What do you think of Pat Robertson’s comments on marijuana?
Don Quixote on Dec 23 2010 at 8:27 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
At a minimum, Pat Robertson is calling for lower penalties for people who smoke marijuana. I quite agree, but then I’ve been for legalization of marijuana forever. Anyway, what do you think, both about Roberton’s comments specifically, and about how our society should deal with drug (and alcohol) use generally?
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54 Responses to “What do you think of Pat Robertson’s comments on marijuana?”
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I agree, but only as part of a larger, more comprehensive reform of drug laws. To remove drug use penalties alone would
From my limited perspective, here is what I see:
The war on drugs has served to restrict the supply of drugs, making them even more valuable. Heavy demand combined with restricted supply not only increases price but burnishes its social cachet. Their addictive nature increases incentives for drug-induced crime on the part of the user. Making drugs illegal has also guaranteed the involvement of the international drug cartels and ongoing, bloody warfare from the mountains and jungles of Afghanistan and SE Asia right up to our borders and within our inner cities. It has led to the drug culture being romanticized as an inner-cities road to riches and to a lifestyle cachet of the upper-classes. Their social cachet combined with the profit motive provides the incentive for drug entrepreneurs to hook kids and adults onto drugs….early. It is, in short, a disaster.
Were I King of the World (relax, I have absolutely no illusions or desires in that regard), I would propose to completely flip the circumstances in which we find ourselves and try the following.
1) Remove the profit motive by making drugs cheap and regulated (expand the supply).
2) Create a class of regulated businesses that can produce drugs (and cigarettes) at a fixed, low profit margin, free of liability but without the right to advertise (remove the crime element).
3) As with cigarettes and alcohol, regulate where people can and cannot use drugs (in vehicles, near schools, at the workplace, etc.).
4) Don’t prosecute people for using drugs, prosecute people for drug-influenced behavior when illegal (like alcohol).
5) Do not include treatment for drug abuse (including alcohol) under health care programs (harsh, but a strong disincentive to drug use). Make individuals accept full responsibility for their drug use. Leave the “victims” of abuse to private charities, not the taxpayers.
6) Use public service messages and social humiliation to portray drug users as the losers they are (as we do for alcoholics), thereby removing any remaining vestiges of a social cachet.
I am not in any way suggesting these points offer a perfect solution. I add these points to DQ’s post to hopefully provoke serious discussion about possible solutions to the drug war. For the record, I am not quite sure that our society is anywhere close to being in a position to make the changes that I have suggested. There are enormous conflicts of interests. Here’s one example, the drug trade in represents one of the salient vehicles for transferring wealth from wealthy communities to the inner cities. The flow of drug money to the inner cities, in turn, generates business activity that wouldn’t otherwise exist in these communities. Having lived near the abomination of Chicago’s inner city drug wars and the blood toll exerted on its citizens (the blood toll on children is just awful), I have become cynical about whether Chicago’s power brokers really want a solution to the War on Drugs and wonder instead about just how far up the political ladder the corruption of drug money crawls.
The core issue in the question that DQ raised, however, is whether we can come up with something better than what we have today. What we have today is a disaster that more enforcement won’t solve and that only expands its net of victims and perpetrators.
That’s my two-cents worth, anyway. Fire away, my friends.
Very good round-up of pros and cons, Danny. My husband and I have this disagreement every time it comes up for a vote – and I’m not sure I feel strongly enough to really disagree. He had to deal with young men drafted into the military during the Vietnam period, and as a result considers MJ to be a gateway drug – the opening chorus to heavy drug use. He has also seen the effects in Yemen, he says, where the men chew some equivalent drug (bota?) in a legal and socially accepted use, and as a result, the poverty in the area is extensive and deep since the men pretty much do nothing as a result of the effects of the drug. The latter is in response to my statement that people should do what they want in this regard, and let the chips fall where they may – don’t keep saving those who fall into poverty or into the gutters as a result of their drug use.
I keep going back to my basics: religious establishes ideals for behavior, laws determine the lowest behavioral standards a society will tolerate. That said, what is the purpose of the laws prohibiting drug use? What or who are we protecting? It seems that if people want the drugs, they’ll get them, and if people don’t use the drugs, they don’t need protection. So…are we protecting people who don’t use drugs from people who do? If the intent of the laws is to keep drugs out of our society – that horse is already out of the barn!
In other words – what is the purpose of the sentences? are they achieving that purpose?
Fire away, my friends.
Spoken like a man who has lived in or near Chicago (but not limited to) ;
From peyote to pot, creating an artificial paradise or altered reality is a good starting point. I’ll hazard a guess and say that some to many have ‘inhaled’ and had one too many; but what is it that takes an experiment to excess, no concept of tomorrow or wishing there wasn’t…and that needs to be addressed first.
I would only support legalization if all the tax revenues off marijuana went into the military or things like roads.
The reason is, I want to squeeze the Hollywood cocaine snorting crack addicts for all they are worth. They’ll pay shatloads of money for a high. We then use that money and redistribute it to national defense to benefit everyone. If Hollywood nut cakes and basketball stars treat tax cuts like “blackjack money” which they say they don’t need, then I’ll take the money they say they don’t need from them. Or better yet, they’ll get in a line to give it to me because they want drugs.
Sue brings up a good point: what’s the object, here? It seems to me there’s never actually been an articulated object, or at least not one articulated in such a manner as to make sense to anyone but Carrie Nation.
Drugs are here, they’ve been here ever since humanity discovered fire, and that’s the way it is. It will not change.
I agree with Danny’s core point, which comes as close to an expression of an actual, sane, drug policy as anything I’ve ever seen from any governmental expert: we want to (or should be wanting to) keep an eye on the results of the drug use, not the existence thereof. As with alcohol, society does not – and should not – give a rodent’s rectum if you drink yourself into a blind stupor every night as regular as clockwork – just so long as you don’t then get behind the wheel.
That, I think, is the correct attitude. It is not the business of society what we eat, drink, smoke, chew, shoot, snort, or otherwise consume – any more than it is any of society’s business into which part of who we stick our appendages. But – the results and consequences of such behavior… ah. Now you’re in society’s wheelhouse. I don’t care what you do. I do not care how blind, stupid, hallucinatory, drooling, or any other way you get – as long as you keep your hands off the firearms and sharp instruments when in that state, and stay the hell away from the car keys. What you do in your own home – I do not care. Take it out on the streets, then we have a problem. That you will be paying for.
But otherwise? Let’s disband the DEA and save the money, and see if we can’t get the cops doing something useful. And, as has been pointed out, there is also the simple benefit that once this stuff becomes legal and readily available, market forces will take over. Prices will go down to fit just about anyone’s budget, and the Mafia and the Colombians will be out of the game.
The people who are going to become addicted will become addicted anyway, and this way they’ll be able to afford it without having to mug Grandma. Thousands and thousands of people are in jail for drugs offenses, let ‘em go and free up the space for illegal aliens. Once the profit motive’s gone, the newly freed will behave, they’ll have no option. If it’s readily available, crime will stop paying. And most users will not become addicted, any more than everybody who takes a drink, or several drinks, becomes an alcoholic.
This is way too simple and sane, though. It makes far too much sense, which means this government will never try it. Even Bongo-on-the-Sacramento there voted down legalizing marijuana when it came down to it, so I assume there’s no hope for making sense. (Jesus, California – you let Nancy Pelosi walk around in public without a keeper, but can’t see your way clear to letting some poor schmuck with terminal cancer have a bong? My list of reasons not to go near the possibility of inhabiting your state is now longer than my arm…)
Okay, I’ll be the non-libertarian in Book’s salon; at least when it comes to drug abuse.
While I support less harsh penalties for drug use. I CANNOT support legalization of currently illegal drugs.
Yes, it is true those that are determined to get and use drugs will do so no matter what. But, making those drugs cheaper and easier to get does not solve anything. Cheaper and more-attainable drugs will only increase the number of drugs addicts. In other words those who may have avoided drug abuse because of the illegal nature and the high cost will be more likely to try ”receational” drugs if they are legal and cheaper. Not a good idea in my opinion.
