No, I don’t know why you would think so. Revoking a corporate charter seems much easier than drafting new legislation. Do you honestly suppose that ending most gun manufacture would have a less significant effect upon the future of firearms use than instituting some additional checks or taxes upon an existing gun market? No new gun sales at all sounds better than reducing them by some amount.
That’s not what I am getting at. Any willing market can only buy what is made available. For example, if cigarette companies were discorporated, one still technically could grow some tobacco and smoke it, but it would still effectively end the tobacco industry, as it exists today. Even if a market can be said to potentially exist, this does not oblige the government to extend corporate status to those who would such a market.
I think that instincts are just as imaginary, whether it is the instinct to belong to a social group, or to survive as an organism. They still represent compulsive behaviors, and so can cause problems reducing choice and autonomy. I am certainly willing to protect my family, although not at any possible cost. I have invested a lot of care and time for their lives to be threatened by anything frivolous, and they value being alive. But I do need to be careful when people frame choices I need to make regarding their safety in ways which could adversely affect us or others.
It’s also tellingly inconsistent that when you are critical of my social projects you entreat me with the reality of the social contract. It’s asymmetrical, almost as if the social contract is real if the government is seeking my compliance, but completely fictitious when I am seeking theirs. The way I work is that social justice means applying the same rules to everybody, and does not allow for such double-standards. When I have discussed disarming police, your reasoning against it basically “might makes right”, because police could shoot you. Yet, when it comes down to my conduct, and our discussions here, there is some expectation of civility. If we are willing to allow violence from the government itself, we would be breeding hypocrisy. Our ideals of a civil society would be insolvent, and have no teeth in politics at large.
The well-being of me and my family are less important than that of society as a whole for mostly ecological reasons - simply because we are but a tiny subset of it. “The needs of the many…” and so on.
So, you’re not a woman. As for the concept of “timely”, I’ll go further and state you’re not African-American either. (Etc., etc., since there are many other groups this applies to…Native Americans, for example.)
Isn’t that just a flippant way of saying that you’d rather not worry your little head about it while attempting to sound morally in the right?
Just because something isn’t pleasant or easy doesn’t mean it can’t, or shouldn’t, be understood. You can choose not to do that, but be honest about what doing that entails. Specifically, putting both index digits in your respective left and right auditory canals and singing “La la la.”
Are you sure? Have you ever seen that happen? If you start the motions to revoke a corporate charter for Smith & Wesson, wouldn’t they just move their corp. offshore? How is the US supposed to revoke the charter for Glock GmbH? Since cops/military are going to want guns, what’ll happen there?
Would you say the Supreme Court gets it wrong almost always?
Here are some recent decisions.. I don’t keep up with it anymore (I used to write about it) but even those decisions that I disagreed with, reading the decisions would at least make me sympathetic to the arguments.
That sounds rather authoritarian for someone that doesn’t believe in laws.
I’ve never said anything about the “reality of the social contract” in any communication with you before today or in any criticism of your projects.
Me too. These rules are called “laws.” They apply to everyone and are open to amendment by the citizenry.
No, that’s a misframing of what was said. What I’ve said is that when you say that you go around pretending laws aren’t real while living in the physical borders of an entity that says they are real and has armed agents willing to enforce them, whether you agree with them or not, that you will find that your pretense to police and the judicial system that laws are not real will not be respected nor abided by. When you’ve mentioned the idea of violence against police or other agents of the law, I’ve pointed out, as a matter of practical reality, that if you threaten police, they will shoot and probably kill you.
If you want to disarm the police, by all means do so. Your steps to do so are to get the laws of our government and its agents to make new laws and regulations that state police are to be unarmed, not to stop cops (whether at gun point or not) and try to remove their firearms. Again, that will get you shot and probably killed.
Governments are rooted in a monopoly of violence. That’s part of the reason they exist. The argument for that is that if they are well ordered and created from the bottom up by the will and decisions of the people, that they represent the people and therefore having them as agents of violence is better than having random individuals engaging in violence whenever they see fit. This is part of the rule of law, of which I am sure you are well familiar in concept if not agreement. This is all basic Civics, which, when I was a young person, we still taught in government funded schools.
I am fairly sure that actually doing so would be easier. The obstacle seems to be more that it is “unthinkable” for many people. An elite may have been bought off to allow corporations to go mostly unchecked, but there might be popular support for doing so. As many reservations as I have about countries, there seems to be quite a few cogent reasons for them to encourage some responsibility from the businesses they facilitate.
If they were to do any significant business here, they would presumably need some US presence. Otherwise contracts with their foreign office would be difficult to enforce. Also, the US is one of the largest worldwide markets, and produces perhaps the largest portion of weapons. There is also the annoying influence of other countries - for better or worse - adopting US-friendly business practices for economic and political reasons.
