I will slay the children I have borne; there is none shall take them from my toils; and when I have utterly confounded Jason’s house I will leave the land, escaping punishment for my dear children’s murder, after my most unholy deed.
— Medea by Euripedes, 431 B.C.
How do you enforce this because clearly it isn’t going to happen voluntarily?
I was not in any way arguing a pro gun platform. I’m very anti gun. I was just looking to see if there were more details.
To our general surprise this story shows: a good guy with a gun™ can turn to bad guy with gun™
So we probably need a better than good guy with a gun™ to protect us from the good guy with a gun™ in case he turns bad.
When some random moron has a gun, they don’t need to sneak through the back door, they just shoot you in the street.
When I ask you why the average person would go along with some trade treaty, you have responded that people are compelled to do it because it is law! If corporations depend upon the government for their corporate charter, then they could not charter such corporations. I think that lack of recognition and support which they count on to seem profitable would sufficiently disincentivize most big businesses. Of course, this would not physically prevent any firearms from possibly being manufactured. But reducing the influx from probably millions each year now (I have no stats) to more likely a few hundred could be a much more significant dent than funnelling them all into a police state.
Is that the firearms equivalent of Poe’s Law?
Murder and authoritarianism have some overlap, but they certainly aren’t quite the same thing.
Either way, deciding that some people are “random morons” and that some others are better is the very act of creating a class of people and giving them power over the average person. Apparently, some people consider that to be a compromise they can live with. But saying that people’s fear for personal safety allows them to create an overclass which others might not consent to could be considered rather confrontational.
It might not be a popular observation, but the drive towards survival and authority is merely the flip side of the same selfishness and entitlement which results in robbery and murder. When the same impulse manifests in both ways, it might be folly to assume that we deserve to have one without the other, even if the reasons why seem obvious. If self-control is too much work, then a dichotomy between draconianism and decadence - imposed discipline versus no discipline - might be the default, but I think that’s unnecessarily cynical.
Did you know her?
Before calling the father a coward, consider that perhaps the three of them did the fairly sensible thing of scattering to make the mother decide who to shoot at first.
Well SOMEONE has to. You don’t seem to be.
I don’t think enso is doing anything of the sort.
I think that popobawa4u was implying that since he doesn’t fear his own death, he can’t be compelled to do anything; I think enso was simply asking, well, what if it was your child’s life on the line?
Now, there was some asshole earlier who actually did call the father a coward (and got worse from there), but the post appears to have since been removed.
There is only one place to go with such questions, no matter who you (or she) are. And the answer to that line of ‘reasoning’ is no. No. N. O.
This is why we need bullet control.
Why is that?
Maybe we can all just become better apples?
So, we’re gonna need a better apple tree™ for future humans to not fall far from.
And can you imagine the degree of authoritarian overreach needed for the government to try to do THAT? And what do you do with all the bad apples?
Yes, that was an indirect Godwin.
Looking at why rather distracts from looking at how.
We can do something about the how. We cannot control the why.
We’re not trying to stop people from behaving badly, nor change behavior, we are trying to limit the damage they can do.
Hmm… Ok… I am not sure what that is about!
In case I was not clear, what I was suggesting is that rather than hand them out to whoever has the money, countries can cancel corporate charters. Of course, since this culture is based upon exploitation, they hardly ever do this now. Do you think that there would be an arms industry if Remington, Smith & Wesson, etc were faced with being dissolved as businesses? There isn’t even any tricky legislation required! It makes murder economically unprofitable much more effectively than yet another license or tax.
I hadn’t replied to that. My point was not my own instinct for survival, but that anyone’s fear of death can be and is exploited. As leverage, nobody can never actually force you to act against your own conscience, killing is more useful as a threat than it is as a practice. Because if exploiters kill those they exploit, they need to do the work themselves. The biggest monkey on the block can enjoy being the biggest monkey only if there are other monkeys to play status games with.
What about my offspring? It’s sad to think about, while also quickly turning into a classroom ethics exercise. No, preserving my kids life is not worth damaging the social climate at large. It becomes an ecological problem - if we acquiesce to an unhealthy social climate simply to survive, then we need to endure in that same unhealthy climate. Also, setting bad precedent makes such threats more - rather than less - likely to be repeated. Caving in to a survival instinct also would set a bad example as a parent.
