[CLUE-Talk] Bowling for Columbine

[Timothy C. Klein]

* bof (bof at pcisys.net) wrote:
> Timothy C. Klein wrote:
> 
> >This is total, utter nonsense.  
> >
> 
> Your point of view. I personally think that your position is based on an 
> incredible naivity and an inability to think in other than simple 
> slogans ("Guns kill people"). Shall we stick to issues, or just go 
> straight into ad hominem attacks?

That was a bit uncalled for, I admit, and I apologize.  I had just
gotten home, and my wife and I had just had a 'disagreement' so I was
grumpy.  Please note, I *never* said that "Guns kill people."  That is
not what I am trying to say.  I have always been a very firm believer in
personal responsibility:  people kill people.

> >If you can look me in the eye and
> >say that guns serve no other purpose than to fire bullets, I would be
> >saddened. 
> >
> Any day of the week, and three times on Sunday.  I hope that you can 
> live with that. ;-)
> 
> >That is just such red-herring debate tactic.  A
> >gun is designed to fire bullets.  Why?  To hit a target.  Why hit a
> >target?  
> >
> 
> You are confusing design with intent. A gun is designed to shoot a 
> bullet; where the bullet goes depends upon the intent of the shooter, as 
> a means of projecting power beyond the reach of their reach.

No, I am not confusing the two.  A rock or tree, as something just
found, can perhaps be considered only for what it is.  But any human
implement is created, and what I am saying is that the *why* of its
creation must be taken into account.

> >You are either practicing for the act of, or actually partaking in,
> >causing a significant bit of physical violence on the target.
> >
> >
> 
> So? Why is this a bad thing? There are times when physical violence is 
> necessary: the tyrannies of the 20th century would never have been 
> defeated without it.

I am not saying it is a bad thing.  The only thing I am saying is that
armaments are a unique form of human tool.  A complete lack of
government involvement in what citizens do with them would make for an
interesting society.  To go back to the Nuke idea:  if every one of us
had our own nuclear weapons, even if most of us were good, law abiding
nuke owners and never used them, I posit that that society would be
hell.  This example is very extreme, but it shows what I am trying to
say:  most would feel that the government has the right to prohibit the
average citizen from owning a Nuke (indeed, we even feel we have the
right to prevent other *countries* from having nukes).  So if you can
agree with this, then it boils down to where do we draw the line?  What
forms of arms are OK?  And at that point, we have admitted that arms are
somewhat different than the average human tool.  Now, if *don't* agree
with me that the government should be allowed to prohibit Joe Average
from owning a nuke, then I would have to say it is you that is being
naive.

> >Guns were not developed, and are not used, as some academic exercise in
> >moving matter at a high rate of speed.  They are designed to kill
> >animals, or kill people. 
> >
> 
> No! Guns were designed to shoot bullets. There are many specialized 
> types of guns that are completely useless for shooting at people or 
> animals: their calibers are too small, they are too heavy, they are 
> unwieldy, for a start. They are designed strictly for shooting targets 
> as sports in which the skills practiced are not at all useful for 
> shooting at people or animals.

The Second amendment is not in the Constitution to protect our right to
hurl projectiles at great speed, nor is it there to make sure we are all
free to practice marksmanship.  These examples really aren't germane to
the debate at hand.  Indeed, the fact that we *have* the 2nd amendment
shows that armaments are important to our society.  The word militia in
there says it all:  a militia's job is to protect the country, quite
probably through harming and killing other humans through the use of
armaments.

> ><snip>  If you take the position that guns are just built to
> >'fire bullets', then I disagree with you fundamentally, and I think the
> >position seems dishonest.
> >
> 
> But I would say that your position is incredibly naive in that you are 
> confusing the purpose of an inanimate object and the intent of the 
> animate object who uses it, and that you are intellectually dishonest in 
> that you are attempting to confuse the debate by doing this.

My position is heart-felt, as I guess is yours.  No dishonesty is here,
I hope.