So far as I am concerned, they are not entitled to want anything. They exist to be of service. No new gun sales would mean gradual disarmament for them, along with everybody else. It is bad enough to have randos with guns wandering around looking for trouble. Actually paying people to do that as their job is crazy.
Well since there’s virtually no chance of any notable restrictions on gun purchases getting passed by lawmakers, and virtually no chance of the gov’t revoking corporate charters of US gun makers and disarming the police/military, we’re at an impasse in terms of which the most unlikely, given that both have something like a .000000000000001% chance of happening. I do think our gov’t choosing to disarm our military is less likely than the Congress passing stronger gun control legislation, but who knows.
I don’t disagree that revoking arms manufacturers’ corporate charters, disarming cops, and radically reducing the military are fine ideas.
Well, I mean, we do actually have regulations and restrictions on the whole “freedom of speech” thing, and words are way less directly lethal than firearms. I think on balance, I’d prefer less regulation of the former and more of the latter.
Also, I really don’t get why people keep treating the Constitution like a religious document. It can be amended. It has been amended. We’ve even ratified amendments that nullify other amendments because of how terrible they were for the country. The rights guaranteed by the Constitution are simply social conventions, not God’s Law. We can change them. And when it comes to the second amendment, we should.
Also, I really don’t get why people keep treating the Constitution like a religious document. It can be amended. It has been amended.
I agree with you 100%. I would go one step further and say it should be amended. I fully support restrictions on certain guns, but passing laws are pretty much a waste of time until we fix the constitution. The rights of gun owners have been very well tested in court and so there isn’t a whole lot of uncertainty about it anymore.
I would also like more explicit privacy guarantees added.
I agree that quick answers will not be helpful. However, I hope psychologists thoroughly profile who she was in order to see if there are patterns of behavior with mentally ill people in order to better restrict housholds from owning / storing firearms where these people reside. I think if medical professionals can help create a means to red flag potential dangers from obtaining firearms, via behavioral patterns and/or EEG tests, it could greatly reduce these disgusting and heartbreaking incidences.
Gun manufacturers and their lobbyists are not doing anything to solve the problem of mentally ill people owning firearms. This is what I call a failure of the marketplace, and one of the main reasons why governments exist. The private sector isn’t addressing the problem, so the people now have to turn to their other option and seek the help of lawmakers and politicians. Whatever personal freedoms are lost, and whatever unattended consequences arise, as politicians try to create laws and solutions for this problem, it will be because of the failure of gun manufacturers to address this horrible problem first.
I think it’s fair to say an EEG of her wouldn’t reveal much at this point. Facetiousness aside, mental health screening for people buying guns is really not going to work. First, you’d need people to submit to it. Second, you’d need people to be honest during it. Third, you’d need to actually be able to predict violence from an interview. The first is going to involved a substantial waiting period and out of pocket cost. The second won’t work in the age of the internet when people can share how standardized tests are looked at on forums. The third isn’t practical and doesn’t even have anything to do with mental illness - a person who has gotten in a couple of fist fights in the past and has a few drinks now and then is a far greater danger of future violence than a person who suffers from schizophrenia and has never become violent.
Mental illness can make gun crimes harder to understand for the average person, but it doesn’t really make them more likely.
I think I used the term mental illness incorrectly. I should have stated the focus should be on banning those with mental illnesses that have shown to bring a person to behave dangerously towards others and/or themselves. That being said, I personally believe those who have little to no problem with acting out (or fantasizing about) violence towards other people, where it’s clearly not in self-defense, as being mentally ill. I would consider adults who get drunk and physically harm others to be mentally ill, and not deserving to own a firearm. Such people obviously have their brains wired in such a way that they need to apply therapies in order to help them manage their impulses towards losing self control and becoming violent. If an adult shows they’re unable to control the amount of alcohol they consume, and cannot control themselves in getting into physical conflicts with other people, then I think they should lose their right to gun ownership; even if their guns are only used for hunting. They’ll have to pick up archery if hunting means that much to them.
I think that the outright banning of firearm ownership by private citizens will not happen here in the U.S. What will happen is regulations and barriers for some to own firearms. This is what frames me to have the opinion that their needs to be objective reasons for governments to use to block an individual from owning a firearm, or living in a place where they have access to one. Such restrictions should be open to scrutiny (for such things like possible tendencies for government agents to deny minority groups more than others) and have the regulations be able to be modified as new information on how to better profile an individual becomes available. I also think that there should be appeal proccesses put into place if someone believes they were wrongfully banned, and can sue for compensation when government agents abuse the ability to restrict a person from owning a firearm.
