Citizen
Founder's Club Member
+1
They're really just voting whether they will recognize a right or a piece of a right.
Of course, these same people are willing to rule others without their consent, so there's no surprise there.
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Where do we draw the line?
- Thread starter REPR
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+1
They're really just voting whether they will recognize a right or a piece of a right.
Of course, these same people are willing to rule others without their consent, so there's no surprise there.
Ken, why even engage in frustrating and out of the blue type discussions with individuals who lack the necessary critical thinking skills necessary to even change or even begin to change their ideas about firearms...live by example by carrying with pride and honor, all the while extending courtesy acknowledging their comment ~ while walking away smiling.
cuz ken, you know when they leave your presence, they just call (read as FB, twitter, etc.) their like minded friends and tell them what a gun carrying duffus they just ran into who couldn't put two sentences together w/o stating 'the 2nd gives me this right'. and then they laugh together hysterically!
as for the get togethers...as grape has said...put it together, put it out here, and they will come!!
ipse
Shovelhead
Regular Member
Where should we draw the line?
How about under the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
How about under the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Citizen
Founder's Club Member
+1
Buried somewhere in the OC in NoVA thread is a report of an encounter I had.
A young hostess at a restaurant expressed personal disagreement with OC. I acknowledged her comment with something like, "That's the great thing about America. You have a complete right to say that." (I said it in a friendly way.) On my next visit to the restaurant she was working the hostess station again, and a couple of her friends were hanging out with her. One of the friends asked about the OC'd defensive sidearm. Before I could reply, the formerly opposed hostess chimed in almost enthusiastically about the right to keep and bear arms.
davidmcbeth
Banned
Your doing it wrong.
Ken56
Regular Member
I do agree with you on that Solus, but for the sake of the OP and all other newbies, posting our experiences and encounters of all kinds helps them in what to expect......kind of. My encounter was at a back yard gathering over at friends and they were friends of theirs (one of her co-workers) that we had not met before. Things were very civil and I think I did plant a seed in their heads. I know for me, reading about encounters of other members was very helpful and attending the few OCDO gatherings and meeting other OCers was empowering I must say. It helped me gain confidence. As far as I have seen locally where I live now I have never seen another OCer so far. Have never had a problem either.
sudden valley gunner
Regular Member
I understand the moderation. Yet keeping and bearing arms as enumerated in the 2A was for a very specific purpose. Common law already covered the right to keep and bear arms for self defense.If one were to simply read any documents from any of the ratifying conventions it says about the same I did.
since9
Campaign Veteran
Since finding the line in the middle is an exercise in perpetuity, let's explore it from the extreme: nuclear weapons. Now for The Question: Are there any reasons as to why I wouldn't want your average citizen to have an operational nuke?
It's not that I think there's a high chance of them doing something heinous with it, like driving to the center of a major metropolitan area and pushing the button. It's that the propensity for such catastrophic damage outweighs the tiny risk.
More to the point:
Probability: Let's call it 1 in 1 million, or 0.000001
Cost in lives: Let's call in 1 million.
Cost in dollars: Let's call it $10 billion
Thus, the Net Probable Cost of allowing this would be: 0.000001 * (1,000,000 lives + $10 billion) = 1 life + $10,000
This doesn't sound very extreme, does it? Compared to what we carry, any one of us could go loony, cost someone their life and rob their family of at least $10,000, right?
These two scenarios, however, cannot be compared using Net Probable Cost alone, as they have vastly different "worst-case scenarios." In the case of an armed gunman, a worse-case scenario involves dozens killed and dozens of millions in lost monetary value. In the case of a single rogue nuke,however, a worst-case scenario involves millions killed and billions of dollars.
Quite frankly, the risk is too high, one I am not willing to take to support someone's self-acclaimed right to nuclear arms. Regardless of what the Constitution actually says, our Founding Fathers couldn't envision nuclear weapons in that day and age, as the destruction goes many orders of magnitude beyond any conventional arms.
Let's go science-fiction and suppose some kid invented a way to quench our sun...
So yes, there is a line, but it varies for everyone.
But if you want a .50 cal perched on your porch step, go for it.