Any comparision to prohibition is a false analogy in that alcohol is a much older and much more prevalent “drug” in western society (or should I say in almost ALL societies?) While other drugs, including pot, are not and were not always so. Alcohol use goes back centuries, can we say for certain that other mind-altering drugs have that kind of history? And, yes, I believe that this history does make a difference. Something being “acceptable” and being used throughout history makes kids more likely to try it and get hook. Alcohol and tobacco are two such examples. Do we really need more?
Allowing drugs to be legal and readily available is bad for society; not just the individuals. Allowing folks to abuse drugs because of “free will” does, in fact, harm a society. Look at history and other parts of the world:
Anyone familar with opium dens in China at the turn of the 19th and 20th century? A large part of China’s problems during that time period were due to “illegal” drugs (i.e, opium) being readily available; and a large part of China’s population being “strung-out.” Massive amounts of drug addicts, broken families, lower productivity, and drug-induced poverty to name just a few of the problems. And it didn’t just affect those individuals – it had a massive impact on China as a whole.
Anyone familar with Iceland’s drinking problems? Iceland tends to have more unwed mothers; while there are other issues at play there, part of it is because of kids drinking and not being careful when having sex.
How about Russia? Russia has a much lower life expectancy and that is directly related to its major drinking problems. The cops in major cities in Russia spend a great deal of their time dealing with public drunkeness.
Do we want to invite such problems in our cities with “high” people? Have the cops spend their time helping to “sober” stupid high people in the streets who are a public nuisance all because “drugs are now legal”? In my experience, “high” people are more dangerous to others than just plain, old-fashioned drunks. Drunks are a piece of cake to deal with when compared to dealing with someone on PCP or something else. Many such high people are often not aware of their surroundings nor are they aware of what they are doing – that includes assaulting others. It is easy to say let’s limit where and when they can get high; but how well has that worked for drinking and driving?
As for the claim (no one here as said so, but I run into it all the time with this type of discussion) that banning certain drugs while allowing alcohol is hypocritical of me. I say, yea, it is, so what? We already have enough problems with drunk drivers, drunks who beat their wives and children, broken families, healthcare problems (and their related costs), lower productivity in the workforce, etc., that affect all of us because of drinking which is legal.
Whether we admit it or not – the ”drunk” living next door is a problem even if his door is closed. Allowing even more problems by giving easy access to more drugs will not really solve anything and will in fact create more problems.
Currently alcohol and tobacco are illegal for minors to use – but that doesn’t seem to stop many of them. It makes the news every so often that a well-meaning (yet, in my opinion, extremely stupid) parent decides to hold an after-prom party including beer. The parent claims that it is better for the kids to drink under “adult” supervision rather than drink on their own. (I say, how about being a parent and keeping the kids from drinking?) If drugs are made legal will we start to hear in the news about parents holding after-prom parties with all the pot or crack the kids can enjoy? If the drugs are cheap enough some nut-job-who-shouldn’t-be-a-parent will try this.
Currently, there are lobby groups in DC that lobby our government on issues dealing with alcohol and tobacco, do we really want to have lobby groups influencing politicians over issues about “recreational drugs”? The government used to subsidize tobacco farmers; are we going to start subsidizing pot farmers? I hear folks in Appalachia could use some economic help – this might be just the right thing with pot being made legal and all (laugh if you want; but I would not be surprised, especially if they are “medically-approved” farmers)
Sorry, folks, I just don’t see it any other way – ready access to “bad” drugs creates more problems than it would solve.
P.S. Now if we are talking about making chocolate illegal then I will scream to the high heavens that the government should stay out while I go grab my gun! So, yea, I guess that I am a hypocrite.
Thanks for writing such a thoughtful comment, Charles. There are certainly disadvantages as well as advantages to legalization. But it struck me as interesting that you ended with getting your gun. As you may know, legalization of guns is where I personally have the hardest time sticking to my libertarian principles. Despite many and persuasive arguments from practically everyone else in the Bookwormroom, I remain unpersuaded that society is better off when people are armed.
Nevertheless, if I am true to my libertarian principles I must admit that owning a gun should not be, in and of itself, a crime. The freedom of the individual from government compulsion is so much more important (both absolutely and in its impact on society) that it outweighs any negative results to society from gunownership or drug legalization. I realize that’s a pretty absolutist position, and I would temper it with the kinds of controls that Danny proposes.
But I do thing there is a dangerous slippery slop here and, obviously, we have slipped well down the slope in recent years. Once we allow the government to start controlling people’s private behavior there is no rational stopping point. Once we allow the government to decide what we can and can do privately, based on nothing more than what is good for the society, there is no principled stopping point. Inevitably, we end up with a government that controls all aspects of behavior. Just look at the EU.
It’s better, I think, to tell the government to butt out of private behavior and only punish the public effects, as Danny suggests. That is even more true of behavior like deciding what substances one puts in one’s own body than it is of external things like gun ownership. So even if drug legalization is bad for society, banning drugs on the basis that the government can ban any private behavior it decides is bad for society is even worse.
I come from a German-American background; this is my experience. Beer is considered a common beverage. I can not remember an age in which it was /verboten/ to have a beer or a sip of beer anyways. This was also accompanied by warnings regarding self-control and not getting drunk. One upshot I noticed was that when many of my friends whose parents forbade the use of alcohol came of age, they went out and got drunk. Plastered. Drinking to them was associated with hiding or binging. For me and my siblings and cousins, it was no big deal, except being able to order a drink in a pub or buy a bottle of wine at the store.
The U.S. already has very severe anti-alcohol laws — good grief, one must be *21* to buy a beer — which should be reduced or eliminated. I’m not totally convinced concerning marijuana, but the laws there are also draconian.
A good discussion topic. I find it useful in encouraging self-reflection, so I can avoid the “I don’t like it so there should be a law against it” trap.
DQ, I think you’re eventually going to have to train with guns and get enough experience to decide for yourself.
http://www.frontsight.com/landingpg-1.asp?src=gaw&kw=front sight&gclid=CJb9yajbiKYCFaFk7AodCGcFZA
Has the best nation wide commercial training system. That’s from people who either I know are already trained in firearms or went there and got the training.
When you’re living in California, it’s easy to make excuses about why it’s not appropriate there due to the climate and claws. When you move out, however, you won’t have that excuse to avoid the experience any more.
Despite many and persuasive arguments from practically everyone else in the Bookwormroom, I remain unpersuaded that society is better off when people are armed.
It’s a simple case that you are unpersuaded because you cannot provide an equitable counter-argument. In the absence of logic, the natural backup solution is emotion. And emotion is affected primarily by one’s personal experiences. So long as your personal experiences remain stagnant, and you have no counter-argument on the matter of firearms, of course your personal view isn’t gong to change. Why would it.
I don’t know what the answer is. We have enough problems with alcohol, a legal psychoactive drug whose use is nearly universally socially acceptable. Were marijuana etc to become more socially acceptable and more available via supply/ price changes, problems would increase. Auto accidents, job performance, etc.
While I drink perhaps 2-3 beers a month, or its equivalent, I have a respect bordering on fear towards alcohol, for at least one reason. At age 6 I was involved in a fatal auto accident caused by a drunk driver.
Many of the old marijuana possession laws were outrageous. Time was when possession of a joint in TX would get you 8 years. Similarly, it seems absurd to me that parents get arrested for hosting a party where high school students consume alcohol- not for auto accidents caused by same, but for the mere imbibing.
Cheaper and more attainable drugs will only increase the number of drug addicts.
Seems obvious on its face, Charles, but I’m not sure I agree, nor see it as being at all obvious. The people who’re going to do it will do it, the rest of us won’t. A (perhaps) illustrative story:
At the last election, Washington had a measure on the ballot to get the state out of the booze business. You can buy wine anywhere: gas stations, drug stores, supermarkets, kid’s lemonade stands, Seven-Eleven – anywhere. But “hard” liquor (love that term) you can only buy in state-owned and run liquor stores. Washington being damned near as broke as California, (or any other place run by liberals), the impetus was to accomplish two things. (A) since the stores are all state-run and state-owned operations, that means that everybody who works there is a state employee, gets to belong to a union, and gets a swell pension and medical coverage until hell freezes over, plus the state gets to lay out a ton to every village in the state for real estate taxes, business taxes, and all the usual governmental BS anybody could think up; and (B) therefore liquor naturally (see “A”) costs a whole lot more than it should. Which is of course always the case when a state has a monopoly on anything.
