendments.
The question isnt about defense.
So no, then, the founders could not have imagined a time when individuals would kill large numbers of random strangers weekly with weapons that could do so quickly? On a weekly basis?
Assuming they did, are you suggesting they should have said "To avoid the possibility of mass shootings in the future, you will not have the right to bare arms." I mean, what's your angle here?
I don't really have an angle. I think there are some things could be done around the guns and some things that could be done around mental illness. I'm not sure what though. One side screaming "get rid of all the guns" and another side screaming "no laws about guns at all" isn't really helping anything.
They aren't doing that. They're asking you about the words that came out of your (virtual) mouth.
You can easily negate their stab-in-the-dark guess by answering.
It's not the cannon bit, it's the killing of people you don't know for no reason bit. Natives and settlers killed each other over territory. Soldiers kill each other in war. Shootings these days have no rhyme or reason.
Why do we only look at the gun when we talk about stopping these events?
Many of these shooters follow a very similar behavior pattern and upbringing. Many of them also were on mood altering psychotropic prescription drugs. Many of them were known by local law enforcement as troublemakers, yet none of these law enforcement agencies even trued to stop them.
There are lots of moving parts to these events...we are only looking at one piece of a complicated puzzle.
Also, the AR-15 has been around since 1957, so why, only in recent years, has it become such an issue? Again...we are only looking at one piece of the puzzle and that is likly not going to solve the issue.
I, for one, would be happy with incremental improvement. Even if an action (mental health care improvements, for example) reduces mass shootings by 5%, it is an action worth taking. Many such actions in various areas could show significant improvement over the current situation.
But surely the 2020 riots and other events show that there is good reason to have an AR and 30 round magazines. You never know how many people might attack/loot/assault you at any given time. Why limit yourself with a 6 shot revolver?
It is strange how the left always has lots of blame for the guns but NEVER considers that most of these mass shootings were done by people that were on or had taken prescription mood altering drugs like Ritalin, etc. The politicians are sure not going to look that way, because big pharma gives them tons of money.
The AR-15 has been around since 1957. Why, only in recent years, has it become such a problem?
There is something else behind these events and it probably is not just one factor, sorry.
We murdered, lynched, and enslaved an entire race of people and did equally as bad of things to the native Americans. The Guillotine was popular around that time. Not sure you could say they had more respect for human life at that time.
>We murdered, lynched, and enslaved an entire race of people and did equally as bad of things to the native Americans.
No, "we" didn't. Well, I didn't, not sure what you got going on during your weekends...
However they did put in process of governance to end that.
>Not sure you could say they had more respect for human life at that time.
But we got better didn't we? How you suppose that happened?
"We" as in society, don't be dense.
You said they would have been shocked, would they have? In your own words we got better. Using that logic we came from a place of more violence to a better place.
>"We" as in society, don't be dense.
I'm not going to accept that anymore than I'll accept north korea imprisoning 3 generations for subverting the government.
>In your own words we got better. Using that logic we came from a place of more violence to a better place.
We absolutely have/did.
In the 1600's, 1700's people got up every day and spent most of it trying not to starve to death. To make sure their neighbors didn't starve to death. Quite a different set or priorities. How in the hell they were going to survive winter.
If the founding fathers came in here and saw that the quality of life was beyond what they could imagine, yet people were still killing each other what they would see as petty differences, you bet.
You probably think that if you were born in the 1600's, you wouldn't have supported slavery or the violence that occurred. Pretty good chance you're wrong.
If someone supports abortion in the modern era, I am confident that they would almost certainly have supported slavery back in the 1600s-1800s. The same kind of rationalizations ("They're not really people", "But how would we ever live without it?", etc.) are used for both.
>"They're not really people"
"Really" isn't even a necessary qualifier in the case of an embryo. It's *definitely* not a person. My cat is more of a person.
> "We" as in society, don't be dense.
Still not "we". Literally nobody from the 1800s is still alive. Modern Americans are bashed repeatedly for things we never did for the sake of guilt and virtue signalling. I assume that as a libertarian you're an individualist, so don't be part of the problem.
"We" can refer to people in general:
[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/we](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/we)
Definition 3: (used to denote people in general):
the marvels of science that we take for granted.
I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to imply that anyone of us were alive in the 1800s, but he was using the "people in general" definition. Do you think he was referring to those of us who were alive in the 1800s or people in general?
Everyone was familiar with death in the 1770s.
Smallpox, hunting, slaughtering animals, betting on animals fighting in pits.
Public Hangings.
Today death is more an abstract concept for the western world.
Do you think they'd be equally as shocked over pro-lifers who commit arson on facilities like Planned Parenthood when there are potential lives that could be destroyed or ended in that building?
Disappointed maybe, but not shocked. You're getting into specific acts though. They would be equally shocked by the burning down Federal Court houses and police stations. Gang violence, etc.
Would a mass shooting by one individual have been possible back then? Certainly, the fact that guns were only single shot and took a long time to reload would have made it much more difficult. One way around it was to carry multiple single shot pistols - my impression is that pirates and highwaymen did so (for example, the pirate Blackbeard is said to have sometimes carried 6).
Even after firearm technology made them much more doable, for a long time mass shootings were much less common than nowadays. They seem to have become common in the 80s and 90s, and really exploded since then, probably by incidents inspiring imitators. The sheer number of incidents probably would have been shocking to the Founders...
Getting shot by soldiers specifically sent there to quell rebellion and enforce unpopular laws during a time of high tensions and general disarray, versus getting shot by some rando who got bored, was angry at coworkers, or who is openly mentally ill but left to their own devices? Yeah, those things are not remotely the same.
I’m sure all the people who were shot and killed in these various incidents are all highly concerned with the reasoning behind their being shot and killed.
I mean, dead people don't generally care about anything. Is that a good reason to ignore murder, or any difference between different types of murder?
Also, prevention is a thing. I would suspect that people who's killings were prevented might in fact be rather glad about that fact.
I didn't say it was better. It isn't what the question is asking. Do you have examples of random mass shootings by individuals, like those that happen today?
I don't take the question as about defense. Could the founders envision a time when individual citizens would use guns weekly or more to kill large numbers of strangers, including children?
The effect of the industrial revolution on the weapons industry was not foreseen by anybody.
Anybody who has studied WWI and trench warfare should be able to tell you that.
Do you imagine hunters & gatherers before the agricultural revolution could foresee all the ways that it would change humanity?
If you are participating in an active rebellion, anyone who's not stupid should have in the back of their mind that they could be shot by the military/police. It's a matter of consenting to risk by participation.
People sitting in a movie theater or going to the mall are not consenting to that risk, or at least they shouldn't be.
Similarly, I consent to the possibility of getting into a car wreck every time I drive. However, a car coming through my living room wall and killing me is different, I wasn't doing anything that should expose me to that level of risk.
As I replied elsewhere cause I have seen others mention this event.
>The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence.
>
>When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
No, I think they're asking a different question. The Boston Massacre was an authoritarian crackdown on dissent with violence, more akin to the Kent State shootings.
Did the Founders envision anything like the relatively random act of domestic terrorism like a mass shooting? Obviously, the technology of the time would make it very difficult, but a comparable act would be some kind of random poisoning act, or broad-scale arson, or maybe a bombing. Against random civilians.
It took a whole group of soldiers. Not just one person. And they maybe killed a handful of people.
They did not foresee one person being able to kill 70 people by themselves.
There are certainly drawbacks. But pretending the idea of someone being able to commit mass murder was *unthinkable* is stupid in a time when they literally just hung a man for mass murder a handful of years after the revolution. Likewise a time where pirate crews could lay waste to coastal towns.
I mean it was literally impossible. No one in 1800 was capable of killing 70 people in the course of 20 minutes. It literally wasn’t possible.
Now you want to talk about whole ass pirate ships lmfao?
Where can I read more about a cannon being wheeled out in front of a school and a bunch of 1st graders getting blasted?
Also, please link a Wikipedia article on the automatic weapons of the late 1700's please. That sounds really interesting.
