4 ms·
Sure, but access to alcohol has the same effect and I’d imagine has the same level of magnitude impact in increased violent crime. There are a million factors,
by tjs8rj 5y ago
Sure, but access to alcohol has the same effect and I’d imagine has the same level of magnitude impact in increased violent crime. There are a million factors, but singling our access to guns - which is way down on the list of factors - sounds less like a genuine interest in solving the problem and more like a gut reaction “solution” that actually solves very little.
- mbrodersen 5y agoSo making nukes legal would be OK in your mind because it isn’t nukes that kill people but people?
- tjs8rj 5y agoThis is an interesting point. I thought about it and concluded that for me there’s a gradient of any freedom between the harm it causes and the liberty it grants. Making nukes accessible at Walmart is a little bit more freedom with likely much more harm. Allowing gun ownership is much more freedom with an increase in harm, but as I see it the increase in freedom is much bigger than the increase in harm. On the other end of the spectrum of marginally more harm but dramatically less freedom, would you suggest that we go into a covid shutdown every flu season? Or compelled speech laws? Or banning cars because the harm they cause? It’s all a balance between freedom and harm.
- mbrodersen 5y agoYep I agree that everything is a balance between freedom and harm. As for your examples: Cars are necessary for a modern society to function. Gun’s aren’t. Australia (where I live) have very few COVID deaths because of strict shutdowns. The US decided to let close to a million people die for “freedom”. Clearly our perceptions of harm is different. So our conclusions will also be different. Having lived and worked in the US, Europe, and Australia, it is clear to me that the US (in general) value human lives less than other Western nations. So the outcomes will be different.