So, here comes the “let’s get the state out of the booze biz” ballot measure, and it looked like a sure thing. It made – and still makes – obvious sense. But – at the last minute in came a mountain of advertising dollars from MADD, all kinds of other sets of initials nobody ever heard of, and of course the unions looking to hang onto the jobs. They painted an incredible picture of “hard” liquor being as readily available as wine currently is, and set up the most unbelievable set of straw men situations depending from that. To everybody’s surprise, the measure went down in defeat.
Afterward the question was asked: “why?” The answers ran from the ridiculous to the really absurd, but mostly settled around not wanting “hard” liquor to become too readily available, because of our children, and driving, and blood-soaked highways, and the usual file cabinet filled with cliches. But see, here’s the thing, and the illustrative part of it. Washington, with all the controls that currently exist on account of having it state controlled, already leads the league in drunk kids driving into trees, each other, off cliffs, into rivers, etc. We’re already a national joke in this category. So, obviously – at least to me - the state controlling access to liquor isn’t keeping these kids safe. And of course the other point, which will already have occurred to you, is the obvious one – who told all these good-hearted people you can’t get plastered on wine? If wine’s available anywhere and everywhere, what the hell do you think you’re accomplishing by sequestering liquor? You can close the door, but the horse is gone…
People who are determined to abuse the drug (alcohol’s a drug) are going to do so. Making it more available, or less available for that matter, isn’t the determining factor. There are lots and lots and lots and lots of people in this country who have the money to be drunk every day, all the time, if they want to be. If you’ve managed to save up about $50,000 over the course of a lifetime, then you can spend every night in a bar for long enough to kill yourself with alcohol. Somehow or other, the vast majority of Americans manage to resist the temptation, and don’t do it.
I don’t think letting them have access to marijuana (to which, face it, they already do have access) would be a whole lot different. And if they’re sitting quietly in their own living room, toking up and watching old Soupy Sales DVDs – what business is that of the government’s?
colorless.blue.ideas;
It’s almost the same with my background – beer was not “forbidden” per say; but it was considered an “adult” drink, the same was true with coffee – “you can try it when you are older.” Today, I rarely drink coffee (and when I do it is usually de-caf) and only once in a blue moon (that’s an intended pun for our “puntif”-in-residence) have an alcoholic drink, usually as a toast at a wedding or some such event.
DQ;
I just finished reading Condi Rice’s book – “Extraordinary, Ordinary People: a Memoir of Family.” In it she describes one episode during the civil rights struggle when Birmingham, where she grew up, became “bombingham.” She tells how her father, and other black men in their neighborhood, sat on their front porches armed with their shotguns to keep the “nightriders” (AKA the Ku Klux Klan) away from their houses and families. This is her reason for being a strong supporter of gun rights for all Americans. For she rightly believes that Bull Conner would have seized all guns owned by blacks if they had been required to register them. To which I would like to add Amen.
Just as colorless.blue.ideas mention growing up with beer, I grew up with guns. They were seen as a tool to be used as any other tool – not something to be feared or placed under taboo. They were also to be used ONLY when an adult was around. For the most part my father and older brothers kept the gun out of my hands, not because of any fear; but because I was such a lousy shot (really, I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn) they considered me to be a big waste of costly ammo. It was only on the day of my father’s funeral that no one complained about me wasting ammo and readily handed me a gun saying “take your best shot” – there weren’t even any outcries as I missed all of the clay pigeons that were for only me to shoot at – not only a waste of costly ammo, but also a bigger waste of costly clay pigeons.
While I know that my two ideas here (beer and guns are okay with adult supervision; while most “recreational” drugs should be kept illegal) are VERY contradictory I really don’t have a problem with it. Most adults are of a contradictory nature. Heck, in fact, almost all folks are full of conflicting ideas. I think it is a part of being human to have such a “flaw.”
Perhaps, I see these two issues from differ points of view because I see guns as useful tools while I do not see “recreational” drugs as anything except as problems. Also, one has a hard time getting “addicted” to guns in the same manner as with many hard drugs.
Sorry, I hadn’t intended to wander away from the main point. But my concern about guns has nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with the news stories I hear nearly ever morning about young people and innocent bystanders shot and killed or wounded in the Bay Area. Here, the people aren’t shooting at clay pidgeons; they are shooting at each other. Every morning, or nearly so, I’m reminded of why I remain unpersuaded.
Having said that, as I admitted above, it may be more important to allow private gun ownership, with all its evil consequences, than to ban it, and start government down the path of controlling private behavior. I think that is true of drugs as well.
Same thing as with the booze and drugs, Don: take the guns away from the Bay Area’s ample supply of gangsters – they’ll kill each other with rocks. They will find a way to continue to be what they are, because that’s what they are.
It’s the same dynamic. Most people live with guns just fine, and manage not to shoot anybody. Most people live in towns with bars and taverns on every other corner, and manage not to be drunks. And just to take one place I know well as an example: pretty much everybody in my town (except, evidently, the cops) knows where the meth labs are, and who to see to score some weed – but somehow or other most of us don’t.
But there are always those who will. No society has ever successfully stopped the jerks from being jerks. Whether it’s easy for them to get access to whatever it is that fuels them in their aspiration to be a jerk or whether it’s difficult, they’ll find a way. They always have. So what you do is try to control the consequences.
You don’t – because you can’t – ban things. Part of the consequences of doing that is organized crime. We once tried to ban alcohol, and all we got out of that was the American Mafia and the Kennedy family. Not a positive outcome. All trying to ban drugs has accomplished is give the Mafia something new to do and add in the drug cartels with their insane levels of violence, as well as buy us a hell of a lot of bribed cops, plus make a goddam joke of US national sovereignty. I fail to see the “accomplishment” there. Maybe I’m dumb.
And I am enough of a libertarian to hold to the belief that whatever I ingest, and however I ingest it in the privacy of my own home is – as long as I don’t take the effects and raise hell in the public square – not the government’s business. Nor is who I sleep with; nor is whether or not I pay them to sleep with them; nor is how many at a time I sleep with as long as everyone’s an adult and freely entered into the contract. Private morals, including drugs and sex, are not the government’s business.
I second JJ’s eloquent post on so many of his points but greatly appreciate the differing points of view presented by Charles, among others.
On the subject of guns and violence, DQ, you might want to look at this link that addresses how the U.S. rates (with liberal gun laws) rates with violent crime as compared to other enlightened countries, like the UK:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html
I so have a question for you on a very narrow point: what makes you think that the U.S. (or any country) would be more successful in keeping weapons out of the hands of criminals than it is in stopping the flow and use of illegal drugs?
To put gun violence into perspective – gun deaths from homicide generally range from 8,000 – 15,000 deaths per year in the U.S. According to the academic research of John Lott and Gary Kleck, simply brandishing weapons defensively dissuades somewhere between 750,000 -2,000,000 violent crimes per year.
http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/p/faculty-gary-kleck.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott
By comparison, automobiles kill around 30,000 – 40,000 people per year while swimming pools kill more children less-than five years of age than guns do (note: statistics on “children” killed by guns are regularly skewed by including 18-19 year-olds as “children). Should we ban swimming pools and automobiles?
Of course not: we accept swimming pools and automobiles with all their attendent risks because we feel the benefits outweigh the risks. For a San Francisco lawyer living in a high-end (gated?) community, the risks of violent crime may seem so minimal as to justify doing away with personal weapons altogether. A waitress walking home from the night shift in a sketchy part of town or an elderly citizen trying to get a secure night of sleep in a low-rent housing unit may have different opinions.
I have an additional perspective to offer: I, too, live in a very nice community with great police protection. However, I (and the criminal class) also know that between 30-50% of the homes in our neighborhood have firearms. This greatly increases the risk factor for criminals and makes crime less likely. If you doubt my point, let me suggest an experiment. Make a sign (I suggest 24″ x 24″) with large block letters that says “Our home does not believe in guns and self defense” and post it in your front window.