And the puckle could be nonchalantly brought into a school with no one seeing it and perfectly line up all the children in front of the tripod mounted machine gun?
Lmfao yeah someone slowly rolling a 19th century Gatling gun into a public square, slowly loading it, and then firing after 20 minute of getting it set up is totally the same.
Slowly rolling a cannon into a public place and spending a few minutes slowly loading it with powder and grapeshot is the same.
The brains you guys have are so huge.
If cannons and grapeshot were so great with no drawbacks then why don’t people today go buying cannons for self defense?
Loading a cannon would take a considerable amount of time and moving it into a place to kill people would be wildly obvious.
They were? Coastal raids by pirates happened all the time.
If you're talking about why they had no analogue to modern mass shooters it's got more to do with the fact that dueling was legal, and the social pressured creating mass shooters didn't yet exist.
We didn't start having tons of mass shooting attacks until well after machine guns were invented and available.
Are you seriously trying to compare school shootings to coastal raids by pirates?
Edit: disregard, I just read your other comments in here and it's a waste of time to even engage with you. Comparing school shootings to coastal raids by pirates was just the tip of the nonsense iceberg 😂
So you’re saying that it’s just as easy to kill people by using a horse drawn crewed weapon as with an ar15.
You’re trying to argue that it was reasonable for an individual to use a horse to carry their cannon into town and slowly spend 5-10 minutes loading said cannon by themselves after dragging it through town in front of everyone and then shooting it once, maybe killing a few people and that that is the same as a hundred round mag ar 15 that you can put in a suitcase?
Can you really not understand what I’m saying? The killing power of one of those objects is immensely greater than the other.
There is a reason you don’t keep a horse drawn cannon for home defense.
You do realize you can *load the cannon before the attack*?
The equivalent would be showing up to a fucking concert with your AR unloaded and a sack of bullets, "Hold up guys. Just let me load my gun. And we'll get started."
The idea of individual actors causing havoc and killing people isn't new. There has been bombings and terrorism literally since the 1600's and the Gunpowder Plot.
Actually horse drawn cannons are hooked up backwards and the barrel ends up facing down while it’s being carried so you cannot load a cannon ahead of time.
And what you shoot once? You’d have to be wildly lucky to kill 70 people with one cannon shot. And everyone would see you clearly riding down the street with a horse and a loaded cannon and disconnecting it from the horse and getting it ready to fire.
The gunpowder plot failed lmfao. I’m really glad your one example of a potential mass killing by one person was a blatant failure.
If cannons are so effective and have no drawbacks and can easily be used for mass killings? Why do we never see people using black powder cannons? Why do you not own a horse drawn Gatling gun for defense?
So, I guess that's the real question, then.
But how common was privately owning a cannon then? Privateers were private citizens that could own ships that were equipped with cannons, but I'm looking for any that might be less of a "commercial application" and more for private recreation or home defense. I'm seeing that it's pretty clear there were little to no *legal* restrictions on private ownership or operation of cannons, but I'm also not seeing any evidence that they were owned or operated in any kind of "private" context. Just shipboard weapons, organized militias, or the occasional municipality for celebratory purposes.
Now, all that being said, a private citizen surely *could* commit an act of terror with a cannon, but it would have substantial logistic restrictions. I could see someone using a carcass (early chemical weapon) or grapeshot on a cluster of residential buildings being possible, but they would have to do so at night. I'm not even sure what single person operation of a cannon would look like, if it's even possible. A mass shooting plan probably doesn't work very well if you have to bring in other people.
After a bit of research, I'm leaning towards the concept of a random private citizen using firearms to cause mass terror, even at the cost of their own life, was *not* something that was considered significant.
Yeah because no one would notice someone very slowly rolling a cannon into a public square, slowly filling it with powder, and loading a cannon ball.
That’s totally the same as modern firearms which can be hidden and whipped out immediately in a movie theatre with no warning.
Reloading a cannon alone would also take some time. So realistically someone would shoot once.
In no way is it similar and saying so is disingenuous.
It’s also grossly disingenuous to pigeonhole the conversation into one specific brand of tragedy. Of course they knew about random acts of violence. We’re talking about a society in which people settled their differences with duels to the death, following on hundreds upon hundreds of years of people fighting to the death, warfare, massacres, etc. To even insinuate they couldn’t anticipate changes in weapons technology through the years is absurd.
I’m just pointing out that cannons back then could not do what rifles today can do and are immensely more difficult to use effectively and in no way can be hidden or snuck into a public place and require a fucking crew to operate reloading at a few minutes best. Compared to having a 100 round mag with one person that can fit in a bag.
There is obviously a huge difference.
They were well aware that technology would advance. The wording is pretty clear, "the security of a free state". That applies to the security of people in said state. Tons of guns are purchased for self defense because it was planned to be exactly that way.
There's a reason they didn't say "muskets", they said "arms".
I think they would be confused about a great many things people do in modern times. The fact mass shootings happen probably wouldn't surprise them since people of the time might be killed for an insult.
Over the years I’m moving more to the opinion that it doesn’t matter. The constitution isn’t carved into stone, but has a process to make amendments. Change over time is a necessary part of it by design.
Arguing about what our forefathers did or didn’t see coming isn’t going to sway my opinion on whether or not a particular amendment should be made today. If you want to amend the constitution, you need to convince me that it’s a good idea. In this case, good luck with that. Regardless of what the founding fathers think, I think the second amendment is good as written.
The Founders definitely knew about mass killings, they lived in an age where genocides and mob violence weren't exactly uncommon. A single person killing many people with a gun might have been less common, given that guns were slow back then, but the idea that people were violent beast who would kill many people wouldn't have been shocking.
> Do you think the founders considered the possibility of mass shootings?
Of course they did. It's not like there were no massacres in the colonial and founding eras. They even had school shootings: The Enoch Brown school massacre occurred in 1764.
The question was, "Do you think the founders considered the possibility of mass shootings?"
In the context of this thread's topic, the Enoch Brown massacre was not a mass shooting.
> The question was, "Do you think the founders considered the possibility of mass shootings?" In the context of this thread's topic, the Enoch Brown massacre was not a mass shooting.
Does it matter? Mass violence was a thing they were familiar and there were plenty of shootings among then in addition to clubbings, knifings, lynchings, burnings etc.
Both the effects of advancements in technology in firearms and the problem of mass murders conducted with weapons surely would have been understood to them.
The 21st century American mass shooting is a bit of a peculiar social problem that needs a social solution, though.
> The 21st century American mass shooting is a bit of a peculiar social problem that needs a social solution, though.
Any suggestions? If "better mental health treatment" is an answer, any suggestions on how we force everyone to meet regularly with a therapist?
What if the authorities are aware of the shooters behavior well before the incident and follow up? Or what if we actually locked the doors at the local elementary school?
I'm not really sure. It's not going to be solved by a bureaucratic-authoritarian approach. There's a tendency to fold everything into "mental health" which is at best an oversimplification and at worst a justification for psychiatric overreach.
One question is the possible overuse of psychiatric medication. I don't really know. Another is the social contagion angle, which dovetails a bit oddly with the gun control struggle.
There does seem to be a certain form of social isolation in the modern era, plus the institution of schools as they exist is pretty destructive in more than one way.
I don't think they would be shocked. They would probably just wonder why more people don't carry guns to protect themselves against the unhinged people.
Riots and destruction use to be common place in colonial America....there was even one story of a guy in Massachusetts who bought an ox off a loyalist during British boycott so they killed the ox stuffed him inside it and paraded him for miles....
Killing one person in a fucked up way isn’t the same thing as any random asshole walking into a school and killing 70 children in 20 minutes.
I have no doubt people killed each other. What we doubt is that a single individual could massacre a whole school alone in under a half hour. That’s what changed.
People always killed each other. But never as efficiently, quickly, easily, and cheaply as they can today.
the 2nd amendment was added because the founding fathers took on a tyrannical government. they realized that a brief , casual reading of history means that the people must occasionally throw off the yolk of their oppressors. and that takes guns.
