It would be fine and dandy for us as a society to hash this difference out, without resort to all the silliness that we actually do instead.Steve of phpBB wrote:I do agree with the general concept of the right to defend yourself. But I don't think that right to self-defense includes a right to endanger others. And obviously, your owning a gun does not directly endanger others because I assume you are responsible about it. But continuing to allowing everyone to access guns does endanger others. So I don't think the moral right to defend yourself includes the right to own weapons.
I could certainly live in such a society that embraced your view, that there was no right to own weapons, and said society embraced the view to such a deep extent that weapons were absent. I truly could; I own a gun to protect myself from the other MFers whom own guns. Not for some cockamamie ideal of resisting the tyranny of the government (because that ship sailed the day a large peacetime standing army was established).
But the USA is not that society. The Second Amendment can be interpreted in several ways, but it is there. It does not say "for the general safety guns will only be held in the hands of a well-regulated militia". And regardless of the ambiguities of language, American society from day one has been and continues to be a gun-owning society. By right, or by law, this is what we are.
The guns are there; the incremental measures to kinda sorta infringe on gun ownership have but one practical effect--to disarm the legal, responsible owners, while maintaining ownership by illegal, criminal owners. You have presented the case for an incremental path to change, toward a gun-less society. But I submit that the intermediate steps along that path, even assuming said path is valid and likely, place me in significant danger; even makes me a criminal.
I don't mean to jump from theoretical plane to philosophical plane for the sake of argumentative advantage. I could absolutely accept a moral order with no legal gun ownership, and the occasional sporatic danger of being subjected to the rare criminal who manages to get ahold of a gun. (For example, life in Japan.) Your moral exclusion of personal firearm rights is just as good as my opposite view, on that theoretic plane; and it has the advantage of actually working much better than life in America in many places in the world. Some countries with a lot of personal freedom; some with not so much. I might even agree that starting from scratch, your view is better; a nation with no private guns is superior to a nation with 400 million private guns.
But of course, that is not the choice down here on earth. In terms of policy, we are bound by the facts of history and by the facts of here and now, as well as the realistic anticipation of any transition.
This shit is not black and white. Even an absolute viewpoint that no right to own firearms should exist carries the messy aspects of lack of consensus around that view, the history of the opposite view, the vast millions of guns that exist, and the adverse effects of incremental gun restriction. Additionally, there are myriad real dangers of domestic gun violence, accidental gun violence, and theft of legal guns by criminals, which I do not mean to discount. Messy messy mess we've made for ourselves.