>>If you don't think it isn't easier to shoot someone than to butcher them, then you have either never skinned and cut up an animal, or you've no imagination. Who knows which?<<
I find it curious that so very early in your conversation with me, you become angry, abusive, defensive, and personal with your language... is that really necessary? Is this your most effective means of persuasion? I would hope not... I believe we could have a meaningful dialogue without your anger as a requisite for discussion...<g>
Now, I suggest you read the study referenced in the following post, the reference is lengthy but highly informative...
Message 15138179
The notion that the state should protect us from our own voluntary actions implies that the state knows better than we do what's good for us. In a democracy, where the people are the state, this is a profoundly illogical idea. If each of us is so witless that we can't figure out what is best for ourselves, how do we suddenly acquire the wisdom to govern our neighbors through the democratic process?
If each of us is smart enough to be entrusted with the right to vote, to stand for public office, and thereby to decide what's best for our neighbors, why are we not smart enough to decide what's best for ourselves?
Only in an autocracy or an oligarchy, where there is no pretence of legal equality between the rulers and their subjects, does the argument in favor of the state protecting people from themselves escape this internal contradiction.
So when the government promotes gun control on the grounds that it will protect people from suicide or accidents, it is proclaiming that their citizens are not the legal equals of their members of the governing body, but their inferiors. It is proclaiming that the government is not a democracy but an oligarchy, ruled by an elite group who miraculously know better than the individuals they control. It is proclaiming that the country is not the free, diverse, pluralistic society we have always been taught to think of ourselves as, but a regimented, conformist, monolithic society where all must be made to behave in the same way, even when that behavior imparts no benefits and imposes unwanted costs.
Asking one to find cases where kids chop up their parents with a hatchet is a highly illogical and diversionary request and clearly demonstrates that you have not fully read or not simply understood the content of my post to you... blaming guns is the same as blaming the messenger... clearly, those kids that murder their parents come from dysfunctional families and there were surely ample warning signs before the tragic incident... why not focus on the dysfunctional characteristics of those families instead, rather than using the momentum of a family tragedy to further an agenda that has no genuine foundation... I find it quizzical that you focus solely on the gun issue when other more grave and far more systemic issues are at hand... far more people, tens of thousands of people or more, are dying each year in this country from diseases, controllable or otherwise, but nothing whatsoever is being done about that, yet you fixate on guns.....
If you would like to continue a meaningful dialogue, kindly keep your denunciatory and affronting language out of it... thank you.....<g>
Best Regards,
GZ |