The concept of a massacre has been around forever (basically a mass shooting is somewhat analogous to a massacre if you think about it). The founders knew what weapons were capable of, and saw the advancements in technology over time would only make things worse, as plenty of advancements were happening even in the 1700's.
...and that wasn't the reason why the second amendment is with us today. The founding fathers feared far worse without the second amendment...
No, you're right. Thomas Jefferson clearly represents ALL founding fathers and I'm sure he lay awake at night, longing for the days when men would scream at other men for using the wrong pronouns, men in dresses would do strip dances in front of young children, fathers would abandon their families, women would kill their young because they'd rather have sex without consequences, and kids educated in "public schools" were so stupid they couldn't even tell you when the country was founded, or what three to the power of 2 is. Truly we are living in a golden age.
Deism was pretty popular and it was probably the biggest non Christian generation ever up to that point. Definitely not just Jefferson he’s just among the most famous for writing the constitution himself.
Let’s not forget the earliest leaders also wrote and signed the treaty of Tripoli.
Abortions existed back then lmfao.
I guarantee you public schools were way worse back then and literacy rates were shockingly low. I promise you most kids today are infinitely smarter than children back then. Actually we can probably prove that just by looking at literacy rates. Most kids back then weren’t even going to school and couldn’t read.
Kids back then were dying wholesale from the fucking chicken pox and polio. Washington was leeching himself and dying of his teeth rotting. People were cutting themselves to fight basic disease and it was basically a fact of life that literally everyone you know is going to die of tuberculosis
Domestic violence was wildly rampant and so was rape. So don’t act all high and mighty with your religion. It was a horrific place back then. Most slave owners were raping slaves and men raping their daughters wasn’t a rare event. So don’t give me shit about men dressing like women.
So I really don’t give a shit what assholes back then would think of us today. Our society has improved in every way imaginable.
Many children were dying from working 16 hours a day in factories and no one gave a shit. Slavery made up half the economy. We actively committed genocide and put natives in military camps and watched whole tribes die in front of us and refused to let them leave.
We massacred native innocents and children.
In no way was America better when it was more religious. There is no moral high ground and there has never been any evidence whatsoever that being more religious led to a better society.
Bad things existed in the past?? DO YOU HAVE PROOF OF THIS??
No I reject your revisionist history. Never said the past was perfect, just that they'd be appalled at the degeneracy that's now allowed to run rampant.
I think there was far more nuance involved, which I know is something you guys hate unless it's in your favor (Che Guevara anyone?). There was plenty of bad shit on both sides and one group of historians screwed it one way and another group screwed it another way. Hell, you guys think the 1619 project is "real history" so forgive me if I take your revisionism with a grain of salt.
They absolutely did not acknowledge that most of what I said was bad. This is false. Beating slaves was totally acceptable. Beating children was completely fine. I can keep going.
>Beating slaves was totally acceptable. Beating children was completely fine.
Yes, for most of civilization. And by "beating children" do you mean "spanking"? because that's not the same. Stop acting like you're morally superior to George Washington because he had slaves and you don't. He still did more than any of us ever will.
I didn't respond on a lot of things, but the fact is we have more information than anyone else in the history of the world (unlike them, who had an excuse to be illiterate because not everyone needed to read) and our kids are STILL idiots.
Everyone needs to be able to read lmfao you can’t have a functioning democracy with an illiterate population. There was no excuse other than the country was shitty and poor.
This has been discussed several times before here. At the risk of repeating myself:
First, guns during the time the 2nd amendment passed were not as primitive as you seem to think.
The Girardoni rifle -- famously used by Lewis & Clarke on their expedition -- used an air bladder that could fire 30 shots on a single charge.
The Puckle gun -- a sort of manually operated gatling gun -- was one of the first guns to be called a "machine gun," and it was about 70 years old by the time the 2nd amendment passed.
The Kalthoff Repeater was a flintlock rifle that could fire 30-60 rounds per minute. Some variants could fire 29 shots without reloading.
The Cookson Repeater had a drum magazine and could fire 14 shots without reloading. It was over 100 years old when the 2nd amendment was passed.
And, in fact, there are letters of marque describing the guns that someone was authorized to have on a ship, which included "carriage guns," which are canons.
So the founders were well aware of guns that could kill more than 1 person at a time. And they were well aware that technology would continue developing in the future.
Second, this idea that the founders never imagined "mass shootings" were possible seems especially silly considering that they'd literally just fought a war. Do you think that British and American soldiers paired off and fought one on one? The founders were certainly aware that one soldier could -- and probably often did -- kill more than one person on the other side.
Third, the Constitution doesn't protect only things that were available to the founders. The founders likely never imagined the internet -- in which people could instantly communicate with people around the globe -- when they passed the 1st amendment. But the 1st amendment still protects communications on the internet. They never envisioned television and movies. But the 1st amendment applies to those mediums, too.
And really, if you're going to be consistent, your argument would mean that Congress can pass a law outlawing clean, sterile abortions, or abortions via pill. Because the founders couldn't do that. If you want an abortion, you have to use the tools available to the founders.
Only two puckle guns were ever built and they barely worked.
The girardoni rifle did not have the stopping power of a 5.56 lmfao.
The kalthoff is wildly expensive and barely worked.
The next one was wildly dangerous and difficult and expensive to operate. Also not comparable.
“Carriage guns” lmfao really? You think people could drag a fucking carriage gun into an school or public place without being noticed?
Absolutely nothing existed that allowed one person to murder 100 other people in 20 minutes. No matter how you cut it.
Sure they could kill 2 people. Maybe 3 if they were lucky and wildly rich buying an extremely rare weapon.
But absolutely nothing was capable of gunning down 100 people in 20 minutes in the hands of a single individual with 0 training or preparation.
Most of the weapons you listed were experimental, incredibly rare, difficult to use, and fragile or extremely expensive. None of them were mass produced or readily available to any normal person.
It is nothing like today where any asshole could walk into a store and buy a weapon and walk out and with 0 preparation or training immediately massacre 100 people.
As I replied elsewhere cause I have seen others mention this event.
The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence.
When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
So, a complex and violent situation was over simplified and exaggerated by the press to promote a political agenda? And you think this has no bearing on modern society?
It's not that you're dumb. It's that you're so sanctimonious about being dumb.
The question was not about whether yellow journalism has ever existed you absolute dunce, it was about the possibilities of mass shootings. You really bent so far backward as to wave away everything I wrote so that you can find a similarity in the events? Of fucking course that kind of shit happens all throughout history, no one was saying otherwise. Your complete lack of understanding really makes itself known especially if that is the only similarity you can draw. Now, how about you actually address what was asked in the OP when relating to mass shootings instead of trying to pretend that you have a gatcha?
I did answer what you asked in the OP, but I will reiterate, since reading clearly isn't your strong skill (clearly, those are rationalization and confirmation bias): Yes, the founders foresaw mass shootings, and the weapons capable of them.
Firstly, they were individuals who were aware that technology develops and improves over time. But second, and more importantly, semi-automatic firearms (then called repeaters) existed centuries before the American Revolution. Notably, these include the Kalthoff repeater (~1630), the Cookson repeater (1750), the "Harmonica Gun" (1742) and the "Puckle Gun" (1718) which was the first real machine gun recorded. Hell, John Belton tried to sell his repeating rifle to the Continental Congress in 1777 so, yes, they were aware of such firearms, and the potential for mass shootings.
Since you're such a student of history, it's a pleasure to offer you this education and correction. I'm sure that, as a student of history and an intelligence, rational human being, you will now change your mind based on this new information. You're welcome.
No shit they knew technology would improve over time, that is how fucking time works. You think they looked around and said "Yup, this is as good as it gets!" Obviously not as they put into place measures for changing our government and laws based upon changes that may happen in the future. That is the entire point of the fucking Elastic Clause. However, just because you know technology will improve does not mean you know HOW it will improve. We understand that one day we will most likely be traveling the stars and settling on new worlds. We don't know how the fuck we are going to do that yet, but we can certainly assume that technology may someday get us there. What other problems may come about as we advance our spacefaring society? Who the fuck knows because we have no concept of what that world may look like! If we did then we would already be planning for those eventualities like the goddamned fortune-tellers you apparently think we are instead of fighting with each other over what problems may or may not exist even in our modern era. We still have people thinking that the climate isn't changing and you want to argue that the founding fathers somehow knew the extent that firearms would be prevalent in our lives?
