The Supreme Court May Finally Do Something Right!

[DanaC]

I don't need a gun to defend myself....I pay taxes to ensure a police force and an army for that. Not wanting everybody to have the right to walk about armed to the teeth with lethal weaponry is not the same as not being willing to mount a defence when needed. I am pro gun control, but I am not a pacifist.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by headsplice

If you're unwilling to defend yourself, that means you're willing to let other people wipe out entire populations?
Shenannigans!

You can address that to UG, not to me.

[headsplice]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

You can address that to UG, not to me.

You're right, I should have been more specifc. on me.

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Sheldonrs

I say let people own as many guns as they want. They can even carry them around out in the open as far as I'm concerned.

However, I think the bullits should be outlawed.

Guns don't kill people; bullits do.

Uh, no...bullets should cost 5000 dollars. Don't make me post the Chris Rock thing again.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

*blinks* in what way do anti-gun opinions equate to pro-genocide opinions?

Easy: the three reliably seen preconditions for a genocide are 1) hatred, however based; 2) the power of the State, either to give muscle to the haters or shield and sanction their activities; 3) gun-control laws, as these are the most efficient mechanism for disarming a population.

If you haven't disarmed a population, you can't practicably wipe them out, particularly in an internal pogrom. They'll shoot back, and you run out of Einsatzkommandos in short order. Maybe they run you out of the national capitol next.

Antigun opinions favor and encourage gun control laws. No gun control, no tyranny. No tyranny, genocide at worst drops to "mighty darn seldom." Nobody's going to call minimizing genocide a bad thing, least of all me.

Gun control laws are all about the disarming -- "you can't have this." Forbid or delegitimize armed self-defense and you eliminate any ability to rescue yourself from crimes by the State, genocides being perhaps the chiefest of criminal acts on a national scale. The record shows such laws are highly efficient at disarming people, and such laws are found in the legal corpuses of Nazi Germany, Ottoman Turkey, Communist China, Guatemala, Cambodia, and others. Damning, really.

Of the deadly three preconditions, hatred is... mighty hard to rid ourselves of. For better or for worse, the State isn't likely to wither away either -- and even worse from an antigenocide point of view, you can't look to another State to rescue you from the lethal intentions of your own. Not, at any rate, in time. It's happened, but how long did it take, and was there any coherent campaign to rescue or was it just incidental to conquering territory? You know the answer to that one. The state isn't a bulwark against genocides, particularly not when it is a necessary part of what makes one go.

What's needed instead is a vaccine against genocide. Gun bans are highly efficient at rendering people helpless before weaponry -- but laws banning guns are also the most vulnerable of the preconditions: they are subject to being wiped out at the stroke of the repealing legislative pen.

Consider too that genocides happen in secret, and that their victims do not see them coming -- they are ambushed. If they saw them coming, they'd take off, wouldn't they?

So it's really not that tough a logical leap to see "antigun opinion --> antigun legislation --> helplessness before violence --> crime by persons, without trouble, and crime by states, also without trouble: genocide."

Genocide being a nasty thing, you want to give it as much trouble as you possibly can, and only one way has been found that always works. The people must have fangs, claws, and the will to use them. Anything less -- well, it might work. Maybe. For a time.

But remember hatred doesn't go away -- it isn't momentary irritation. Remember how much hatred is completely irrational: are its possessors really anything other than like rabid dogs? Irrational haters are singularly unresponsive to the force of a good example, and notably rendered untroublesome after responding to the force of a well directed bullet. Given a choice between submitting to murder and using a good bullet, well, being of sound mind, I'll use the bullet and Godspeed to it.

Gun control laws can lie in wait for decades before a genocide occurs, as was the case for Cambodia. Theoretically, they could do their dirty work generations after being passed.

Thus saith the JPFO. The case they make for their argument is strong enough I don't think anyone's mileage varies.

[DanaC]

The genocide in Rwanda was mainly through machetes rather than guns.

England has strict gun controls. Does that mean England is pro-genocide?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

It means England is more vulnerable now to a genocide than ever before in her history. It's already meant violent crime has taken off into a growth spurt. To stop this, you're going to have to push Queen and Parliament into liberalizing concealed carriage of weapons and into active encouragement of private arms -- quite in accord with the long English tradition of limited government. It is, I think, essentially how limited government was kept a limited government.

