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I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights but t
by joe_the_user 7y ago
I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights but they are different, large questions and this leap is effectively a thread derail.
- salawat 7y agoThey are more intertwined than you think. What is gun control but the government asserting a right to pierce your privacy to the putative end of arms control? People don't look at it that way because people are used to looking at X and calling it X, Y and calling it Y, but not realizing both X and Y are subtypes of Z, so chipping away at X is chipping away at Z, even if you want to swear up and down the street it's only -X and not -Z. It is -Z and it is -X. Period. It's why I've begun to fear the legislator that is seemingly able to break the law by making laws they are not empowered to make, and a politicalized judiciary that doesn't spend their time enforcing a strict obeyance of legislation to common language, and administrative lawmakers in the executive that are never double checked. The world passed on to the generations after us will be a grim place indeed if we keep leaving them more and more shackled by the overwhelming detritus of the legislative hooliganry of our age.
- wavefunction 7y agoYou and I have a natural right to self-defense, I don't know that you or I have a natural right to firearms. I'm a firearms owner and I love to hunt but I am not sure that people have a natural right to firearms, and from observation many people should not possess them due to personal negligence surrounding the awesome responsibilities attendant with firearms usage/mis-usage.
- robomartin 7y ago100% agree with this.
- jeffdavis 7y agoAlthough responsibility is important, firearms aren't an "awesome" responsibility. Millions of kids use firearms safely; some quite young. It's in the same ballpark as other ordinary responsibilities like driving, maintaining a swimming pool, using power tools, etc. As far as recreational activities, those involving guns aren't particularly dangerous (statistically). There are something like 400M civilian-owned guns in the U.S. If it were an awesome responsibility, then we'd all be dead by now. But murder rates are low and either steady or declining. It's easy to say that other people seem irresponsible, but we need to look at the data. Firearm accidents resulting in death are very rare.
- Thorrez 7y agoOn the other hand, some types of cryptography are classified as weapons by the US government. But I do favor a 1st amendment view of "right to cryptography" rather than a 2nd amendment view of it.
- bborud 7y agoAre they? I thought they were just subject to the same export rules for convenience - the ones for weapons were reusable to achieve the wanted goal.
- Thorrez 7y agoAccording to Wikipedia some cryptography is on a "munitions list". I'm not very familiar with the law though, so I guess I don't know if that really means it's classified as a weapon.
- 3leggedcatman 7y agoHe clearly said 'bare arms' which is all about t-shirts and the rolling-up of sleeves, not citizens buying military assault weapons.