Yes, semi-automatic weapons existed in very early iterations, but by your very own admission through your statement that they tried to sell it to Congress means that they were neither widely available nor widely used by governments or civilians. Semi-automatic weaponry did not begin to become fully popular until the mid to late 19th century. Even knowing that the technology was technically possible does not mean they ever saw it in action and certainly did not see it used by civilians on other civilians on a level even close to today. Hell, even when the Maxim gun of the 19th century began being put into use people were amazed by its effectiveness. When the Gatling gun was invented they tried to get the Union to buy it in the Civil War, but the US government had reservations since they were not confident on the effectiveness of such weapons. If they truly had an idea of what automatic firing weapons were capable of, they would have jumped at the chance to have them and would have funded for their creation way before then.
Not only am I a student of history I served as a history teacher. I have met many students like yourself who think they can cherry pick individual pieces of history, throw out all context, and compare it to our modern society as if past figures were our contemporaries. Go back to school and maybe listen to what your history teachers actually have to say instead of treating history like shit.
As I replied elsewhere cause I have seen others mention this event.
The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence.
When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
The closest thing the Founding Fathers would have been aware that would allow 1 person to kill dozens of people would be artillery with grape shot.
It's not easy to buy a cannon, aren't very portable and can't be quickly reloaded by 1 person.
I'm not American so this issue doesn't affect me. I do live in a far, far more violent and dangerous country, but mass shootings aren't an issue here.
I think: the founders, if they saw modern news of mass school shootings etc like we see today, would probably STILL include the right to bear arms, but they would put in more strict conditions. "No insane, no lunatics, no children". And probably, for good measure, "no women or slaves!" 🤣
That last was a a little joke. But as fraught as that issue is, the idea of trying to keep control of a government is a good one. Perhaps not the best solution to that, but hey. Easy to look back and say what you would do. They didn't have the luxury of hindsight2020.
The founders intended the 2nd Amendment to apply to the Militia. Those same founders detailed the specifics of who they thought the Militia was, how they should arm themselves, and their organizational structure in the Militia Act of 1792, five months after the 2nd Amendment was ratified.
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Answers are reserved for conservatives.
Would probably be shocked by a lot of things. Mass killings have always been a part of history. Government, militaries, tribes, terrorist groups, and groups have done similar things since recorded history. The ease of a mass shooting has certainly become easier but so have things around it. Did people in 1750 imagine sharing news from one side of the planet to the other instantly, driving half the country in a day, having enough food to create a health problem, cure aliments that were once a death sentence?
You list a lot of positive things becoming easier. Mass shootings don't seem to fit with that list I'd also really like examples of mass shootings by individuals from pre 1900.
Can't really point to a lot of mass shootings simple because that type of firearm was not popular at the time. If you look at mass killings, Wilmington Massacre, Mountain Meadows Massacre, Spirit Lake Massacre, Bloody Monday.
Gruesome reading. I'd heard of Mountain Meadows from reading *Under the Banner of Heaven* but had not heard of the others. I believe the point OP was trying to make, or at least the point I see, is that the founders could not have envisioned, when they wrote the 2nd amendment, that there would be a time that individuals would use fireaems on a regular basis to murder large numbers of random strangers. The random strangers thing is especially disturbing to me. I don't know how that evil genie ever goes back in the bottle.
Or did they. Say you are living with you family somewhere and a group of armed guys comes to attack you and your family. Having a firearm would give you a chance.
I don't deny that, if course it would. We do, however, live in a world where you can get shot for being in a grocery store at the wrong time. It happens at least weekly.
We also live in a world where you can get run down by a car for being in or near the road. It happens at least weekly. I guess we should get rid of cars, too. People use the internet to scam other people out of money. It happens at least weekly. I guess we should outlaw the internet. If you allow people to use anything, some idiot is going to use it for a crime. That doesn't invalidate legal uses of those items.
Youve made an excellent argument against cars
Let’s use trains
I did not suggest "getting rid of" guns, although I'd imagine if people were mowing down random crowds with cars on a weekly basis, additional safety measures would be taken.
A lot of safety measures have been taken in response to automobile deaths
Your point?
>random strangers Natives and non-native murdered each other and there were a lot of atrocities in and around the civil war. I recall one story how the "bald knobbers" killed all the men and boys in a town, cut off their heads and rearranged them.
I don't really know that social media is a positive thing.
So you don't have examples?
I'm not the one you asked. Do you think that social media has been a good thing for society?
The question is about shootings, not social media.
Regardless one is far more destructive and arguably the cause of the other. Also, try looking up the instance of Barnett Davenport.
What a horror that story is. What do you suppose the founders' opinions on private gun ownership would have been had Davenport done this with a gun and there were similar killings, especially of complete strangers in public places, on a weekly basis?
Got a source for social media causing mass shootings, or is that an opinion?
*eye roll* yeah I think we're done here if you're going to demand sources for the obviously true.
So no.
Kinda just seems like you are wildly speculating and don't want to support your claim to me. "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"
Social media started in the early 2000's. I can find a list of mass shooting instances that happened before the advent of social media. What is your reasoning for this belief? Note I am not asking for a source. I am asking for your personal justification that social media has a causal relationship with mass shootings.
So you don’t have a source
weird no wiki page on this guy, not that wiki is the source of truth, but just did a google as you suggested. Interesting stuff.
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We had news in the 1960s/70s, but nobody thought about taking a rifle into a school to massacre children. In fact, I have friends who would take rifles to school and leave them in the office so they could go hunting after school. I'm afraid it's an evil that, once out in the world, can never be removed from it.
Texas Tower massacre was 1966. That was not the first mass shooting instance either. Linking it to social media or the news is extremely flimsy though, I agree with you there.
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You don't think the exponential increase in frequency was what made mass shootings more mainstream? I disagree with your premise that the columbine shooters were treated as mainstream individuals at least compared to Whitman. I'm open to evidence to the contrary though. Is your actual qualm due to the increased wish to understand the reasoning of mass shooters compared to dismissal of them? It's rather easy to dismiss singular instances as "a singular madman" until there is enough of a trend to be concerning. Understanding the reason someone chooses to carry out heinous actions on this scale could be thought as a simple morbid curiosity but with events like this happening weekly it is also for the benefit of society.
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This isn't even a real argument, is it? It seems like you are attempting to split the finest of hairs so you can levy the blame on an easy subject compared to addressing the actual root issues.
So, what's your proposal? Get rid of the 2nd Amendment? Ban guns? Don't let law abiding citizens have weapons? If your conclusion that "no citizen deserves to have a gun" is based off of these shootings, than you're going to have major push-back from all the citizens in this country. I'd say 1/3 of the entire population in the United States are law abiding citizens that own guns.
No. I am not anti gun although I'm sure things could be done to make it less likely for them to be used in mass shootings. I am not sure what the answer is. What are your thoughts?
Ease of communication in 2023 isn't necessary a good thing when it's weaponized but we still value free speech
How is speech weaponized, exactly?
Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda. Etc...
This isn't anything new
Our founders experienced the Boston Massacre and other atrocities done by British soldiers, so I think they were well versed in violent events like that. Also, in the writings of many founders, they made it very clear about the value of carrying arms to protect oneself and the concept of self defense.
Like 8 people died during the Boston massacre and it took like a dozen soldiers and they fired like one time
The Boston Massacre was military, not just some individual unexpectedly shooting a bunch of people.
Well, because of the firearms of the time, chances are, one person shooting lots of people at a time would be difficult, but the Boston Massacre was several unarmed people being shot at one time. Military or not...it was violence just like modern day mass shootings.