Do you feel safer, now?
everything to do with the news stories I hear nearly ever morning about young people and innocent bystanders shot and killed or wounded in the Bay Area.
That is emotion. Unless you want to argue that the media, a California MSM division even, has anything to do with logic, intellectual discourse, and high philosophy.
It’s the same as making judgments off of religion, all religion, based upon what you were taught by a Calvinist based branch. That’s just your personal views, they don’t necessarily affect the truth about anything else, unless you start using them as a basis for judgment.
In both cases you have a personal reaction, negative, to an experience in your life. And then in both cases, religion and guns, you then start extrapolating it to Eternal Truths affecting all of humanity based upon that limited sample bias. It’s limited because all you have heard in California is what other people decided to tell you. It’s a sample bias because the moment you start branching away from California sources, you are suddenly inundated with a bunch of stuff you haven’t heard before. Sample bias is often found in surveys and human experiments where the scientists selectively choose people who have higher incidences of the issues they are testing for, whereas in a normal population it isn’t prevalent. (I.E. Immaturity and lack of critical thinking in college students leading to the conclusion that Americans are dumber than other nations) It’s not hard to judge that you weren’t told everything. It’s a bias because it’s from your personal experience, yet you lack personal experience of many other things related to the subject matter that other people had gone through. That separates it from simply experience and life wisdom, when people can say they know because they have experienced the issues at hand and tested them.
Most people will not assign a higher truth value to the experiences of other people than they would assign to their own personal experiences. This is exacerbated when you combine identity politics, because now people cannot assign a higher truth to people who disagree with them else they would be committing identity suicide.
In your case DQ, you are looking at an incomplete picture. An intentional incomplete picture when it comes to the news reports or newspapers or the various other things you get your news and information from. Because you’re living around other people who are in the same predicament, you’re judging that because they have similar experiences to yours or that they are working closer to the Oakland poverty and crime situation, that you have a diverse and challenging set of views. It’s not the case. Everybody in Oakland is functioning under the same delusion. Which is why they are dysfunctional. And everybody in California is basically functioning under the same delusion, and that’s why they can’t fix Oakland or anything else in California any time soon. The people that believe other wise, are in the same boat. Since they can’t fix Oakland with only theories so the only evidence is the evidence of dysfunction. They can make a claim but you, judging by your personal truth to be of higher value than the views of other people who claim otherwise, are unconvinced.
The only relevant factual data is that the South has a functioning society and we know what works when it comes to violence and crime, whereas California doesn’t. But since people living in places like Georgia and Texas cannot transfer their personal experiences to you, DQ, you are still judging truth by assigning a higher truth value to your life in California compared to anywhere else. And your life experiences in California says that guns don’t work in public for good and harmony. Whereas our personal experiences say that it does. In terms of a scientific theory, our theory covers why places like Georgia and Texas have a healthy relationship of guns to ownership and we can explain the failures at Ft. Hood and California. The only thing your theory can explain, by your own words DQ, is some of the reasons why California has such a crime and chaos issue. If you were to admit that this was purely a local problem due to Californian politics, rather than a human or society problem, you would then need to explain why the South and other states don’t have California’s problems even though we have even more guns around than gangbangers. But you can’t do that without dropping your premises on guns being the cause. But you still believe it is true of everywhere guns exist, even though you have no arguments explaining the factual data differences between regions. Btw, people in many parts of the country aren’t at peace with guns because we use them to “shoot clay pigeons” with. It’s a non sequitor to the argument.
People like Rory Miller and Marc MacYoung are intimately familiar with violence on the streets concerning gangs and criminals. MacYoung grew up around Hollywood Blvd, the place that turns freakish at night once awhile ago. They aren’t social workers nor psychologists, yet they have developed much the same tools, using a different set of experiences and education material. To avoid entangling into too complex a comparison, to sum it up, their conclusions about social and asocial violence are contradicted by your views, DQ. How do you explain that your theories are the right ones?
It’s the same scale issue with your views on religion or God. There is no particular reason why one person’s experiences with one religious sect means they now know the truth about any other religious organization. As I said to you before on that subject, whatever you believe you found to be the truth in your personal experiences, is not necessarily extrapolated to apply to everybody else in the world. Not to God. Not to guns. And not to places outside California either. It was only true for you and the people you got it from. Any other things you come up afterwards is what you created, not what your life experiences said. So your views on the God your Calvinist preachers said to you, are from your personal experiences, because they both existed. Your views on God, however, are manufactured using a judgment criteria derived from your personal experiences. Your personal experiences were a lot closer to the truth than your extrapolations off of it. You personally experienced a view of Christianity under X division and Calvinist influenced individuals=Truth. You being taught that God did not allow for free will is false, because that’s an extrapolation belief outside your personal experiences. The difference is very clear. Someone heats up a stove of hot water and you stick your hand in. If it hurts, then you can say your personal experience says that the water there is hot. Come back 30 minutes later, however, and you can’t say the same. You can only extrapolate based off of your personal experiences that the water is hot or not hot. And if you move to another house, you then can’t use your personal experiences from a previous house to say that the water is hot. First you have to test if there is bubbling or steam. Then you could say, “judging by the presence of the same data here as before, I can infer that the water is hot now like it was before and therefore if I touch it will thus hurt”. So if you came across a Church that was Calvinist based, you could then say their teachings of God and view of God is the same or similar to what you were taught before. Now we get back to the gun and gang crime issue.
People like Rory Miller and Marc MacYoung, even though they had personal experiences with violence, readily admitted that they didn’t know the full picture. Instead of trying to contradict or ignore other people’s experiences, they integrated their experiences with their own to ensure consistency. They needed to know that whatever they were told was consistent with reality and their experiences. If their personal experiences lack is incapable of making a judgment of true or false, then they’ll make a comparison and see if both could be true at the same time. Their life’s work has not been a result of one person, them, judging everything off of their personal experiences like a guru. They used their personal experiences as spring boards and collaborated with others to gain a fuller understanding of actuality.
The fact that you can’t make California’s situation consistent with a bunch of other places in the world, is an indication that you don’t know the full truth. Yet you treat every preconception you developed in California as if it was the full truth concerning guns, ignoring everything else going on in the world that contradicts your conclusions. This is not a logical strategy. It is an emotional strategy people use when they come up against contradictions against their world view and instead of changing their world view to produce more consistency in explaining things, they change their way of phrasing the argument to avoid entangling with all the potential inconsistencies around.
In the end, it still has nothing to do with clay pigeons, but I suppose it sounds good enough to avoid the contradictions inherent in claiming that California’s problems with guns means that the problem is in fact the guns, irregardless of where the guns are or who uses them. You call this a non-emotional argument, DQ? Be interesting to see how you apply that kind of thinking to Ft. Hood or other places in the world.
Charles,
I see it as a function of ethics. All legalizing drugs would do is mostly solve a problem that was created through the use of drugs. Gun users, however, not only solve their own problems, but they also solve problems manufactured by a completely different source.
Thus the attempt to erase drugs or poverty would embolden the problems created by drugs or poverty. Whereas the attempt to register or ban guns would not only increase the problems with guns, it would also increase the problems of all kinds of issues that originally had nothing to do with guns. Those problems would get worse because the gun solution would be out. On top of the problems with guns themselves.
People would not only become more reliant on the government, they would also become more vulnerable to criminals with guns, police with guns, or criminals with knives.
Thus it is ethically more evil to ban guns than it is to ban drugs, in terms of severity or degree.
Btw, did you ever become a better shooter once you learned to control your breathing and remain perfectly still?
(that’s an intended pun for our “puntif”-in-residence)
Charles, thanks for picking up the slack.
P.S. Now if we are talking about making chocolate illegal then I will scream to the high heavens that the government should stay out while I go grab my gun! So, yea, I guess that I am a hypocrite.
Add peanut butter to the chocolate. I’ll bring the ammo and tell the punks to get out of our way ;
When chocolate is outlawed, only outlaws—most of them women—will have chocolate.
They’re more likely to put a consumption tax on chocolate. The more you make, the more you pay for chocolate. And the more money the gov gets.
