The problem is that most gun owners are in fact pretty moderate.
And the gun lobby/right wing screams up and down insisting that the regulations being asked for are anything but moderate.
Personally, I think most gun owners might be slightly grumpy but basically OK with a ban on handguns when you show them that over 2/3rds of gun deaths of all sorts are from handguns. We wouldn’t infringe on any 2nd amendment nonsense either. Hunters can hunt, home defenders can imagine intruders to shoot with their rifles, target shooters can shoot targets, etc.
This is actually a new position for me since getting involved in these forum bickerings. But I’ll be damned if anyone here made a case for it. (And I don’t even think this is the way to handle the issue, I think there are several ways after listening to everyone here)
Will do! I’ve just been putting together a multi-step plan so I can start it as a small Skunkworks type business and expand from there. WAY less explaining and thanks to HP milking the State Medicaid contract (Something I prototyped for them in six months will be finished in mid 2019 with half the feature set) I’ve got a good starting point for that.
I’m just acquiring some bonus skills and stockpiling some funds to pay people to do some of the things I’m not as good at.
It couldn’t replace nations because membership in a nation isn’t an option, and civilization (from a human psychology standpoint) has to be an option. Otherwise you’re stuck with people who aren’t on the same page, right?
It could be something that exists inside a nation (like the military, but very different in a lot of ways), but I think it’s somewhat crippled if it’s constrained within one nation.
That still leaves a few existing legal structures (Religious institution, NGO, Multinational Corporation) that can fit the requirements and gather people from anywhere. My current leaning is a worker co-operative, (which would fall under the multinational umbrella) because it has the most power to compete for resources and to acquire land/facilities while still having an easy way to join (‘being hired’) and leave (‘being fired’ or ‘leaving’).
So basically, supplemental citizenship, but making the whole ‘Nation’ model largely irrelevant as far as the people within are concerned. A few sympathetic host nations to shuffle people back and forth between would add value then, too.
I think that people not being on the same page is better. Nation states are simply monopolies, which seem to eventually create more monopolies. Having overlapping, parallel groups seem robust enough to allow for a diverse ecosystem - which traditional governments have never had.
The existing structures do not work for me at all, which was my original motivation for starting something else. If you have never believed in property or territory, then most currently existing legal/institutional frameworks very much work against you. They are designed for “collective selfishness”, and make any “group” (company, religion, family, school, etc) other than certain prescribed types impossible. So the first thing to do is unlock that and create a framework which makes it easy for groups of people to create new social institutions which the participants agree to.
I’m trying to decide whether or not that would work. It all sounds very Neal Stephenson (e.g. the burbclaves in Snow Crash).
The problem with doing away with the nations as hosts is that if one group (let’s call it GunLand) is centered around gun ownership, manufacture, proficiency, etc. - what is to stop that group (which has the most guns) from conquering the other groups and taking their resources?
Well, when you think about it that’s exactly what I’m talking about, except there’s also an option for somebody to not join at all (and thereby remain part of their current nation). That allows for a basic level of civility by default across the board, making it easy to set everyone else loose. [quote=“popobawa4u, post:28, topic:70156”]
The existing structures do not work for me at all, which was my original motivation for starting something else. If you have never believed in property or territory, then most currently existing legal/institutional frameworks very much work against you.
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Which sounds great and all, but there’s no mechanism for getting from where we are now to the point you’re talking about other than ‘everybody becomes enlightened and agrees’…which is pretty common among the RBE and Venus Project crowds. It’s an excellent concept, but they’ve got no transition plan and no way to deal with somebody else deciding to use existing rules to take their stuff.
I’m very deliberately taking the road less travelled there. I’ve got a slightly better explained design here: Rewriting the Planet and Taking our Lives Back in Five Easy Steps if you’re interested in the general approach…but conceptually you’ve got a fringe of min/maxers treating all existing legal systems like an exploitable RPG and passing the benefits to the people on the ‘inside’, which are progressively held to kinder and gentler standards within their groups.