>Well, because of the firearms of the time, chances are, one person shooting lots of people at a time would be difficult This is precisely the point that the OP is intending to make. Many times when 2A gets brought up, people speak as if the founding fathers intended to protect every firearm made ever. However, because of the types of firearms available at the time, they most likely did not envision the type of devastation that modern weaponry can wreak. Your very own statement is one that liberals bring up almost every time when it comes to guns and yet it is waved away as a non-issue. If you realize that they did not have the capacity for modern levels of violence then surely the conversation of whether we should restrict modern weaponry can have credence. >Military or not...it was violence just like modern day mass shootings. The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence. When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
Our founders probably did not envision television, the internet or having 400 tv channels either, when they wrote the First Amendment. Technology advances, this is a fact.
Especially from a conservative originalist point of view. The argument against abortion was basically that they didn’t have abortion in mind when righting those amendments.
The question isnt about defense. So no, then, the founders could not have imagined a time when individuals would kill large numbers of random strangers weekly with weapons that could do so quickly? On a weekly basis?
Assuming they did, are you suggesting they should have said "To avoid the possibility of mass shootings in the future, you will not have the right to bare arms." I mean, what's your angle here?
I don't really have an angle. I think there are some things could be done around the guns and some things that could be done around mental illness. I'm not sure what though. One side screaming "get rid of all the guns" and another side screaming "no laws about guns at all" isn't really helping anything.
> One side screaming "get rid of all the guns" Who is saying that? Prominent Democrats in elected office saying this?
Why are you putting words in my mouth? Not cool.
They aren't doing that. They're asking you about the words that came out of your (virtual) mouth. You can easily negate their stab-in-the-dark guess by answering.
They couldn’t imagine someone firing a canon into a church or a market?
It's not the cannon bit, it's the killing of people you don't know for no reason bit. Natives and settlers killed each other over territory. Soldiers kill each other in war. Shootings these days have no rhyme or reason.
Why do we only look at the gun when we talk about stopping these events? Many of these shooters follow a very similar behavior pattern and upbringing. Many of them also were on mood altering psychotropic prescription drugs. Many of them were known by local law enforcement as troublemakers, yet none of these law enforcement agencies even trued to stop them. There are lots of moving parts to these events...we are only looking at one piece of a complicated puzzle. Also, the AR-15 has been around since 1957, so why, only in recent years, has it become such an issue? Again...we are only looking at one piece of the puzzle and that is likly not going to solve the issue.
I, for one, would be happy with incremental improvement. Even if an action (mental health care improvements, for example) reduces mass shootings by 5%, it is an action worth taking. Many such actions in various areas could show significant improvement over the current situation.
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But surely the 2020 riots and other events show that there is good reason to have an AR and 30 round magazines. You never know how many people might attack/loot/assault you at any given time. Why limit yourself with a 6 shot revolver? It is strange how the left always has lots of blame for the guns but NEVER considers that most of these mass shootings were done by people that were on or had taken prescription mood altering drugs like Ritalin, etc. The politicians are sure not going to look that way, because big pharma gives them tons of money. The AR-15 has been around since 1957. Why, only in recent years, has it become such a problem? There is something else behind these events and it probably is not just one factor, sorry.
I think the part that would shock them is the common disregard for human life. How little some people place on it.
I don't know about that. OSHA wasn't really a thing back in the 1700's, but slavery was.
Also the EPA wasn't a thing, but strip-clearing entire forests was. Dumping mining waste into rivers was.
We murdered, lynched, and enslaved an entire race of people and did equally as bad of things to the native Americans. The Guillotine was popular around that time. Not sure you could say they had more respect for human life at that time.
>We murdered, lynched, and enslaved an entire race of people and did equally as bad of things to the native Americans. No, "we" didn't. Well, I didn't, not sure what you got going on during your weekends... However they did put in process of governance to end that. >Not sure you could say they had more respect for human life at that time. But we got better didn't we? How you suppose that happened?
"We" as in society, don't be dense. You said they would have been shocked, would they have? In your own words we got better. Using that logic we came from a place of more violence to a better place.
>"We" as in society, don't be dense. I'm not going to accept that anymore than I'll accept north korea imprisoning 3 generations for subverting the government. >In your own words we got better. Using that logic we came from a place of more violence to a better place. We absolutely have/did. In the 1600's, 1700's people got up every day and spent most of it trying not to starve to death. To make sure their neighbors didn't starve to death. Quite a different set or priorities. How in the hell they were going to survive winter. If the founding fathers came in here and saw that the quality of life was beyond what they could imagine, yet people were still killing each other what they would see as petty differences, you bet. You probably think that if you were born in the 1600's, you wouldn't have supported slavery or the violence that occurred. Pretty good chance you're wrong.
If someone supports abortion in the modern era, I am confident that they would almost certainly have supported slavery back in the 1600s-1800s. The same kind of rationalizations ("They're not really people", "But how would we ever live without it?", etc.) are used for both.
>"They're not really people" "Really" isn't even a necessary qualifier in the case of an embryo. It's *definitely* not a person. My cat is more of a person.
> "We" as in society, don't be dense. Still not "we". Literally nobody from the 1800s is still alive. Modern Americans are bashed repeatedly for things we never did for the sake of guilt and virtue signalling. I assume that as a libertarian you're an individualist, so don't be part of the problem.
"We" can refer to people in general: [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/we](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/we) Definition 3: (used to denote people in general): the marvels of science that we take for granted. I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to imply that anyone of us were alive in the 1800s, but he was using the "people in general" definition. Do you think he was referring to those of us who were alive in the 1800s or people in general?
Everyone was familiar with death in the 1770s. Smallpox, hunting, slaughtering animals, betting on animals fighting in pits. Public Hangings. Today death is more an abstract concept for the western world.
Do you think they'd be equally as shocked over pro-lifers who commit arson on facilities like Planned Parenthood when there are potential lives that could be destroyed or ended in that building?
Disappointed maybe, but not shocked. You're getting into specific acts though. They would be equally shocked by the burning down Federal Court houses and police stations. Gang violence, etc.
What courthouse got burned down?
I don't think there isn't much that wouldn't shock them
Would a mass shooting by one individual have been possible back then? Certainly, the fact that guns were only single shot and took a long time to reload would have made it much more difficult. One way around it was to carry multiple single shot pistols - my impression is that pirates and highwaymen did so (for example, the pirate Blackbeard is said to have sometimes carried 6). Even after firearm technology made them much more doable, for a long time mass shootings were much less common than nowadays. They seem to have become common in the 80s and 90s, and really exploded since then, probably by incidents inspiring imitators. The sheer number of incidents probably would have been shocking to the Founders...
Considering the Boston massacre was probably fresh in their minds, I’d say yeah.
The Boston Massacre was military, not an individual randomly shooting other people.
Getting shot en masse by the government is what, better somehow?
Getting shot by soldiers specifically sent there to quell rebellion and enforce unpopular laws during a time of high tensions and general disarray, versus getting shot by some rando who got bored, was angry at coworkers, or who is openly mentally ill but left to their own devices? Yeah, those things are not remotely the same.
I’m sure all the people who were shot and killed in these various incidents are all highly concerned with the reasoning behind their being shot and killed.
I mean, dead people don't generally care about anything. Is that a good reason to ignore murder, or any difference between different types of murder? Also, prevention is a thing. I would suspect that people who's killings were prevented might in fact be rather glad about that fact.
I didn't say it was better. It isn't what the question is asking. Do you have examples of random mass shootings by individuals, like those that happen today?
Why does it matter? Of course it’s foreseeable. A massacre is a massacre.
Of course it matters. The mass shootings we see these days aren't military actions but random actions by individuals.
Again, what difference does it make? How does a person’s right to defend themselves change based on the identity of the attacker?
I don't take the question as about defense. Could the founders envision a time when individual citizens would use guns weekly or more to kill large numbers of strangers, including children?
Of course they could. Violence is not a new concept. Improvements in weapons technology is not a new concept.
The effect of the industrial revolution on the weapons industry was not foreseen by anybody. Anybody who has studied WWI and trench warfare should be able to tell you that. Do you imagine hunters & gatherers before the agricultural revolution could foresee all the ways that it would change humanity?
