Kartoffel
Member
- Joined
- Sep 29, 2017
- Messages
- 1,199
Those who advocate that law abiding citizens have no right to self-defense with weapons are not anti-gun. They are in fact very pro-gun. They just want government to have all of the guns. And therein lies the problem. They think they are in some moral position by thinking all guns should be outlawed, but they lose the moral argument because the very act of what they advocate (government only having weapons) is, by any historical metric of how many innocent people governments have killed, immoral, if we were to judge by outcome alone, which is the only truly objective way to judge morality. So put aside the fact that gun bans won't stop black weapons markets from growing, even if they did work, all you're doing is trading in one thing for another --- by advocating that government have all the weapons to stop mass shootings (which until this day strict gun laws do not do), you are but merely trading in the bodies of mass shooting causalities in for the many bodies which will and always have historically come at the hand of government itself. It's akin to trusting in a corrupt Police department to investigate itself for officers who murder innocent people and take drug money. When only government has the weapons, then truly, there is no real accountability and, as human nature assures, absolute power will always be corrupted. I went on a long drive throughout central America a few years ago. I went through the good and bad parts. During that time, I was held at gun point and robbed by corrupt police officers on five different accounts. A few of them got very heated. I easily could have died and would have never been heard of again and the officers could have easily gotten away with it too. These were places where no guns were allowed for citizens to own. It is easy to ignore history when you live in a developed country that hasn't 'yet' seen such hardships and infringements on freedoms, where you feel fairly safe, and say it doesn't matter if government has all the weapons because it won't ever happen in said country. But when you have a rogue government who has all the weapons, and you have experienced it firsthand, and how quickly things can go wrong, and how great they can abuse their power, it is an entirely different situation and experience and often, those who advocate such ideas have not had such experiences. At least, if I am well armed, my freedoms are taken into my hands and are my own responsability, and I am not on my knees to government, at their mercy seat, hoping that they remain good. And of course, even if they remain good for some time, I am still defenseless against the people who do not obey laws and will therefore use illegal weapons to terrorize the innocent. So, like in those places I visited, you're at the mercy of the government that they not become bad, but you are also at the mercy of the drug lords and gangs that they not come after you and all that you worked hard for.
With freedom comes great responsability, and punishing those who abuse their freedoms to hurt others rather than dishing out collective punishments by restricting rights of the people is the only thing that works in a truly free society. It may sound nice to the utopian authoritarians, but their perfect view never works in reality and always ends up leading to a dystopia rather than a utopia. Governments will always work in their own self-interest to keep power, and as technology progresses, this consolidation of power will only make this even more dangerous to free innocent individuals. With robotics being used more in military and other such advancements, it makes it even more important than ever that checks and balances remain on the other side of the isle so that government is kept in check --- because with technology advancing, there may come a day where it only takes one time for them to consolidate enough power and they will have the technology and leverage to keep that power over a once-free peoples, forever. And I assure all, they will always have plenty of excuses like mass shootings to try to dupe people into giving up that power to them, by pulling at our emotional heart strings. And that time will come when there will be no going back.
I have an innocent question: Let's say we have a state like the U.S. or any other Western nation, and citizens are allowed to own handguns, maybe even automatic rifles. How exactely would the right to bear these arms allow citizens to protect themselves from a tyrannical government? If the government wanted to subjugate the people with force, than these guns and rifles wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. You can't fight an organized military force of the 21st century with a few automatic rifles, even if every citzen possesed one. This isn't 1776 where armed colonists could actually hope to prevail in a fight with their opressive government.
On top of that, all the guns Americans possess haven't stopped the American government from becoming the most Orwelian in the Western World. Where were the armed masses when the Freedom Act was passed? Have they prevented the surveilance programm of NSA and CIA, protected farmers from FBI raids, stopped the Illegal wars in Vietnam or Latin America?