Then Congress gets like these exemptions, because the purpose of consumption taxes, in aristocracies, was to clearly define the difference between nobles and lesser castes. They call it sumptuary laws. California calls it banning junk food because it is unhealthy.
Chocolate is a gateway drug!~
“When chocolate is outlawed, only outlaws—most of them women—will have chocolate.”
Mr. “Martel” – I do believe that you’ve “nailed” it!
Chocolate is a gateway drug!
Danny – that’s why I will always have my “chocolate lab” – oh, wait, that’s my dog.
okay, okay, I’ll leave the puns to the expert.
Y-man, I’m not about to try to climb your wall of words to debate you on gun control. I was struck, though, by your casual dismissal of hundreds, indeed thousands, of people dying unnecessarily as “emotional.” I’m arguing from the fact of their death. My gut reaction is that we ought not to stand idly by. My libertarian reaction is that we need to react in ways other than government control. But to dismiss the reaction as emotional without acknowledging the deaths misses the point, I think.
These are real people dying, not creations of the MSM. And it has little to do with my personal experience. I live in a cozy little suburb. The deaths just happen to be on my news a lot because they happen locally. That doesn’t make them any less real, though.
DQ…
While not disagreeing that the number of deaths due to criminals using guns is distressing, are you equally concerned about the number of deaths caused by motor vehicles?? Should we consider banning automobiles? Besides walking is so much more beneficial to our health – right up there with eating your veggies…!
Apples and oranges, I think, suek. The purpose of cars is to get from place to place. They are rarely used to intentionally kill people. The sole purpose of guns is to kill people and things. Anyway, while I’ll grant the high utility of guns in some circumstances, I don’t see them as nearly as useful or important to society as cars. Yeah, I know, Y-man and others will disagree. We’ve had that discussion.
Then, too, I’m a bit biased, since I have a 100 mile a day round trip commute and could not live where I do and work where I do without a car.
Apples and oranges are both fruits. I grant you your point – the intended use of the objects – but the fact is that intended purpose is irrelevant – people are still dead…caused by the object’s use.
If the intent is the main problem, then you’re making an argument like a liberal – the intent is the main thing. If you’re arguing the results, then you must consider the results regardless of intent.
Gee, suek, you wound me deeply. A liberal? (j/k)
I’m not so concerned about intent as purpose. Y-man is quite right that there are places in this country where guns serve very valuable purposes, such as hunting food. But about the only game in the cities is human. And I do think it matters that we allow people to legally own something for which their only use is the killing of other people.
As a libertarian, I guess I have to favor legal gun ownership anyway. And I’ll grant that in cities gun ownership may be even more important as a way of defending one’s home and family (by killing, or threatening to kill, those who threaten them). But the cost in human life, much of it completely innocent human life, is fearsome and I just don’t think people who support gun ownership should ignore that.
I was struck, though, by your casual dismissal of hundreds, indeed thousands, of people dying unnecessarily as “emotional.”
The point is, it’s not an argument to say “I saw X number of events on the local news and this then means something conclusively true about guns”. There’s not even a logic there, other than pointing out that Cause A creates Consequence E. That’s why I say it’s an emotional reaction on your part when you view the news. It isn’t reason or logical argument that’s going on. If you want to talk about logic and arguments, you actually have to use one. The news is not it.
Y-man is quite right that there are places in this country where guns serve very valuable purposes, such as hunting food
That wouldn’t be the valuable purpose I would have in mind. The equivalence with Oakland is purely that. Crime in Oakland compared to how more guns in the hands of citizens deal with guns in the hands of criminals elsewhere. It’s not a matter of crime in Oakland, now we zoom in on Texas hunting squirrel rats or something.
But the cost in human life, much of it completely innocent human life, is fearsome and I just don’t think people who support gun ownership should ignore that.
The premise you’re still using is that guns is what allows such loss of completely innocent human life. When challenged on the matter of where your evidence comes from, you mention the loss of human life in Oakland or California due to guns. Well, wouldn’t the loss of lives due to news events about guns justifying guns being the direct cause of innocent human life loss, a circular paradox. It is, isn’t it.
There’s no argument here, DQ, on your part.
The deaths just happen to be on my news a lot because they happen locally. That doesn’t make them any less real, though.
The point I often make is that the stuff people think they’re getting from the news isn’t the truth. You seem to trust a lot of MSM sources. You don’t have a lot of filters you appear to be using on the matter. You both use them and you have an assumption about their veracity. So you receive the emotional impact of the story, lives lost, and that becomes inter tangled with the other beliefs you have. You are mistaking intensity for truth. You don’t have direct personal experience of the stories in question, as you mentioned. So how do you know what is or is not real about them? All you’re dong is making a priori assumptions left and right, based upon what other people tell you. And who are these other people? Reporters? Is that enough for a belief system let a lone enough of a justification to make a priori truth assumptions here, DQ.
How can I tell and make the statement that this is so? Because every time you talk about a news story, DQ, you implicitly accept that it conforms to your beliefs about guns and crimes. This is called a bubble and it lacks fundamental attributes such as critical assessment. You even get to the point that you perceived my comment that you were reacting to the emotional content of the news stories as a statement that the people killed, weren’t people. You are confusing intensity for truth. Truth has nothing to do with whether people are dead or not. It has everything to do with what, when, where, and how. The details. The fine print. That is the entirety of the body of truth. The thinking seems to go something like this. Because people died and because the news reported it as due to guns, then it is true that people died due to guns. You’d think this was a pretty simple thing right? However, something weird happens when an argument like “people didn’t die due to guns, that’s just an emotional bias in the story” with “it isn’t emotional that people died”. You see, there are two parts to the story/belief here. One part has people dead. The other part connects it to guns as being the cause. You wouldn’t normally make the mistake of confusing one for the other, unless they are both inter tangled in your mind. As in identity politics, one thing becomes the same as the other. A identifies with B such that A equals B. Thus an argument against B can be considered an argument against A and vice a versa.
Disconnect the identity relationship, because it’s just not true.
Y-man, I try real hard not to engage you in detail on the merits, because it would take more time or energy than I have to even begin to meet your wall of words, but I can’t resist asking one question. Are you really suggesting that since I hear about the gun deaths through the MSM they didn’t really happen or are in some way less real or less important? Or that they really didn’t happen by the use of guns? Sure, they might have happened anyway, but not nearly so many of them and not nearly so many innocent bystanders would be involved. Those are facts, whether you choose to try to drown them in a torrent of words or not.
DQ, can you imagine any situation where you would feel it necessary or desirable to kill a person?
I do challenge you on the notion that a gun is designed only to kill someone. A gun can be used to dissuade someone from inflicting violence on others. As I mentioned in my previous post, the way guns are almost always used in self-defense does not involve injuring or killing someone but simply dissuading them from inflicting violence on you.
You can say, “I don’t like guns because they are designed to do violence on others”. Fair enough. But, realistically and given the world in which we live, do you really think that weapons are an anachronism that society can simply surrender without consequence?
If you were to remove weapons from society, do you truly believe that it would remove the causes and means by which people inflict violence on others?
And, finally, can you identify from this list the greatest source of violence inflicted upon others (multiple choice): a) law-abiding citizens; b) criminals; c) governments.
Given you answer to the question above, who does removing weapons of self defense from the hands of law-abiding citizens benefit the most?
Just askin’!
Are you really suggesting that since I hear about the gun deaths through the MSM they didn’t really happen or are in some way less real or less important?
The question is a matter of are you seeing the forest, the total truth. Maybe some part of it is true, but not all of it. What is important is really going to be based upon what people assign truth values to. If you assign truth values to an incomplete story, as if it was entirely truth, you will be led astray. And that’s important in the long term. And it’s not like the MSM will correct themselves if you find yourself erroneously believing their stories are 100% accurate in both data and interpretation. Lacking personal experience of the events in question, lacking personal experience of gun or crime issues, and lacking any other direct/diverse input into the situation, what else can you say you are utilizing to form a judgment except purely the emotional effect of the news stories? Whether something is important or not, is not equal to being true. Truth is an issue decided by other things than the essential, intrinsic, importance of life or events. There is no “it is necessary, therefore it must be true”.