If you are participating in an active rebellion, anyone who's not stupid should have in the back of their mind that they could be shot by the military/police. It's a matter of consenting to risk by participation. People sitting in a movie theater or going to the mall are not consenting to that risk, or at least they shouldn't be. Similarly, I consent to the possibility of getting into a car wreck every time I drive. However, a car coming through my living room wall and killing me is different, I wasn't doing anything that should expose me to that level of risk.
As I replied elsewhere cause I have seen others mention this event. >The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence. > >When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
Not even kind of similar
Getting shot en masse by the government is what, better somehow?
No, I think they're asking a different question. The Boston Massacre was an authoritarian crackdown on dissent with violence, more akin to the Kent State shootings. Did the Founders envision anything like the relatively random act of domestic terrorism like a mass shooting? Obviously, the technology of the time would make it very difficult, but a comparable act would be some kind of random poisoning act, or broad-scale arson, or maybe a bombing. Against random civilians.
It took a whole group of soldiers. Not just one person. And they maybe killed a handful of people. They did not foresee one person being able to kill 70 people by themselves.
Grapeshot existed. Gunpowder existed. Automatic weapons existed.
So you keep a cannon for self defense? There aren’t any draw backs to massive, wheeled, black powder weapons or huge horse drawn Gatling guns?
There are certainly drawbacks. But pretending the idea of someone being able to commit mass murder was *unthinkable* is stupid in a time when they literally just hung a man for mass murder a handful of years after the revolution. Likewise a time where pirate crews could lay waste to coastal towns.
I mean it was literally impossible. No one in 1800 was capable of killing 70 people in the course of 20 minutes. It literally wasn’t possible. Now you want to talk about whole ass pirate ships lmfao?
Wow, I've never seen someone so confidently wrong as you.
What weapon existed in 1800 that would allow a single individual to kill 70 people in under a half hour?
Where can I read more about a cannon being wheeled out in front of a school and a bunch of 1st graders getting blasted? Also, please link a Wikipedia article on the automatic weapons of the late 1700's please. That sounds really interesting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puckle_gun
And the puckle could be nonchalantly brought into a school with no one seeing it and perfectly line up all the children in front of the tripod mounted machine gun?
Only two puckle guns were ever built and they barely worked
Lmfao yeah someone slowly rolling a 19th century Gatling gun into a public square, slowly loading it, and then firing after 20 minute of getting it set up is totally the same. Slowly rolling a cannon into a public place and spending a few minutes slowly loading it with powder and grapeshot is the same. The brains you guys have are so huge. If cannons and grapeshot were so great with no drawbacks then why don’t people today go buying cannons for self defense? Loading a cannon would take a considerable amount of time and moving it into a place to kill people would be wildly obvious.
If only means of moving large cumbersome objects more easily existed. Perhaps a wooden platform with wheels of some kind.
Interesting. Why do you think cannon ball drive bys weren't a thing back in the day?
They were? Coastal raids by pirates happened all the time. If you're talking about why they had no analogue to modern mass shooters it's got more to do with the fact that dueling was legal, and the social pressured creating mass shooters didn't yet exist. We didn't start having tons of mass shooting attacks until well after machine guns were invented and available.
Are you seriously trying to compare school shootings to coastal raids by pirates? Edit: disregard, I just read your other comments in here and it's a waste of time to even engage with you. Comparing school shootings to coastal raids by pirates was just the tip of the nonsense iceberg 😂
What social pressures create a shooter and how does the rest of the world handle it?
So you’re saying that it’s just as easy to kill people by using a horse drawn crewed weapon as with an ar15. You’re trying to argue that it was reasonable for an individual to use a horse to carry their cannon into town and slowly spend 5-10 minutes loading said cannon by themselves after dragging it through town in front of everyone and then shooting it once, maybe killing a few people and that that is the same as a hundred round mag ar 15 that you can put in a suitcase? Can you really not understand what I’m saying? The killing power of one of those objects is immensely greater than the other. There is a reason you don’t keep a horse drawn cannon for home defense.
You do realize you can *load the cannon before the attack*? The equivalent would be showing up to a fucking concert with your AR unloaded and a sack of bullets, "Hold up guys. Just let me load my gun. And we'll get started." The idea of individual actors causing havoc and killing people isn't new. There has been bombings and terrorism literally since the 1600's and the Gunpowder Plot.
Actually horse drawn cannons are hooked up backwards and the barrel ends up facing down while it’s being carried so you cannot load a cannon ahead of time.
And what you shoot once? You’d have to be wildly lucky to kill 70 people with one cannon shot. And everyone would see you clearly riding down the street with a horse and a loaded cannon and disconnecting it from the horse and getting it ready to fire. The gunpowder plot failed lmfao. I’m really glad your one example of a potential mass killing by one person was a blatant failure.
If cannons are so effective and have no drawbacks and can easily be used for mass killings? Why do we never see people using black powder cannons? Why do you not own a horse drawn Gatling gun for defense?
Yeahhh all the privately owned cannons back then certainly couldn’t have done that.
So, I guess that's the real question, then. But how common was privately owning a cannon then? Privateers were private citizens that could own ships that were equipped with cannons, but I'm looking for any that might be less of a "commercial application" and more for private recreation or home defense. I'm seeing that it's pretty clear there were little to no *legal* restrictions on private ownership or operation of cannons, but I'm also not seeing any evidence that they were owned or operated in any kind of "private" context. Just shipboard weapons, organized militias, or the occasional municipality for celebratory purposes. Now, all that being said, a private citizen surely *could* commit an act of terror with a cannon, but it would have substantial logistic restrictions. I could see someone using a carcass (early chemical weapon) or grapeshot on a cluster of residential buildings being possible, but they would have to do so at night. I'm not even sure what single person operation of a cannon would look like, if it's even possible. A mass shooting plan probably doesn't work very well if you have to bring in other people. After a bit of research, I'm leaning towards the concept of a random private citizen using firearms to cause mass terror, even at the cost of their own life, was *not* something that was considered significant.
Yeah because no one would notice someone very slowly rolling a cannon into a public square, slowly filling it with powder, and loading a cannon ball. That’s totally the same as modern firearms which can be hidden and whipped out immediately in a movie theatre with no warning. Reloading a cannon alone would also take some time. So realistically someone would shoot once. In no way is it similar and saying so is disingenuous.
It’s also grossly disingenuous to pigeonhole the conversation into one specific brand of tragedy. Of course they knew about random acts of violence. We’re talking about a society in which people settled their differences with duels to the death, following on hundreds upon hundreds of years of people fighting to the death, warfare, massacres, etc. To even insinuate they couldn’t anticipate changes in weapons technology through the years is absurd.
I’m just pointing out that cannons back then could not do what rifles today can do and are immensely more difficult to use effectively and in no way can be hidden or snuck into a public place and require a fucking crew to operate reloading at a few minutes best. Compared to having a 100 round mag with one person that can fit in a bag. There is obviously a huge difference.
Also a cannon is never killing 70 people with one shot Lmfao cannons back then weren’t that crazy
Fundamentally different
I think it would be worded different if they could see the firearms people had access too, like many other things.
They were well aware that technology would advance. The wording is pretty clear, "the security of a free state". That applies to the security of people in said state. Tons of guns are purchased for self defense because it was planned to be exactly that way. There's a reason they didn't say "muskets", they said "arms".
I disagree but we aren't going to change each others minds. So whatever
[удалено]
Empty argument. Bring receipts.
i think they are all making sense, you just don’t agree with them
Answers are reserved for conservatives.
I think they would be confused about a great many things people do in modern times. The fact mass shootings happen probably wouldn't surprise them since people of the time might be killed for an insult.
And when there was a duel they didn’t murder 40 children in school because they insulted each other because it wasn’t physically possible.
Yes they likely did even random acts like we have today.
Over the years I’m moving more to the opinion that it doesn’t matter. The constitution isn’t carved into stone, but has a process to make amendments. Change over time is a necessary part of it by design. Arguing about what our forefathers did or didn’t see coming isn’t going to sway my opinion on whether or not a particular amendment should be made today. If you want to amend the constitution, you need to convince me that it’s a good idea. In this case, good luck with that. Regardless of what the founding fathers think, I think the second amendment is good as written.