You could also look at it as ‘A ring of people engaging in society to create multiple TVP-like experiments while putting the final decision making in the hands of the actual best of us and protecting them all from harm/distraction’
However, to reiterate one thing, I don’t feel the need to explain the details to anybody unless they’re very eager to help find solutions (rather than problems) or else have the resources or platform to help speed things along in some way. It’s annoyingly stressful and I’m better off focusing my efforts, especially as I have an actual short-term plan now that doesn’t require I ever explain anything…I can just demonstrate.
It deserves to be tried at the least… and in a way it’s simpler than a lot of other work that I’ve done from a human productivity standpoint as this way the people control their inputs and outputs (rather than being told to work and then being sent to a hovel in Detroit). I’ve got several years of analysis using my brain very responsibly on the subject.[quote=“nimelennar, post:29, topic:70156”]
The problem with doing away with the nations as hosts is that if one group (let’s call it GunLand) is centered around gun ownership, manufacture, proficiency, etc. - what is to stop that group (which has the most guns) from conquering the other groups and taking their resources?
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You hit on why I’m leaning multinational corporation.
I can do it without begging for help
Laws become the weapon of choice.
You don’t need roads between the nice people and the assholes.
If we’re spiderwebbed through several nations and one gets prickly, we can leave.
I’ll note though that a key part of the design is to very aggressively spill benefits out to any host nations so that any harmful action is an unpopular choice and has negative economic consequences.
Oh! And for a more practical attempt to explain how things would work in practice I started putting together a little story at Doctor Who and the Rightly Broken Rule. It’s incomplete but I think it helps to get a vision out there, right?
That way we’re closer to the same page.
Not that I can predict everything, of course. In fact I’m pretty sure my view is an immature one and I’m missing a lot of options, but it sets the stage.
My stance has not changed because of discussions per se, but it has evolved after plenty of posts on 3D printing and every (all) failed attempts at legislating away technology.
Something needs to be done, but you can’t put the low-cost technological genie back into the bottle.
Nuclear devices are not going to be built by the average kid on the block, but eventually the average kid will be able to print one that fires more than once.
So therefore we shouldn’t bother legislating guns? I’m just curious if your stance on gun control has changed, where because of 3D printing you now think we shouldn’t have any laws about them or that we now should.
I don’t think we can “ban” guns (which is a bit of a strawman argument) because we will be able to 3D print them. Prohibiting technology from printing arbitrary pieces that can be assembled into a gun is impossible.
We need a societal change in attitude. But as others have pointed out, enacting less-than-perfect laws can be a sign that attitudes are changing.
This is a bizarre argument. You can build a gun. Now. Today. No one is stopping you and instructions are online. The future of 3D printing is mostly a question of the material democracy, but the fact of the matter is that the skill you need to build a pipe bomb is minimal. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have rules about destructive devices. It’s a total non-sequitur. It’s incredibly easy to get in a car, but that doesn’t render licensing and registration requirements moot.
Difficulty and futility are not the same thing, not by a long shot. This is especially true for crime. The fact that the War on Drugs does more harm than good is the reason it should be ended, not its futility. There are plenty of human activities that are Sisyphean in nature. A certain percentage of missing persons will never be located, but it doesn’t mean no efforts should not be made.
The difference in skillsets for building a working, multiple-shot gun and running a 3-D printer to assemble the same are/will be vastly different. I know that I cannot build a gun today.
There is no parallel between pipe bombs and guns. Unless a pipe bomb is some sort of tool that has utility beyond blowing things up? It falls into the same category as dynamite, I would guess. There’s not much hunting or target shooting going on pipe bombs, and few police officers carry pipe bombs. There was an infantry division that carried pipe bombs. But their delivery vehicle was the postal system, and it was eventually determined that service was so erratic in a war-zone as to be of no practical purpose.
You’re making a … not sure of the fallacy here. Guns == crime because… hand-waving.
And there’s the big strawman. Because I never said any such thing. Perhaps you are arguing with somebody else who said there should be no laws about guns? I very specifically said that there should be, even imperfect ones.