Those are facts, whether you choose to try to drown them in a torrent of words or not.
It’s also a fact that other gang bangers and crazies in the rest of the country, where there are a lot of guns, don’t do drive bys that end up killing civilians. Why is that, do you think. Could it possibly be because if they started shooting out on the streets at everybody around, children included, the concealed carry militia would plug their car full of holes at least 20% of the time? Gang bangers may be violent, but suicidal they are not. Both situations contain guns. In fact, we have more guns than you do in California or Oakland (put together). By your theory, we should have more drive bys and gang slaughters of civilians. Yet we don’t. Why is that, DQ. Explain those facts.
DQ…
Related but unrelated…
What is your position on the death sentence – in light of your opinion on unnecessary deaths caused by guns?
Y-man, it would take a book to “explain those facts” and I’m not the person to write it. I’ll give you the short version, though. To begin, they do kill each other with stunning regularly in many, if not all, of the cities in which gang wars take place. This is hardly a problem unique to California. Also, in Oakland and the many other places the gang wars are taking place, the competing gangs are armed to the teeth. The “gang-bangers” as you call them are not deterred by the fact that the people are shooting at are fully armed. The simple fact is that if we were to take guns away from the gangs fewer people would die. It takes far more personal courage to attack someone with a knife or other weapon than with a gun, for obvious reasons. Why do you have such trouble acknowledging that?
Danny, see my comment 27 which included its reference to “threatening to kill.” Removing guns would not “remove the causes and means by which people inflict violence on others?” But it would certainly make inflicting that violence more difficult and less frequent. Yes, governments are the greatest source of violence. But anyone who thinks, in this day and age, that even a well-armed citizenry has any chance against a serious government attack is kidding themselves. We might as well be carrying clubs and pitchforks. Even when people defended their position when we discussed this before they had to resort to speculating that the American military would not fire on American citizens. By the way, that last might be true, but it is certainly more likely to be true if those same citizens are not armed and firing at them! From that standpoint, arming our citizens is counterproductive.
suek, in favor of, for a limited list of crimes. Some people deserve it and I’d rather the government dish it out than vigilantes. Though I must admit I have some qualms about giving the government that much power over anything, it beats any alternatives I can think of. What’s your view?
My view…generally speaking, I’m in favor. I think society has a right to defend itself from those who cannot live peacefully in society for whatever reason. I’m not so sure about your government vs vigilantes, though. I suspect that often times – not always, for sure, but often – the vigilantes are acting with a knowledge that is correct because it is close to the action, whereas the government has become _such_ a protector of the rights of the accused that it has become almost a defender of the accused instead of the victims.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that one of my sons has decided to study law. He and his wife were visiting the week before Christmas and he was talking about something with his son…tactics in a game of some sort. He commented that he should do such and such but had to do it in such a way that – like an attorney – although the facts were known, the other side wouldn’t be likely to recognize the significance of the facts. I was struck again of the “game” our legal system has become – the goal isn’t to determine guilt or innocence of the accused in order to protect society, the goal is to win. I find that appalling, but to be honest, I don’t know of any way to fix it. No system is perfect, and if you have the death sentence, it’s likely that there will be innocent people put to death. Is that a price worth paying? Our society is wealthy enough to be able to support a prisoner for a lifetime sentence – in fact, many prisoners. If we were _not_ so wealthy, we would not be able to afford the prisons and/or the means to maintain those prisoners. That’s a factor not to be ignored.
Personally, I think that a lifetime of imprisonment is crueler than the death sentence, and less of a deterrent than a fast trial with a fairly speedy sentence carried out in a reasonably short time. Our system seems incapable of doing any of these at the moment.
In other words, I approve of the death sentence for guilty persons. Not only do I think it’s justified, but I think it’s necessary for a lawful society. Oddly enough though, I think that’s an idealistic view.
Is that a price worth paying?
People get sentenced to life all the time that were innocent. The point is, when people can say life imprisonment, they don’t really care as much whether the person is innocent. Thus the chances of them actually being innocent is higher than for death row inmates.
If the death penalty was the punishment for the guy caught in New Jersey trying to move with some guns in the trunk, the jury would have stalled. But the jury convicted him because that’s what the judge said. But would the jury have done so knowing that it was death, with no possibility of correcting a mistake?
It’s all about moral consequence and responsibility. People when given an out, will take it. If you say “life imprisonment is better than death penalty”, they will stop caring about the innocent or guilt of those imprisoned for life. They would think “he’s lucky he wasn’t executed”. Yet he might as well be dead because life imprisonment means lack of freedom. It’s a death that just takes longer.
Some people deserve it and I’d rather the government dish it out than vigilantes.
The government’s retarded. Like John Corzine, if not outright malicious in fabricating crimes for their own political self-aggrandizement.
There’s no justice when people, after the fact, try to look back and determine the truth. The only people that can determine the truth with a 99% accuracy rate are the ones perpetrating the crime and the victim of the crime. The “justice system” we have is an attempt to look backwards and ensure that the punishment fits the crime and that the guilty accused are actually guilty. It was not intended to solve matters on its own.
Y-man, it would take a book to “explain those facts” and I’m not the person to write it.
I take that to mean you essentially have no argument. I’m not sure why you feel comfortable with that state of existence. I wouldn’t if I were in your slot.
The “gang-bangers” as you call them are not deterred by the fact that the people are shooting at are fully armed.
Like I said, statements without evidence to back it up. I don’t consider that an argument or even an example. An example of what, exactly.
It takes far more personal courage to attack someone with a knife or other weapon than with a gun, for obvious reasons. Why do you have such trouble acknowledging that?
Probably because after coming to an understanding about social, anti-social, and asocial violence, your claim just isn’t credible. Many people believe it, but then again, many people are wrong on many things. A gun vs a knife does not change a person’s intent. It only affects the external consequence or societal behavior of those in question. More personal courage? You expose the limits of your understanding here. Criminals are not concerned about a danger to themselves in the act of doing it. Thus they are not presenting courage, virtue, or valor. Criminals only attack when they think they have the upper hand and have Zero concern for “defending themselves” against what the victim can do. You, a normal citizen, thinks about “defending themselves” against violence and that’s the sole reason you can’t understand asocial predators. Asocial predators do not worry about fear or lacking the “courage” (intent) to attack someone. Asocial predators are normally the ones that shoot people, after they got the money. Criminals are mostly people who run away at the sight of a gun or clear resistance. But it’s only because it was a surprise. When attacking, they thought they were safe. If they see no resistance and win, then they were right. And criminals are usually more right than wrong on the matter of judging victim status.
But it would certainly make inflicting that violence more difficult and less frequent.
So more people get stabbed to death rather than shot to death. How is that preferable. Dead is dead. If people prefer to get stabbed than to get shot, that’s probably because they are thinking like a victim and trying to appease their attackers. Well, if you really don’t want to get shot or stabbed, why don’t you just not resist and give over the money and do whatever they tell you. And if at school the gun man tells you to line up against the wall and you’ll be safe. Do that. And if he tells you to tie yourself up and all the women and teachers, and put them up against a wall, head facing on the ground, do that too. Again, as I repeatedly said, violence is independent of tools, whether a person has a knife, a bat, or a gun, it does not change a person’s intent or the nature of violence. Of course, DQ, you yourself can see the flaw in the argument. Because people are dead already with guns around and they didn’t need to resist the crims or gang lords. They were just “innocent” bystanders. Yet you think a knife would make such a huge difference. And what personal experience do you have that tells you so? What news reports are you using to tell you so? What body of evidence do you have that dictates that such be the truth?
People who value their lives over much and have nothing they are willing to die for or kill for, may be considered slaves. I certainly consider it such. As such, why do they even need human rights when they are satisfied with slavery.
that even a well-armed citizenry has any chance against a serious government attack is kidding themselves.
An ignorant argument. That’s like saying the terrorists couldn’t pull off a Mumbai because the Indian government had more firepower (and nukes) than the terrorists. X. Wrong.