> >Neither you, nor I, are mind-readers: what the frmers 'meant' is a
> >sticky issue at best.  
> >
> 
> No, not at all. This issue was discussed enough in debate and in writing 
> that there is little doubt as to what the framers meant in mnay cases, 
> and firearms in particular.
> 
> >Thus, with the word arms, there is room for
> >interpretation.  
> >
> 
> There is no doubt whatsoever that, whatever else "arms" might have 
> encompassed, such as swords, bayonets, pikes, etc, it definitely 
> included firearms of the kind carried by the individual soldier.  

I did not mean to imply that armament did not include guns, but that it
*did* include more.  I also think what armaments can do has changed
drastically since the time the Constitution was written.

> >I think the Constitution is only an embodiement of something a hell of a
> >lot more important:  human rights, as it pertains to a governments
> >treatment of its people.  
> >
> 
> The framers of the Constitution were heavily influenced by John Locke 
> and the idea of a social contract between the governed and the 
> government, in which the governed gave up certain rights to band 
> together for the common good. Such a contract could be dissolved if the 
> government failed to live up to its end of the contract; this, in fact, 
> was the grounds for the Declaration of Independence and the spilt from 
> England. The original Constitution dealt with the way the government 
> would be formed and its powers. There is no mention of "human rights" in 
> it at all. The individual "rights" mentioned in the Constitution were 
> added as an afterthought in the Bill of Rights when the framers became 
> concerned that they had not addressed them and wanted them in writing to 
> protect people from the tyranny of the government and to make clear 
> certain terms of the contract in which it could be dissolved. Much of 
> the Bill of Rights reflected their experience under the English and the 
> years leading up to the Revolution. Thus such provisions as the right of 
> free speech, brought about by such incidents as the trial of John Peter 
> Zinger; the right to freedom OF (not FROM) religion, the basis for 
> settlement of many of the colonies; the right to own firearms --- it was 
> the march on the armories at Lexington and Concord to seize the guns 
> there that was the direct cause of the war; the right not to have troops 
> billeted in civilian homes during time of peace; the right to be free of 
> unreasonable searches, brought about by the British actions in the early 
> 1770's; the right of speedy, open trial by jury, again from the 
> experiences of the early 1770's under the English court system; and 
> finally, the catchall Tenth Amendment, which denied the government 
> anything not specifically granted it to as a result of the King's 
> ministers making up laws as they went along.

I realize that human rights are never mentioned in the Constitution.  I
would like to think we have evolved, if ever so slightly.  At the time
the document was written, many seemed to think was OK to own other
humans, and that women should not be allowed to vote.  To my mind, the
most important obligation of a government is to ensure that it does not
trample or allow to trample individual human being's rights.  Secondly,
the government should provide services to the citizens: roads, defense,
etc.  In return, citizens give time and/or money to the government, to
make this possible.

> >I have never said, nor do I believe, that "we must have laws to make the
> >people good."  My belief is that, as needed, we create laws to help the
> >society prosper.  Whatever an individual does within that society is up
> >to him/her, within those boundaries that don't harm the society as a
> >whole.  
> >
> 
> Including my owning a fully automatic weapon or even a small nuclear 
> device? In of itself, and as long as I don't use it, then society will 
> prosper (whatever that means), and no harm will come to it. OTOH, when 
> you start advocating licensing of guns on the grounds that they are 
> harmful, then not only are you demonizing an inanimate object and 
> patronizing people as being too weak to withstand its evil, you are 
> passing laws to make people good by controlling the behavior of owning a 

Sure, in a Utopia, we could all have or own small nuclear weapon.  The
trouble is, that it would only take one moron to use theirs, and
thousands of people would die.  In the real world, the risk is way too
high to justify letting anyone have that kind of weapon.  Now, the same
logic applies to a fully automatic weapon, but the question now is this:
is the moron that goes nuts with it harmful enough to justify
doing the harm of taking all such guns away from the society at large?
That is open for debate, you obviously think not.  Others say yes.  

I am not really sure where I stand, but I don't think that a licensing
program does all that much harm.  But I am also not sure that it helps.
What I really wish we had was more dispassionate logic on the issue.
The anti-gun crowd thinks that banning all guns would be a panacea, the
pro-gun/NRA folks think that any regulation whatsoever is horrible.  I
think in the end, the best solution is a compromise somewhere in the
middle.

Tim
--
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== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
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== "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings... ==
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