Discuss.

[kitchen_kink]

Y'all know that I'm deeply conflicted on the whole gun thing. I don't like them and think that their proliferation has bad results, yet I understand the desire and right to be armed. I also cheer when I watch victims in films (usually women) turn around and shoot their aggressors.

Yet I also think that gun control is good, that waiting periods are good, that anyone who needs a gun NOW RIGHT NOW probably shouldn't get one right now.

And then there's this article (thanks greendalek):

If your job makes you fear gunfire from people who are not violent criminals, and if you routinely do things that you think might make the “common man” want to blow your damn head off, maybe what you’re doing isn’t good. (Personally, I avoid doing things that might make the average Joe want to kill me.) The reason tyrants are afraid of armed citizens is because tyrants do things which sometimes make people want to shoot them. (Duh.)

Leaving off the usual stylistic bluster that I think makes most Libertarian writers sound like paranoid, insane assholes and hurts their credibility tremendously...whattaya think?

Comments

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

i waver in my thoughts about this. mostly along the lines you've described...

tools have accident rates associated with them. some, like guns and cars, are prone to particularly damaging accidents.

to reduce the death/dismemberment rate associated with a particular tool, you can either reduce the accident rate, or reduce the proliferation/usage of the tool.

so in europe the price of gas is inflated by taxes, and there's much less of a road-trip culture than in the u.s. over here our car usage per capita is high. but this means that a lot of people die in car accidents. we could impose strict licensing requirements-- training-- to cut t down the accident rate, but we don't wanna. but it turns out that lethal car accidents are highly correlated with drinking, especially in younger people. so we have this baroque drinking-age scheme whose only real justification is that it somewhat reduces the number of young adults who drive after drinking alcohol, and hence cuts down on the death rate from cars.

i guess in some sense it means that as a culture, it's more important to us to be free to drive than free to drink. maybe that's something. :)

but there's the same problem with guns. in europe they tend to reduce the proliferation of the tool, though not as subtly as with cars. here in the u.s. we've... well, done nothing, actually. we could impose strict licensing requirements but we don't wanna.

i'm neither philosophically in favor of "gun control" nor convinced that in practice it could be made to work here-- as you point out, there are a lot of guns already in circulation. but it has the virtue of being an approach to the problem.