The point is, violence is not something you can fit into neat little social boxes, DQ. It isn’t like, “oh, this guy is bigger, so that means people won’t mess with them”. In point of fact, with violence, it doesn’t matter. If people think they can win, they’ll use it. And often times, they’ll be right because that’s how effective violence is. A well armed citizenry would absolutely destroy an attempted military invasion, whether domestic or foreign. Not because they had more firepower, but due to Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Logistics. Influence. Leverages. Unconventional attacks. Political sabotage or assassination. Flowing amongst the people like fish in water. Urban warfare. If a terrorist group tried a Mumbai in a US place with a bunch of concealed carry holders, they would be absolutely annihilated in minutes after the start of their “rampage”. In a city like SF or a state like your California, they would go on for hours and kill thousands, probably, if they had enough to disperse backed by transportation and ammo. They would actually avoid places like Oakalnd, precisely because they don’t want a shoot out with gangs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNOP3X9OyzM&has_verified=1
This video may help you understand, viscerally, what goes on in guns vs knives. They are snippets caught from real asocial violence, which the media go out of their way to hide as it helps them promote their propaganda campaigns.
Y …
Overall I agree with you…but you _must_ admit, if gangbangers were limited to knives, it sure would cut down on the drive-by shootings…!!
Y-man, this is why I don’t bother to take on your war of words. I do not appreciate the personal attacks, nor do I think they are deserved.
It’s not that I have no argument, it’s that I do not have the time or inclination to attempt to write the book it would take to make it. Sorry about that.
The fact that the gang-bangers are not deterred is supported by the evidence of thousands of shootings a year which obviously would not take place if the shooters were deterred. No more evidence than that is required.
It is not an “ignorant” argument to suggest that even a well-armed citizenry would be absolutely flattened by the American military. History is filled with whole populations being wiped out by a well-organized, well-drilled and well-armed military. It would most certainly happen here if things ever came to that. All history provides all the evidence you need.
You are right that violence does not fit into neat little boxes. Very few issues worth discussing do. But it is also possible to lose basic truths in overanalyzing and overintellectualizing everything. You can use as many words as you want but the fact is that a person can shoot someone from a distance in relative safety, but it takes much more personal courage to get up close and personal with a knife or other hand-to-hand combat weapon. You keep chirping about lack of evidence or full understanding, but some things need nothing more than common sense. Some people have the courage to attack with knives anyway. But not nearly as many as do with guns and that requires no further evidence that common sense.
Sorry, Y-man, you can declare yourself the winner and proclaim I have no argument or only ignorant arguments if you want, but I’ve got a brief to get out and don’t have time to even try to meet you head on. Nor any I inclined to. I do wish you would not be so personally insulting, though.
I suppose it would cut down on the drive-bys, yeah, but I don’t think taking the guns away from the gangs would render them less violent. Gangs have always been with us, in one form or another. Whether it was protecting the prime fishing hole with clubs and rocks, or protecting the drug turf with Tech-nines, there have always been people gaited that way. The people have always been the problem, and they remain what they are, and whether they have a gun, a stone to throw, a club, a knife, or a sharpened stick isn’t going to change them. The violently-inclined will incline to violence with whatever you allow them, including their fists and feet if you allow them nothing.
England and Australia have both banned guns. It isn’t working, and violent crime is up in both countries. The bad guys feel very comfortable now, knowing that no one can oppose them with serious force. The effect of a law disarming the populace has been what it always is: the only ones who are disarmed are the ones who give a damn about such things as obeying the laws, and they’re the ones who wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place.
Sue – you’re right of course, the legal system isn’t a “system” at all, it’s a joke, designed primarily to enrich the practitioners. Wait until your son encounters some wise old head who’ll tell him: “Ask me what your chances are if you go into court with the law absolutely on your side, all your facts impeccably lined up, and fourteen unimpeachable witnesses – and I’ll tell you 50-50. Ask me what your chances are in court if you’re the town drunk, a liar, the law adamantly opposed to you, no facts at all, three witnesses everybody in the state knows are habitual liars, and the most useless bottom-feeding ambulance-chasers in town as your lawyers – and I’ll tell you 50-50.”
I can’t tell you how many lawyers I’ve heard that from. I wonder sometimes if they realize what an indictment of their profession that is, from out of their own mouths. Usually said with a smile. Obviously, in anything genuinely approaching being a “system” the person with the facts, the witnesses, and the law should win 90%+ of the time – otherwise you’re running a crapshoot, not a “system” that should be taken seriously or honored by anyone.
It gets you thinking that it’s past time to kill all the lawyers and judges, and just go with flipping coins, if that’s what court’s going to amount to anyway. Society would save a hell of a lot of money.
The discussion about taking guns away from gangs by making them illegal is pretty much beside the point, isn’t it? Gangs don’t obey the law and I propose the “Law” would be just as effective in banning guns from society has it has in banning narcotics.
However, when it comes to arming gangs with knives, Suek, I really don’t think that it will necessary cut down on gang violence nor will it cut crime, but I do think that it might turn gangsters into neighborhood cut-ups. What do you think?
Sorry to perpetuate this but I must agree with JJ (44) who said “….I don’t think taking the guns away from the gangs would render them less violent. “
Taking away guns is not focusing on the CAUSE of the problem.
We have the same problem with airport security. The TSA is focused on looking for suspicious OBJECTS when we all know that they should be looking for certain PEOPLE.
When we make sure they can’t bring their tools on the aircraft, they just find some new tools. We should be looking for THEM, not their TOOLS.
(Sorry for the caps. I gave up trying to code emphasis with caps or underline)
>>I don’t think taking the guns away from the gangs would render them less violent>>
One can not argue with the fact that Cain killed Able.
>>…but I do think that it might turn gangsters into neighborhood cut-ups. What do you think?>>
I think you need more practice to compete with Sadie!! Keep working on it!
I agree with JJ and Suek on the state of the law. It has simply become a game irrelevant of justice. I (and other share holders ) once lost a company because, in essence, we were frivolously sued by a much larger entity and told, pretty much point blank, that “you might fight off our lawsuit but we have far more money than you and we will sue you into bankruptcy unless you do what we say”. They were right. The case never made it to trial (due to their endless maneuvering) and many lawyers became very rich. Eventually, the investors ran out of money and we lost the company. My lesson learned was that you can sue anyone over anything and win not over the facts of the case but through economic predation.
The second example was the OJ Simpson trial. So, OJ is acquitted for murdering his wife (meaning, he was found “not guilty”). However much that decision was a travesty, I found it far worse that he could then be retried in civil court (thereby rendering the principle of double jeopardy a complete joke) and found guilty of depriving his wife of her human rights (but, wait…how could he do that if he didn’t murder her). You mean he cut her head off with a samurai sword by mistake? By accident?
My Liberal/Lefty BIL attorney, of course, thought it made perfect sense. Yes, it made perfect sense according to the rules of the game, but not from a sense of justice. He either murdered her or didn’t murder her. Anything else is gamesmanship.
It may be all that we have and it may still be better than alternatives systems, but the law IS an ass!
The fact that the gang-bangers are not deterred is supported by the evidence of thousands of shootings a year which obviously would not take place if the shooters were deterred.
A negative claim that ignores the fact that deterred attacks are not put down on paper. Thus the ones that didn’t happen, aren’t around to be pointed to. Arguing deterrence isn’t an issue of facts. It’s an issue of prediction and probabilities. It’s not a fact that attacks happen means deterrence didn’t work. It’s that you don’t even know deterrence works because when it does work, nothing happens. Thus the indicator of success is always “nothing happens”, not “oh there’s a bunch of attacks so that proves that it doesn’t work”.
Y-man, this is why I don’t bother to take on your war of words. I do not appreciate the personal attacks, nor do I think they are deserved.
It’s not that I have no argument, it’s that I do not have the time or inclination to attempt to write the book it would take to make it.
You’re skipping around and moving the goal posts. It’s either you don’t appreciate “personal attacks” (defined by god knows what) or it is you don’t have the time to write up an actual argument. Unless of course you think requiring you to have an actual argument is a personal attack. Which I would then say, you’re stuck yourself too closely to your beliefs about guns and aren’t open to a different view. What does this remind you of, exactly.