Now if the victims had had guns, how long would the machete-wielders have survived? The victim populations were not armed, and that is why they died. If you want private arms to inoculate against genocide, the arms must be efficient. In point of fact, for several reasons including ergonomics of shooting and availability of ammunition, the arms should be assault rifles. The defense against genocide is more central to the matter than the means of the genocide.

The mass murder/suicides that make headlines over here, and are not unknown over there, have a feature in common that the public handwringers never mention: the shooter could be confident no one could shoot back at him. Because no one else could shoot back, the perp could rack up a sizable total before finishing himself off. Suicide is so often paired with this kind of multiple murder as to indicate a furious anger at the self as well as others.

[Radar]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I don't need a gun to defend myself....I pay taxes to ensure a police force and an army for that. Not wanting everybody to have the right to walk about armed to the teeth with lethal weaponry is not the same as not being willing to mount a defence when needed. I am pro gun control, but I am not a pacifist.

Who is going to protect you from the police or the government when they choose to attack you rather than defend?

Everyone has the right to walk down the street armed as much as they want to be and neither you, nor the combined remaining population of the planet earth combined has any legitimate authority or right to prevent them from doing so.

[Radar]

A person with a gun is a citizen. A person without a gun is a subject.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

We raise this kind of point from time to time, for we are citizens of a republic -- not a monarchy, however constitutional. Republics properly constituted are all about the broad distribution of political power.

The smartest thing Mao ever said was his remark about what political power grows out of. A Commie rat, yes, and a pathological narcissistic personality also, but that didn't make him a dullard.

[DanaC]

It's already meant violent crime has taken off into a growth spurt. To stop this, you're going to have to push Queen and Parliament into liberalizing concealed carriage of weapons and into active encouragement of private arms -- quite in accord with the long English tradition of limited government.

Violent crime primarily does not involve guns. There has been a spate of gun crime, which is due to a growth in American style gang-culture (by which I mean they take as their model the media depicted American gangs). Guns are not a part of English culture as a means of personal defence. Guns have always been for sport or for the armed forces and specialised police units.

Most of our violent crime involves knives. In the ward I represent, the crime levels are high and there is a gang culture amongst the youth. Despite this there are very few guns around. A lot of kids carry blades. Very few criminals carry guns. If guns were more easily available to the general public, every hard case on the estates would have one. Every time the police bust a drug dealer in the Close it would turn into a siege.

The answer to rising violent crime is not to increase the number of available weapons. All that would result in would be a tacit arms race between the police and the criminals. The more ordinary, law-abiding citizens that take up arms, the more accidental gunshot victims there would be.

We raise this kind of point from time to time, for we are citizens of a republic -- not a monarchy, however constitutional. Republics properly constituted are all about the broad distribution of political power.

However broad the distribution of political power in theory is in your country, in fact it not that broad. Large swathes of your population have abdicated themselves from political power (as have large swathes of ours) believing that they are already tacitly denied a part in it, or that any part they play is pointless. The laws on gun ownership are not because you are a repulic and we are a monarchy. Political power does not reside in guns. It resides in the ballot.

Netherlands and Poland have similarly tough restrictions on firearms. France has high gun ownership but in order to get a licence citizens must prove their mental state and concealed weapons are illegal. The American system of easily acquired guns and legal concealment is not a feature of republicanism it is a feature of American republicanism.

[xoxoxoBruce]

However broad the distribution of political power in theory is in your country, in fact it not that broad. Large swathes of your population have abdicated themselves from political power (as have large swathes of ours) believing that they are already tacitly denied a part in it, or that any part they play is pointless.

I agree with you, especially on a national level. Too many people feel they are part of the system just because they vote once every four years... and pay taxes.
It's a shame, but I suppose it does limit personal disappointments... and gunfights.

[deadbeater]

Okay you pro-gunners, can you explain what the hell is happening in Iraq? There every citizen got a gun, but even then they are helpless vs the insurgents. They can't even defend themselves, which is vexing even the Bush Administration.

[TheMercenary]

Apples and oranges. There is no comparison. The majority of gun owners and supporters in this country have a sense of the rule of law.

[Radar]

So much for the theory that people without guns can't kill a lot of people.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapc....ap/index.html