This could (maybe) work in a theoretical world where our SCOTUS isn’t perpetually 5-4 in favor of either conservatives or liberals.
Now if we could fill up the SCOTUS with highly educated scientists, humanists, social scientists, etc instead of lawyers then we might have something…
Send all important matters to a national referendum, like Brexit.
that would require a major rewrite of the Constitution.
I’d love to see a national referendum on these issues.
I just finished the book two nights ago, and this very thought came to me many, many times. I don’t know that things are all that different than they were back then. Perhaps just the vehicles by which we communicate our opinions and beliefs is what’s different. It was pretty darned brutal back then! Ugly, ugly, ugly! For Christ’s sake, duels were a method of solving disputes (however, most disputes die and no one shoots).
Funny that we’re talking about a Consitutional issue and the Constitution is what set up the 3 branches of govt.
Those two don’t add up… to the point that you have to wonder at the polling questions.
Or, maybe we’re dealing with people that are AOK with the right people carrying concealed… just not terrorists. That and they haven’t thought it through - that their rights might end up being abridged due to letting someone else tell them what will make them safer. (I’d suggest they google Chicago/gun laws/murder rate before they hand it all off to the same people that have incubated that sorry mess, myself.)
Serious question: Does it ever occur to some people that when John Lewis talks about doing a little wrong to further right, he doesn’t sound any different from a whole host of people that led others astray? Infallibility isn’t really a human trait.
“I’d suggest they google Chicago/gun laws/murder rate”
New York City’s gun laws are every bit as strict as Chicago’s (if not more so), and yet it has a much lower murder rate. What’s the difference? For one thing (and very fortunately) New York is not next to Indiana.
Yes. This is a big “duh.”
I’m fairly certain that Political Science majors had to take Dueling 101 back in the old timey days. Change the No-Fly List to the No-Fly/No-Gun List would be a good place to start.
I have ready that if they did fire at a duel, they’d usually miss on purpose, or even just fire up into the sky. It was almost always only about saving face, not actually doing harm to the other person.
I know none of us can really predict, but does everyone think that if the access to a gun was cut off in most mass shooter incidents, the shooter would give up their convictions and do nothing? Suppose for a second in the Orlando case that the shooter would have been turned away from all the gun shops rather than just one. Would his hatred for homosexuals just have poof vanished because he couldn’t get a gun?
Chicago has a third again as many white, right-wing, bubbas as New York? Those in New York neither have a car or know anyone who does? The culture of those in Chicago is a little more devolved?
A brief nod to the number of illegals in the US, only because the number is approximately 1/60 that of firearms: You can hear as many times as you ask that it’s impractical to find and remove them. Go figure
“Chicago has a third again as many white, right-wing, bubbas as New York?”
What?
“Those in New York neither have a car or know anyone who does?”
Silly, but irrelevant. Compare the gun laws in Indiana to those in New Jersey and Connecticut.
“The culture of those in Chicago is a little more devolved?”
What?
Unfortunately, it did not end that way for Alexander Hamilton, or his 19-year old son. 
Although it was interesting (and somewhat inspiring) to see our representatives sitting on the floor in a circle, I did find myself having uncomfortable flashbacks to elementary school days.
“know none of us can really predict, but does everyone think that if the access to a gun was cut off in most mass shooter incidents, the shooter would give up their convictions and do nothing?”
How many times does it need to be said that these things don’t occur in the UK, Canada, Australia, Scandinavian countries etc anywhere near the rate they do here?
I’m tired of the loser argument “you can’t prevent it all so why even try.”
I just turn that argument against people and ask them if I shouldn’t bother treating my Lupus and RA since there is no cure. After all, shouldn’t I just accept death since I’ll never be rid of it completely?
Of course like a broken record the response is almost always “well that’s different.” Not one person has actually been able to tell me why it’s different but alas… it just is! 8-|
People are expendable- doncha know.
The cultural context is different in some other countries. It may be harder to get a gun illegally, etc. I’m sure some of us remember this argument beginning decades ago - that if getting a gun were made more difficult, only criminals would have them. Or that there’d still be a market for Saturday Night Specials.
But the point is to implement some better regulation and/or vetting, where we can.
Same thing I always think when the bubbas get dragged into it. Isn’t them.
Read that NYTs piece contrasting gun homicide in Chicago & NYC. One of the more implausible reaches in it is blaming Chicago’s problem on Indiana and I suppose by extension crediting NYC’s to Connecticut. As if there’s a magic number of miles that a criminal considers too many to import across. Drug dealers, if they bothered to read it, would be rolling their eyes all the while.
They did point out that Chicago’s population is roughly that of Brooklyn’s. The demographic group that is busily killing itself in Chicago is about the same size in Brooklyn also, which leads one to believe my last suggestion is closest to the truth: the culture is a little more devolved in Chicago. That an attempt was made to put jail sentencing for weapons charges in Chicago on par with New York’s (3.5 years, instead of 1) but failed because of complaints as to incarceration rates, tends to support the conclusion.
Our ‘bubbas’ are responsible only in the sense that they oppose restrictions that will fall on them. And fall they will, sure as a log rolls downhill.