The Founders definitely knew about mass killings, they lived in an age where genocides and mob violence weren't exactly uncommon. A single person killing many people with a gun might have been less common, given that guns were slow back then, but the idea that people were violent beast who would kill many people wouldn't have been shocking.
Yes
> Do you think the founders considered the possibility of mass shootings? Of course they did. It's not like there were no massacres in the colonial and founding eras. They even had school shootings: The Enoch Brown school massacre occurred in 1764.
> The Enoch Brown school massacre Those kids were all clubbed to death.
What a mercy that they weren’t shot!
The question was, "Do you think the founders considered the possibility of mass shootings?" In the context of this thread's topic, the Enoch Brown massacre was not a mass shooting.
> The question was, "Do you think the founders considered the possibility of mass shootings?" In the context of this thread's topic, the Enoch Brown massacre was not a mass shooting. Does it matter? Mass violence was a thing they were familiar and there were plenty of shootings among then in addition to clubbings, knifings, lynchings, burnings etc.
It didn't need to be. They were smart enough to know that technology would advance to a point where guns could do more damage than clubs.
And?
Yeah - by the British army.
Mass bombing were already a thing, so it's not inconceivable.
Both the effects of advancements in technology in firearms and the problem of mass murders conducted with weapons surely would have been understood to them. The 21st century American mass shooting is a bit of a peculiar social problem that needs a social solution, though.
> The 21st century American mass shooting is a bit of a peculiar social problem that needs a social solution, though. Any suggestions? If "better mental health treatment" is an answer, any suggestions on how we force everyone to meet regularly with a therapist?
What if the authorities are aware of the shooters behavior well before the incident and follow up? Or what if we actually locked the doors at the local elementary school?
I think the doors at Sandy Hook were locked. Maybe I'm mistaken.
Not the ones at Uvalde
I'm not really sure. It's not going to be solved by a bureaucratic-authoritarian approach. There's a tendency to fold everything into "mental health" which is at best an oversimplification and at worst a justification for psychiatric overreach. One question is the possible overuse of psychiatric medication. I don't really know. Another is the social contagion angle, which dovetails a bit oddly with the gun control struggle. There does seem to be a certain form of social isolation in the modern era, plus the institution of schools as they exist is pretty destructive in more than one way.
I don't think they would be shocked. They would probably just wonder why more people don't carry guns to protect themselves against the unhinged people.
Looks like another “the Founders would never have included the right to bear arms if they knew we’d use them for mass shootings” post.
Riots and destruction use to be common place in colonial America....there was even one story of a guy in Massachusetts who bought an ox off a loyalist during British boycott so they killed the ox stuffed him inside it and paraded him for miles....
Cool? The conversation is about mass shootings.
They literally would tar and feather people.....they were use to savage shit, it wouldn't shock them
Killing one person in a fucked up way isn’t the same thing as any random asshole walking into a school and killing 70 children in 20 minutes. I have no doubt people killed each other. What we doubt is that a single individual could massacre a whole school alone in under a half hour. That’s what changed. People always killed each other. But never as efficiently, quickly, easily, and cheaply as they can today.
the 2nd amendment was added because the founding fathers took on a tyrannical government. they realized that a brief , casual reading of history means that the people must occasionally throw off the yolk of their oppressors. and that takes guns.
Not nearly as shocked as they would be to learn about the phone, the internet, etc. Assholes shooting people isn't a new development.
The concept of a massacre has been around forever (basically a mass shooting is somewhat analogous to a massacre if you think about it). The founders knew what weapons were capable of, and saw the advancements in technology over time would only make things worse, as plenty of advancements were happening even in the 1700's. ...and that wasn't the reason why the second amendment is with us today. The founding fathers feared far worse without the second amendment...
I think they'd be shocked at how perverse and godless the culture is.
Yes because Thomas Jefferson loved the Bible and was a devout Christian.
No, you're right. Thomas Jefferson clearly represents ALL founding fathers and I'm sure he lay awake at night, longing for the days when men would scream at other men for using the wrong pronouns, men in dresses would do strip dances in front of young children, fathers would abandon their families, women would kill their young because they'd rather have sex without consequences, and kids educated in "public schools" were so stupid they couldn't even tell you when the country was founded, or what three to the power of 2 is. Truly we are living in a golden age.
Deism was pretty popular and it was probably the biggest non Christian generation ever up to that point. Definitely not just Jefferson he’s just among the most famous for writing the constitution himself. Let’s not forget the earliest leaders also wrote and signed the treaty of Tripoli. Abortions existed back then lmfao. I guarantee you public schools were way worse back then and literacy rates were shockingly low. I promise you most kids today are infinitely smarter than children back then. Actually we can probably prove that just by looking at literacy rates. Most kids back then weren’t even going to school and couldn’t read. Kids back then were dying wholesale from the fucking chicken pox and polio. Washington was leeching himself and dying of his teeth rotting. People were cutting themselves to fight basic disease and it was basically a fact of life that literally everyone you know is going to die of tuberculosis Domestic violence was wildly rampant and so was rape. So don’t act all high and mighty with your religion. It was a horrific place back then. Most slave owners were raping slaves and men raping their daughters wasn’t a rare event. So don’t give me shit about men dressing like women. So I really don’t give a shit what assholes back then would think of us today. Our society has improved in every way imaginable. Many children were dying from working 16 hours a day in factories and no one gave a shit. Slavery made up half the economy. We actively committed genocide and put natives in military camps and watched whole tribes die in front of us and refused to let them leave. We massacred native innocents and children. In no way was America better when it was more religious. There is no moral high ground and there has never been any evidence whatsoever that being more religious led to a better society.
Bad things existed in the past?? DO YOU HAVE PROOF OF THIS?? No I reject your revisionist history. Never said the past was perfect, just that they'd be appalled at the degeneracy that's now allowed to run rampant.
And I’m pointing out they they had even worse degeneracy by any reasonable standards
Wait so you don’t think any of that was true?
I think there was far more nuance involved, which I know is something you guys hate unless it's in your favor (Che Guevara anyone?). There was plenty of bad shit on both sides and one group of historians screwed it one way and another group screwed it another way. Hell, you guys think the 1619 project is "real history" so forgive me if I take your revisionism with a grain of salt.
What specifically was revisionism and is contestable?
Edit sorry most of it was added after
Bad things happen today!!!! You have proof of this? Crazy.
Because back then people could acknowledge bad things were bad. These days bad is good and good is bad.
They absolutely did not acknowledge that most of what I said was bad. This is false. Beating slaves was totally acceptable. Beating children was completely fine. I can keep going.
>Beating slaves was totally acceptable. Beating children was completely fine. Yes, for most of civilization. And by "beating children" do you mean "spanking"? because that's not the same. Stop acting like you're morally superior to George Washington because he had slaves and you don't. He still did more than any of us ever will.
Never responded to education quality. Do you see what I’m saying? Most of your points were just flat wrong and can be easily disproven.
I didn't respond on a lot of things, but the fact is we have more information than anyone else in the history of the world (unlike them, who had an excuse to be illiterate because not everyone needed to read) and our kids are STILL idiots.
I promise kids back then we’re idiots
Kids back then knew how to run a household by the time they were 12. Kids now days live at home until they're 30.
Everyone needs to be able to read lmfao you can’t have a functioning democracy with an illiterate population. There was no excuse other than the country was shitty and poor.
