: I thought I'd go for the unemotive subject of guns ;-), but would like to direct the question toward advocates of stateless socialism.: State socialists, right, left and centre, would naturally oppose the right of individuals to defend themselves, and specifically to own any means to do so
SDF: Armor-piercing bullets? Machine guns? Antitank weaponry? Biological weapons? Chemical weapons? Nuclear weapons? You said ANY means...
: , namely guns. Why? Well the last thing a social engineer wants is a populace whom, if they disagree with what they call 'the good of the people' could actually offer genuine resistence.
SDF: Social engineers who spend any time thinking about 'the good of the people' are a straw figure here. Let's rewrite it for stateless socialist cynicism concerning capitalist engineers: "The last thing a social engineer wants is a populace whom, if they disagree with what they call 'capitalism', could actually offer genuine resistance." Funny, this sounds like what the US, the Trilateral Commission, the WTO, the IMF want, it's why they crushed the governments in Nicaragua, Chile, etc., it's why they spent so much time and energy and resources crushing what Chomsky calls alternative models of development...
: This is the cornerstone to the some of the other things statists dont want, namely for children to be educated in a way not approved by them, for people to associate and trade without their say-so etc.
SDF: The statists now in power are all in favor of "free trade" -- please consult the above WTO page...
: Statists also disagree with the notion that an individual owns his own mind & body, as evidenced by statists use of conscription, taxes, and regulation of private lives and freedoms to reinforce this message.
SDF: Paranoid procapitalists think that statists are threatened by the concept of ownership -- since the statists in power are comfortable with their current ownership of far more than you or I own, it isn't the concept of ownership that threatens them, and it sure as hell isn't our ownership of what piddlingly little we do own, that threatens them, either.
: There are also vested interests in gun banning, such as the police beaurocracy who might see a drop in their necessity and status were civilians able to defend themselves and not become dependant upon the state to do so.
SDF: By any REAL logic of "vested interests," the vested interests of the police bureaucracy would love for everyone to own guns, and to commit crimes with them as well, it would keep cops in business for a long time. But seriously folks. In the real world, the vested interests of the gun industry far outnumber such vested interests here in the US, esp. given the US role as the world's biggest weapons dealer...
: To gain public support for banning guns its necessary to spread an number of fallacious beliefs such as "The U.S. has a high murder rate because Americans own so many guns", "When one is attacked, passive behavior is the safest approach",
SDF: I'd love to see what Gee would have done had he advised David Koresh on the eve of his shootout with the US Government on that dark day in Waco, Texas, or the Montana Militia amidst their confrontation with the FBI. Let's run it from the top -- "when one is attacked"...
: "If law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed handguns, people will end up shooting each other",
SDF: When law-abiding citizens shoot each other, are they still law-abiding? Gee would have us believe that there is a clear distinction between "law-abiding citizens" and "criminals," as if one could distinguish the former from the latter by their uniforms or something...
: "The family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense" and the ommision of any stories or research regarding sucessful self defence using a gun. Such fallacies and ommissions are grossly, life costingly, misleading.
SDF: It's amusing to hear what Gee calls a fallacy -- stories that don't support his case are fallacies, as well as omitting stories that do support his case. However, the idea that we shouldn't examine the whole truth should still be, for the rest of us, a fallacy.
: A person or group who seeks to control what you think and do would like to keep you helpless, unable to defend yourself. Such persons intend to keep the upper hand specifically because violence (threat or actual) is the final means of controlling others.
SDF: And such a violent means of controlling others is the special preserve of the statists that control the US government, the most weaponry-ridden of all governments. Yep, the US defends itself all right, it spends half my tax money on self-defense. It's an amusing thing, that my "means of self-defense" also serves as my "means of controlling you."
: Stateless Socialists, if I understand what is being said, must therefore support the right to self defence. If this right is to mean anything, an individual must also have the right to own and use the means to self defence, namely a gun. Red Deathy has done well to explain how a commune based world society requires voluntary agreement to function, and that disruption threatens it. Although both libertarians and stateless socialist argue that 'their system' will reduce crime rates, neither would be wise to claim it would make crime a thing of the past. Criminals will still exist and peoples lives will still be threatened by violence initiated by others.
SDF: Excuse me? No state, no law, yet criminals? How defined? Methinks Gee wants to sneak the state into the back door...the statists would certainly love to sneak him and his kind in through the back door, they (unwittingly I think) defend the paranoias that keep pro-gun capitalists in such lucrative business, and their failure to think logically (as noted above) helps keeps the public stupefied...
