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Pencils are tools and you could kill someone with a pencil. Doesn't happen all that often though.

by makerofthings 5y ago

krapp 5y ago
Pencils don't have their own Constitutional Amendment or multi-million dollar industrial lobby.
- harshreality 5y ago
  I think lobbies and advertising tend to be bad — lobbying obviously, and advertising because it extends ordinary business practices to include artificially increasing demand for products; these "features" of capitalism are allowed—advertising under the guise of "informing" people of availability of products, and lobbying under the guise of keeping politicians informed of issues of genuine public concern—but if we're honest, those corporate activities go far beyond that. I'm an individual gun rights absolutist, but I'm also fine with restricting those aspects of corporations. There's no point in getting mad about the gun industry's activities in those respects without being even more incensed about the food and pharma industries. Those destroy a lot more healthy life years than the gun industry ever could. Not much is done, though, because capitalism and because 1A — even though I don't think the 1A inherently applies to corporations, at least not to formally registered ones; nothing about them is an inherent right. In exchange for the power to pool multiple people's resources — capital, tangible property, and labor — under a single authority, once that pool gets sufficiently large, the state imposes requirements that it could never impose on individual natural persons. Incidentally, nothing in the 2A is specific to firearms. Pencils, when carried or used as weapons, do fall within the meaning of "arms" in the 2nd amendment—they're just not very good compared to kubotons. So do knives, swords, baseball bats, golf clubs, and bows&arrows. None of those are regulated even remotely as much as guns are. Of course, they kill far fewer people, but they're used sometimes. And yet, no specific reporting on them is available: all edged weapons, from folding knives to katanas and broadswords, tend to be lumped together, as are all blunt objects, whether a table lamp or a golf club or baseball bat owned by someone who doesn't play golf or baseball.

Pencils are tools and you could kill someone with a pencil. Doesn't happen all that often though.

krapp 5y ago

Pencils don't have their own Constitutional Amendment or multi-million dollar industrial lobby.

harshreality 5y ago
I think lobbies and advertising tend to be bad — lobbying obviously, and advertising because it extends ordinary business practices to include artificially increasing demand for products; these "features" of capitalism are allowed—advertising under the guise of "informing" people of availability of products, and lobbying under the guise of keeping politicians informed of issues of genuine public concern—but if we're honest, those corporate activities go far beyond that. I'm an individual gun rights absolutist, but I'm also fine with restricting those aspects of corporations. There's no point in getting mad about the gun industry's activities in those respects without being even more incensed about the food and pharma industries. Those destroy a lot more healthy life years than the gun industry ever could. Not much is done, though, because capitalism and because 1A — even though I don't think the 1A inherently applies to corporations, at least not to formally registered ones; nothing about them is an inherent right. In exchange for the power to pool multiple people's resources — capital, tangible property, and labor — under a single authority, once that pool gets sufficiently large, the state imposes requirements that it could never impose on individual natural persons. Incidentally, nothing in the 2A is specific to firearms. Pencils, when carried or used as weapons, do fall within the meaning of "arms" in the 2nd amendment—they're just not very good compared to kubotons. So do knives, swords, baseball bats, golf clubs, and bows&arrows. None of those are regulated even remotely as much as guns are. Of course, they kill far fewer people, but they're used sometimes. And yet, no specific reporting on them is available: all edged weapons, from folding knives to katanas and broadswords, tend to be lumped together, as are all blunt objects, whether a table lamp or a golf club or baseball bat owned by someone who doesn't play golf or baseball.