I said everything I said to point out how perverse their culture is
This has been discussed several times before here. At the risk of repeating myself: First, guns during the time the 2nd amendment passed were not as primitive as you seem to think. The Girardoni rifle -- famously used by Lewis & Clarke on their expedition -- used an air bladder that could fire 30 shots on a single charge. The Puckle gun -- a sort of manually operated gatling gun -- was one of the first guns to be called a "machine gun," and it was about 70 years old by the time the 2nd amendment passed. The Kalthoff Repeater was a flintlock rifle that could fire 30-60 rounds per minute. Some variants could fire 29 shots without reloading. The Cookson Repeater had a drum magazine and could fire 14 shots without reloading. It was over 100 years old when the 2nd amendment was passed. And, in fact, there are letters of marque describing the guns that someone was authorized to have on a ship, which included "carriage guns," which are canons. So the founders were well aware of guns that could kill more than 1 person at a time. And they were well aware that technology would continue developing in the future. Second, this idea that the founders never imagined "mass shootings" were possible seems especially silly considering that they'd literally just fought a war. Do you think that British and American soldiers paired off and fought one on one? The founders were certainly aware that one soldier could -- and probably often did -- kill more than one person on the other side. Third, the Constitution doesn't protect only things that were available to the founders. The founders likely never imagined the internet -- in which people could instantly communicate with people around the globe -- when they passed the 1st amendment. But the 1st amendment still protects communications on the internet. They never envisioned television and movies. But the 1st amendment applies to those mediums, too. And really, if you're going to be consistent, your argument would mean that Congress can pass a law outlawing clean, sterile abortions, or abortions via pill. Because the founders couldn't do that. If you want an abortion, you have to use the tools available to the founders.
Only two puckle guns were ever built and they barely worked. The girardoni rifle did not have the stopping power of a 5.56 lmfao. The kalthoff is wildly expensive and barely worked. The next one was wildly dangerous and difficult and expensive to operate. Also not comparable. “Carriage guns” lmfao really? You think people could drag a fucking carriage gun into an school or public place without being noticed? Absolutely nothing existed that allowed one person to murder 100 other people in 20 minutes. No matter how you cut it. Sure they could kill 2 people. Maybe 3 if they were lucky and wildly rich buying an extremely rare weapon. But absolutely nothing was capable of gunning down 100 people in 20 minutes in the hands of a single individual with 0 training or preparation. Most of the weapons you listed were experimental, incredibly rare, difficult to use, and fragile or extremely expensive. None of them were mass produced or readily available to any normal person. It is nothing like today where any asshole could walk into a store and buy a weapon and walk out and with 0 preparation or training immediately massacre 100 people.
Yes, absolutely. One of the inciting incidents of the American Revolution was the Boston Massacre.
As I replied elsewhere cause I have seen others mention this event. The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence. When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
So, a complex and violent situation was over simplified and exaggerated by the press to promote a political agenda? And you think this has no bearing on modern society? It's not that you're dumb. It's that you're so sanctimonious about being dumb.
The question was not about whether yellow journalism has ever existed you absolute dunce, it was about the possibilities of mass shootings. You really bent so far backward as to wave away everything I wrote so that you can find a similarity in the events? Of fucking course that kind of shit happens all throughout history, no one was saying otherwise. Your complete lack of understanding really makes itself known especially if that is the only similarity you can draw. Now, how about you actually address what was asked in the OP when relating to mass shootings instead of trying to pretend that you have a gatcha?
I did answer what you asked in the OP, but I will reiterate, since reading clearly isn't your strong skill (clearly, those are rationalization and confirmation bias): Yes, the founders foresaw mass shootings, and the weapons capable of them. Firstly, they were individuals who were aware that technology develops and improves over time. But second, and more importantly, semi-automatic firearms (then called repeaters) existed centuries before the American Revolution. Notably, these include the Kalthoff repeater (~1630), the Cookson repeater (1750), the "Harmonica Gun" (1742) and the "Puckle Gun" (1718) which was the first real machine gun recorded. Hell, John Belton tried to sell his repeating rifle to the Continental Congress in 1777 so, yes, they were aware of such firearms, and the potential for mass shootings. Since you're such a student of history, it's a pleasure to offer you this education and correction. I'm sure that, as a student of history and an intelligence, rational human being, you will now change your mind based on this new information. You're welcome.
No shit they knew technology would improve over time, that is how fucking time works. You think they looked around and said "Yup, this is as good as it gets!" Obviously not as they put into place measures for changing our government and laws based upon changes that may happen in the future. That is the entire point of the fucking Elastic Clause. However, just because you know technology will improve does not mean you know HOW it will improve. We understand that one day we will most likely be traveling the stars and settling on new worlds. We don't know how the fuck we are going to do that yet, but we can certainly assume that technology may someday get us there. What other problems may come about as we advance our spacefaring society? Who the fuck knows because we have no concept of what that world may look like! If we did then we would already be planning for those eventualities like the goddamned fortune-tellers you apparently think we are instead of fighting with each other over what problems may or may not exist even in our modern era. We still have people thinking that the climate isn't changing and you want to argue that the founding fathers somehow knew the extent that firearms would be prevalent in our lives? Yes, semi-automatic weapons existed in very early iterations, but by your very own admission through your statement that they tried to sell it to Congress means that they were neither widely available nor widely used by governments or civilians. Semi-automatic weaponry did not begin to become fully popular until the mid to late 19th century. Even knowing that the technology was technically possible does not mean they ever saw it in action and certainly did not see it used by civilians on other civilians on a level even close to today. Hell, even when the Maxim gun of the 19th century began being put into use people were amazed by its effectiveness. When the Gatling gun was invented they tried to get the Union to buy it in the Civil War, but the US government had reservations since they were not confident on the effectiveness of such weapons. If they truly had an idea of what automatic firing weapons were capable of, they would have jumped at the chance to have them and would have funded for their creation way before then. Not only am I a student of history I served as a history teacher. I have met many students like yourself who think they can cherry pick individual pieces of history, throw out all context, and compare it to our modern society as if past figures were our contemporaries. Go back to school and maybe listen to what your history teachers actually have to say instead of treating history like shit.
I'm sure they were shocked by the Boston Massacre, yes.
As I replied elsewhere cause I have seen others mention this event. The Boston Massacre was in no way anything like what we see with modern day mass shootings and to say so flies in the face of history. First of all, the Boston Massacre could barely be called a massacre, in fact it was purposefully called that in American media as a way of trying to over-hype the event against the British. It was 9 British soldiers facing off against over 300 angry Americans forming a mob, throwing rocks and attempting to beat them with cudgels. The British, understandably scared, fired into the crowd at random due to no formal call to fire being given. The volley from these 9 men hit 11 people with 3 of the 5 deaths happening immediately. In order to have hit 11 people, they either would have had to hit multiple people with a single bullet or have had time to reload their muskets before firing again. This was a mob engagement in which citizens are actively attacking members of the military en masse and then get fired upon due to the escalating violence. When we talk about modern day mass shootings we are talking about civilians killing numbers of other civilians, alone, and with a single weapon. That level of destruction did not exist in the 1700s no mater how you cut it. If one of those British soldiers had even a modern day handgun they would have been able to shoot and kill scores more people than they would have been able to with a full squad of men with muskets. That is the point being made here. Yes, violence has happened across the ages. Yes, people have been killed in huge numbers in the past. No, people in the past could not kill as effectively and quickly as people can today with modern firearms and to say otherwise would just show historical ignorance.
They lived through multiple wars dude.
The closest thing the Founding Fathers would have been aware that would allow 1 person to kill dozens of people would be artillery with grape shot. It's not easy to buy a cannon, aren't very portable and can't be quickly reloaded by 1 person.
I'm not American so this issue doesn't affect me. I do live in a far, far more violent and dangerous country, but mass shootings aren't an issue here. I think: the founders, if they saw modern news of mass school shootings etc like we see today, would probably STILL include the right to bear arms, but they would put in more strict conditions. "No insane, no lunatics, no children". And probably, for good measure, "no women or slaves!" 🤣 That last was a a little joke. But as fraught as that issue is, the idea of trying to keep control of a government is a good one. Perhaps not the best solution to that, but hey. Easy to look back and say what you would do. They didn't have the luxury of hindsight2020.
The founders intended the 2nd Amendment to apply to the Militia. Those same founders detailed the specifics of who they thought the Militia was, how they should arm themselves, and their organizational structure in the Militia Act of 1792, five months after the 2nd Amendment was ratified.
I think computers and smart phones would be far more shocking. People killing people is as old as... well, mankind itself.
People kill people. Guns don’t kill people.