STLDaniel
Regular Member
Anti's like to throw out extremes (like nukes) but then try to draw the lines extreme in the other direction. The extremes are usually self evident (with the exception of a few acorns who think we should have nukes :banghead
The finer details of the line, when not baited and swapped for the extremes, usually comes down to simple opinion. For me, it's anything that's generally accessible to our troops or LEO's. Can an average soldier walk over to the armory and check out a nuke or even a tank? Nope. Can they go to the range, check out and practice with their rifle? Yep. There's plenty of discussion to be had on the finer details, but it gives me a good starting point to frame the discussion and eliminates the more extreme arguments they use (nukes) to try to justify a magazine ban.
The finer details of the line, when not baited and swapped for the extremes, usually comes down to simple opinion. For me, it's anything that's generally accessible to our troops or LEO's. Can an average soldier walk over to the armory and check out a nuke or even a tank? Nope. Can they go to the range, check out and practice with their rifle? Yep. There's plenty of discussion to be had on the finer details, but it gives me a good starting point to frame the discussion and eliminates the more extreme arguments they use (nukes) to try to justify a magazine ban.
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stealthyeliminator
Regular Member
I'm sorry, but why is that the question? Why is this about what you'd want?
'Extreme' merely denotes that we're looking at the far end of a scale, it isn't true that the extremes must be wrong and somewhere in the middle must be the answer. There are many cases where one extreme or the other is, even obviously, the correct or right answer.The extremes are usually self evident (with the exception of a few acorns who think we should have nukes :banghead
OC for ME
Regular Member
To "This person" I would say..."Why do you hate children and kittens. Why do you want them all dead at the hands of a Planned Parenthood butcher with a medical degree?...You are one of those 'all lives matter' goons aren't you...You nazi racist!"
remember, he who draws the race card first wins these days.
Citizen
Founder's Club Member
I guess I have to 'fess up at some point.
You're right, Stealthy. He's got the wrong premise.
Its not a question of me having a nuke so I am comparably armed to government. Its a question of anybody having nukes.
In his book The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard points out that nuclear weapons are a total violation of legitimate defense. Rothbard gets right to the heart of the matter by pointing out that the user cannot target only his attacker. The user is necessarily going to kill and poison vast numbers of innocent people.
Let me get my copy of the book, do a few chores, and I'll come back and actually quote the passage verbatim.
ETA: See Post #58 below for the promised quote.
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stealthyeliminator
Regular Member
He also talks about this in For a New Liberty, which I had actually forgotten about until you mentioned him discussing it in The Ethics of Liberty. In For a New Liberty he makes a case for total nuclear disarmament. Edit to add: I'm not sure he ever makes a case for enacting prohibitions on nuclear armaments, per se, though. He certainly makes the case that it would be in everyone's interest to agree to disarmament.
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utbagpiper
Banned
Exactly. There is no way that an individual can target an attacker, and only the attacker with WMDs. His deployment of the weapon will, in almost every single case, result in large numbers of innocent persons being injured and killed.
An individual cannot "bear WMDs" against attackers in any practical way that doesn't grossly violate the rights of lots of innocents.
Additionally, as since9 points out, the risks posed by a WMD so grossly outweigh any benefit that an individual may conceivable derive from the possession of such WMD as to place personal possession of WMDs outside an individual right. It moves into the realm of presuming to ignore traffic signals or driving on the wrong side of the road. Such conduct denies others their rights.
A gun, any "firearm" up to an including the 16" big guns on a WWII-era battle ship, a Tommy gun, or even a modern mini-gun or anti-tank 20mm machine gun can be left entirely unattended and pose no threat to anyone. Only when loaded and fired do firearms pose a risk to anyone (short of using them as badly shaped bludgeons). Great-great-great-great grand-daddy's muzzle loader from the War of 1812 left hanging above the mantle for the last 200 years poses nary a risk to anyone even it had power and a ball left in it. Spontaneous ignition is all but unheard of. And should a loaded firearm somehow spontaneously discharge, it poses a rather limited risk to society. Left entirely unattended, a house can rot around the gun, which can rust and decay back into mother earth with virtually zero chance of ever harming anyone.
