: Interesting the posts here about gun ownership. Obviously, as an anarchist I cannot support giving cops the power to jail people for owning a chunk of inanimate metel.How about if they own a machine gun, or bubonic plague acquired by illegal means, or a child pornography mag? We sometimes jail people for owning inanimate objects because society has deemed those objects too dangerous to be owned by the public, and so we enforce that decision through the criminal code.
:Besides, disarming the people gives those armed psychos in the government almost abslolute power.
That's really overdoing it. The vast majority of government employees, including those authorized to carry and use weapons, are not psychos. However, if indeed they are psychos, your owning a handgun or rifle will only result in their flying over your house in a military helicopter and dropping napalm on you -- after all, that's the way psychos operate, i.e., psychotically. Fortunately, as I first said, there a very few psychos actually in government (I mean, besides the GOP Congress...).
:The real purpose of gun control is to disarm, not criminals who will ignore it, but the general population so they cannot resist the government.
Not true. The impetus for handgun control comes from ordinary citizens who are scared of living in a society with such an extremely high handgun murder rate, especially when compared to most of the industrialized world.
:For instance, the war on drugs runs into a LOT of trouble with the armed general public in some inner city neighborhoods, and many, many traffic stops have been deterred by the fear of an armed victim(as well as burglaries, etc.)
You have it backwards. What an armed public produces are shootings like the Amadiou Diallo case, where the cops shot an unarmed man 41 times because they thought he was armed. The proliferation of handguns, especially in inner city neighborhoods, makes the police afraid (understandbly) and hence more willing to shoot first and ask questions later, as well as increasing their willingness to ignore citizens' rights by conducting warrantless searches and frisks without probable cause.
:NOBODY is proposing to take the guns away from the government
That's because under our system of government, it is the government's duty to protect citizens from criminals; would you rather have an unarmed government and replace it with citizen's militias which are not publicly accountable to anyone?
:and any criminal can make a gun(or a bomb) from a piece of pipe and some homemade powder(a simple procedure).
It's far easier for most criminals to obtain a handgun than make a reliable one, and very few criminals hold up people with bombs or engage in drive-by bombings.
:Therefore, if the bad guys(the cops and other criminals) are going to have guns, than everyone else must also have that right.
Cops are not criminals. Bad cops are criminals. Who do you think will respond to a call for help when armed criminals hold up a bank, rape a woman, or hold people hostage inside a building: citizens, or cops? Who will patrol the streets to deter crime? Cops. With all due respect, I think your justified anger at police brutality has resulted in an unjustified condemnation of all cops, and the idea of a police force at all (which you may prefer, but I prefer a public police corps to wild west anarchy).
:Gunpowder, like napalm,m mustard gas and nuclear bombs, is one of
: those genies that, once summoned, refuses to be put back in the lamp. Many people have wished they could uninvent explosives, guns, nukes, etc but nobody can do it unless they burn all books on the subject and kill all people who know the matereial-and someone will rediscover it anyway.
As my link above demonstrates, gun control in other countries has resulted in far fewer gun deaths than here in the U.S. Gun control works.
:Therefore, if you want to control guns, start with the superweapons nobody can afford but large nations and multinationals, and try to equalize the distribution of the other weapons so nobody can hope to gain anything from aggressive warfare(the pentagon is shitting bricks about a coming age of cheap smartbombs anyone can buy and put on an old scud, by the way).
No, do both at the same time. Countries can lob bombs at each other in a crisis; the pissed off driver next to you can take a gun out of his glove compartment and shoot you dead because you didn't pull over in time. Both scenarios are wrong, and preventable.
:As for killing in fights, that can be done with knives, blunt objects, and even the good ol' bare hands,
I prefer rope...
:so if you get rid of the guns, you get stabbings and bludgeonings(also bombings because they are easier than making guns).
It's hard to imagine drive-by bludgeonings and knifings. It's hard to imagine a mugger killing you as you flee by tossing a knife or blunt object at you. And aside from Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, not many muggers or rapists or other violent criminals producing bombs with lit fuses from their pockets when they assault you.
:The hunting issue is completely seperate. Guns were invented for war, not hunting. I do not eat meat, so I do not hunt. Hunting something you do not eat is murder, by the way. If you insist on eating meat, I think you should get a rifle and hunt ALL your own meat so as not to support the horrors of confinement factory farming. If someone wants to eat me, let them come and hunt me, it's better than being raised in prison for food(some of my PETA and COK friends will kill me for saying this,by the way).
I said I also agreed with you, and here it is. I'm a hardcore PETA type, but I think it's far preferable for a wild animal to be shot for food, than any animal to be raised in factory farms and killed in slaughterhouses. At least the wild animal is living free and unmolested until killed by the predator (in this case, human). That said, as a healthy vegan I see no reason to eat flesh, and so therefore no reason to hunt by most people (the exception being people who live in the wilderness, but that's not most people).
See you in D.C. in April, Luke (at least, I'll see you in spirit, if not in person among the hopefully large crowds).
- MDG
