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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (5914)	2/15/2001 2:50:32 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Changing the subject now. Can you tell me the argument against registration? Seems to me that the most sensible compromise is not banning guns but registering them to assist the authorities in fighting crime and to hold people accountable for their misuse of guns. The only argument against registration that I know of is from the militia types who think they need and would be able to defend themselves from a government gone bad. Criminals will not register and in fact are not required to as normal (gag) law-abiding citizens are. shadeslanding.com I'm not aware how registration will assist only that it is a claim and that you must assume the offender is not a criminal but a good citizen gone bad. I'm open to good logic to persuade me. I have registered (and historically it is a prelude to confiscation) as required by law (even though I disagree and believe that eventually a Supreme Court decision will favor my views) so I don't qualify as a "militia" type who is overly paranoid. A little research will show that the "old dead guys" did indeed consider a government gone bad, so who am I to disagree with them. I try not to confuse correlation with cause and effect but was your comparison of Wyoming and New York based on your personal view of human nature and projected using the lowest common denominator? I'm not arguing the personal view since I've never been in NY and only in Wyoming briefly. But I'm not happy with a negative view of the city being able to negate the right to self-defense (again an issue of personal choice). I'm also unhappy with laws that appeal to emotion rather than reason. I do not envision that NY would become a place where everyone is armed (isn't this a straw man?) and doubt that many would go to the trouble (I'm assuming criminals will do as they please, as always) of owning and qualifying for concealed carry or in the case of NY just the simple permit to own. There is some evidence that criminals will seek the path of least resistance and pick on a populace of the unarmed and weak. It only makes sense and they are not really that dumb. It's interesting that some Police are required to carry their weapons off-duty (in other words, they're never off duty) and some are discouraged. We certainly are not of one mind on the issue no matter where we look.

To: Lane3 who wrote (5914)	2/15/2001 4:08:39 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Changing the subject now. Can you tell me the argument against registration? I think you have to understand the mentality of the times then and now. Don't forget, we had just come out of a revolution which we won in large part because of an armed populance. The Minutemen were entirely a volunteer, not a government, body. If the British had had gun laws in place and enforced, we would probably still be speaking English. If they British had every gun registered and could pop over to the citizen's house and confiscate the guns, ditto. Today, for better or worse, liberals in particular have a much more benign view of government. It's hard to see a single liberal agreeing with the proposition that when a government goes bad it is not only your right but your duty to overthrow it by force. Liberals tend to like what government does, and if they don't they tend to prefer peaceful, democratic means of addressing their grievances. In that context, the concept of an armed citizen militia seems anachronistic. But there are still a lot of people who think government is overstepping its limits and can't be kept under control by peaceful means, and that (see the Declaration of Independence) the population has both the right and the duty to be prepared to overthrow it by force. This requires being armed, and being armed with weapons that the government may not know about and aren't in a tidy government file. I tend to dismiss this as close to paranoia until I look around at modern day nations under the grip of tyrannies and realize that if the population were armed, a lot of this might well not be happening. Would apartheid have survived as long as it did if the black population had been armed? Not that I'm advocating armed revolution. It's a nasty business, as we can see in the Middle East. But OTOH, our country exists primarily because of an armed population, and I can see the other side of this argument.