Not so with most WMDs. Fail to maintain a nuclear device and eventually you're going to have some rather nasty nuclear material being unshielded and released into the atmosphere. Where exactly does one presume to take out a 10,000 year insurance policy for making a small city uninhabitable when Uncle Gomez's nuke buried in the back yard is detonated even just has its core exposed by an excavator in 50 years after Gomez is gone and everyone has forgotten about his personal WMD? Chemical and Biological weapons are probably even more dangerous from this perspective. My neighboring county was home to the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the nation, dating to WWI (Google "Tooele Chemical Demilitarization Facility"). Even in our dry climate, shells stored in bunkers had corroded and were dangerously closing to releasing Mustard Gas, Sarin, and other nasty stuff into the atmosphere.
Whether governments have any legitimate "right" or power to manufacture and control WMDs--and if so, whence that power derives--is a different and potentially interesting discussion.
Charles
utbagpiper
Banned
I think you too frequently seize upon a turn-of-the-phrase to make an offender over naught. In such discussion one might just as well write "I believe evidence suggests such activity creates an infringement to others' rights....." as to write "I'd not want to see...".
We all get it. Individual opinions and even super-majority decisions matter not a bit to anarchists who like to think themselves islands unaffected by and not affecting any around them except through mutually voluntary interactions. It's a nice theory. Here in the real world, WMDs aren't real good at recognizing where your property ends and you're neighbor's property, life, and liberty begin. So dealing with reality rather than anarchists theories....
True enough. But neither does it follow that in every case the extreme is the correct answer.
Appeal to extreme or reducto ad absurdum is a logical fallacy. Those who suggest that the 2A either covers WMDs, or doesn't cover any modern weapons at all are either being very ignorant, or deliberately deceptive. Ditto those (usually supporters of the 2A) who misuse slippery slope to suggest that if we concede on Nukes we are in grave danger of having to give up our sporters/militia-style firearms or self-defense handguns.
Charles
utbagpiper
Banned
(emphasis added)
Not at all. There are many practical reasons not to keep rotting corpses around. However, far fewer practical reasons not to keep a few infected blankets around, which items I note you didn't address in your parody. But as someone recently asserted, the impracticality of something is not necessary an impediment to a right to own the thing.
Perhaps not. But the inability to "bear" such an arm against any aggressor without grossly infringing the most basic and important of rights of many innocent persons does place such an item beyond the scope of the 2A, which is the topic of this thread.
This would leave you to argue that there is an un-enumerated, natural right to own WMDs. I would counter this with the gross risk to the rights of others. I would point to Marshaull's analogy of traffic laws. Your choice to ignore red lights or to drive on the "wrong' side of the road infringes on your fellow's ability to use that road in a safe manner. We are not obliged to wait until you kill someone to cite you for such traffic violations.
Similarly, your ownership of WMDs which their need for expensive and highly technical maintenance and horrific impact should any accident occur provides the justification for your fellows to prevent you from acquiring such weapons.
I would submit this is one of those real-world cases where anarchist/libertarian theory breaks down rather obviously to any who are able to examine it objectively, rather than forcing all observations to conform to an already adopted pseudo-religious dogma. While legitimate governments derive their just powers from the (general, rather than individual and specific) consent of the governed, it is also obvious that governments are something slightly different than merely a collection of individuals. One nation targeting or deterring another is a different dynamic than an individual presuming to deter his own government when it comes to WMDs as noted that you cannot target your government, nor any other aggressor, without targeting a large number of innocents.
Or, the libertarian/anarchist might go the other direction and conclude that since individuals cannot legitimately possess WMDs, then neither is there any legitimate power for governments to possess them. If this, then current possession of WMDs by governments (good or otherwise) is not justification for individuals to possess WMDs, but is simply a violation of natural law by governments. You may want to adopt this view as it more readily provides an answer consistent with both anarchist principles and the dilemma over private ownership of WMDs. It does lead to a practical problem of trying to deter evil governments from using WMDs (or threat of WMDs) to conquer or destroy your own society, however.
Thanks for the fun.
Charles
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georg jetson
Regular Member
The "line" question is easier to answer. In a free Republic, the government cannot posses that which is illegal to the citizen. Now let them decide how much they want to weaken the military.
Freedom1Man
Regular Member
That is the best answer so far.
I wish I could have formulated that response.
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stealthyeliminator
Regular Member
Reductio ad absurdum isn't a logical fallacy. Improperly employing reductio ad absurdum may be fallacious, but reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate argumentation technique.
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