I always recommend people to unstick their ego from the facts and their claims of Truth “tm”, because it’s neither good for their ego nor good for discerning truth by interpolating them together. Especially in the case of violence, people have the habit and inclination of substituting good sense and common assessment with their ego and perceived self-identity. It just gets people killed, at the end of that extreme railroad.
It is not an “ignorant” argument to suggest that even a well-armed citizenry would be absolutely flattened by the American military. History is filled with whole populations being wiped out by a well-organized, well-drilled and well-armed military.
I say you are ignorant precisely because it is truth. Those populations, were disarmed. Oh you didn’t know that? Then quote the case and let’s see who is right. You don’t have time to look up something and write down one paragraph describing it? I don’t think you realize the concept of “time” here. If you had pooled all the time you spent repeating baseless claims, you could have actually came up with an argument, detailed by a thesis, 3 body paragraphs supporting it, and a conclusion. You know what I’m talking about. You could have had that, instead of 5 or 10 repetitions of the same argument you’ve been using for awhile now. Which one is better. I know which one is better by my lights.
The point is, your claims of personal attacks are not backed by truth when you lack the evidence and I have the evidence. When you don’t want to state the facts of the case, while I have already stated the facts of case. Why would I need to attack you personally, when your arguments are full of holes, even by your admission, non-existent because you somehow think it requires an hour to write up stuff you could have done if you had actually started to 2 days ago.
But not nearly as many as do with guns and that requires no further evidence that common sense.
The so called “i’m right because I think so” claim. Hilarious. Where you come from, DQ, that may suffice for things. Like arguing from authority because the law says so. Where I come from, it’d be laughed out of the park.
The problem, Y-man, as you know is that arguing with you woudn’t be one paragraph, it would be an endless series of insults and put-downs. As you well know. Go ahead, declare victory. I’m disengaging.
To Suek
Overall I agree with you…but you _must_ admit, if gangbangers were limited to knives, it sure would cut down on the drive-by shootings…!!
Not having nukes would also eliminate nuclear bombardment. If I cut down what I eat to zero, I would lose weight. Both are true statements is it not? How can you have nuclear bombarded cities without nukes being used? How can you have drive by shootings without things to shoot with? But my issue is, is it good to actually do that? Are you now okay and safe from bombardment, if there are no nukes? Has getting rid of nukes been a positive, good, and beneficial exercise? If it worked, of course. Is it still beneficial? Let’s say I stopped eating anything for 1 week. If my goal is to lose weight, that means I’m doing good, right? It’s good for me. Or is it. Even if you could do it, doesn’t mean you should. That’s a basic point here. DQ has failed to make the argument of what should be so given his assumptions. All I hear are echoes in this chamber of ours that don’t end up doing anything to justify the claim that X is good and should be done when feasible.
A FAE explosion can accomplish much the job of a nuke, it just needs some work and wide deployments. It’s not as spectacular in terms of labor efficiency as a nuke, but dead is dead one way or another. There are many ways to create a problem. Removing guns isn’t solving problems. It’s just replacing one with another problem. A worse one perhaps.
Of course others have argued the reality of how banning guns wouldn’t work in reality and I don’t think DQ would disagree based upon libertarian policy making. However, the theory that less absolute number of deaths would happen if you could theoretically remove the means in question, I challenge and cast as untrue.
It’s really a matter of centralization vs de-centralized procedures. Wouldn’t less terrorist attacks happen if the TSA was successful in finding bombs on groped subjects (at least less bombs exploding on airplanes. More bombs exploding in airports)? Would then what the TSA do, be justified if they could in fact defuse bombs? We know it’s a sham and a con and attacks on US soil have either been prevented by the FBI or been defeated by citizen actions, but let’s say TSA was effective in stopping attacks. Would what they now be doing become justified or effective? I say no. I say it’s not an effective way to stop terrorists. Even if TSA could stop terrorist attacks. The issue is a determinate of truth or Epistemological Knowledge. It’s not an issue of policy, although policy is formed upon the philosophy of what is or isn’t true. The question is core ethics. Is it right, regardless of collective benefit or cost analysis. Is it the right thing to do given an indeterminate future.
DQ is claiming, repeatedly, that knives will cause an absolute, objective, decrease in deaths or even attacks compared to guns (higher level of intent, he said courage). This is basically a Utopian argument. Meaning, if we could somehow create a hive mind and centralize everything and make it actually work, perfection and Utopia would be justified. I say no, it still wouldn’t be justified even if you could get it to work simply because the results aren’t going to be what people think it is. A centralized system, a hive mind even, would still be crippled by things we see with our systems today. Lack of flexibility. Rigidity. Stupidity. Megalomania and so forth. It’s just all be focused in one spot and probably be immortal as a result. That kind of thing just exchanges one type of problem with another and labels it an “absolute improvement”. It’s not an absolute improvement. It’s a just a relative difference or change in the local matters. I’m looking for the ethically correct decision. Not the decision that people jump on because it has the sweetest flavor.
For example, I hold to the matter that the only real effective way to solve gun crimes without also introducing incubating problems later on, is to de-centralize problem solving away from the police, the courts, the judges, the corrupt lawyers, and the government aristocrats in DC. It doesn’t matter if they could get rid of guns, really get rid of them, from everyone, including gang bangers, because you don’t want the government to be solving your problems for you. Because there’s no guarantee they’ll keep on doing it. Why should they care about you, more than you care about yourself and your family.
It’s not a matter of “oh, we can’t actually get rid of guns, so I hold to the libertarian position that our policy should be to allow (get it, allow, like the government is doing you a favor instead of you doing it a favor by solving its problems for them).” It’s more like “even if we could get rid of guns, it wouldn’t solve anything in the long term because it is just trading one problem with another”.
People might think, “so what”. They’d happily main their life for the cost of some money. Sure, people make decisions like that all the time. But what about slavery. Government outlaws guns. Wohoo. Congratulations, now you are a slave as a result. Is that now better than dying by a gunshot when there are far better remedies available? Ones you could have actually done, if you were free to do so without government interference. What’s the libertarian going to say here, yes it is better to become a slave than to die from a gunshot? No, it is not better? If it isn’t better, why do people think less deaths would happen if guns didn’t exist. Is not a value statement that it is “better” or “more right”?
There’s a fine line between arguing that it is better for less deaths to happen from guns given the costs of centralized authority, and arguing that there’s a factual difference in capability between a gun and a knife. People confuse reality with their emotions all the time. Their emotions tell them that less deaths are good and better. Then they see that it’s easier to kill with a gun than with a knife (because they get stuck in the victim mentality mostly, in reality, both require some advanced or specific skills/training. Relatively, it’s the same in terms of man hours and training time. In fact, marksmanship is harder to learn than attacking with a knife. Especially at long range. Guns are just prepacked violence tubes for idiots, one way of looking at it) So when they see this fact, they then invest that fact with a truth value and now they claim that because they would have a harder time killing people with a knife vs a gun, limiting guns would save lives, and saving lives is good. Thus limiting guns is good if it could work. I call that either a baseless argument, a claim without evidence, or some kind of circular self-justification claim. They don’t really know what’s going to happen. They just want it to be true, and so they believe it is true. It’s not enough to be judged ethically good. Except, perhaps, if your ethics is consequentialism. The biggest benefit, to the biggest number of people. But isn’t that like Utopia? Shrugs.
Guns are tools. Don’t assign ethical value or truth value to a tool just because it feels right. A tool does not justify social policy, good, evil, or anything else being true. It just is what it is. Bombs go boom. Guns shoot a bullet that has a lot of kinetic force and penetration due to the size+weight of the bullet. People, however, are the thing people should pay attention to using their “common sense”. Whatever that means now. TSA would learn much from that.
To JJ,
It isn’t working, and violent crime is up in both countries.
I would agree with the premise and descriptions listed by JJ. I would also make the counter-claim that if somebody thinks more violent crime is a good substitute for less deaths by gunshots, they (like DQ) should say so. Clearly, concisely, and better now than later. Because there are plenty of reasons why I can explain why that line is wrong. Ethically, factually, morally, politically, epistemologically, and so on and so forth. In the interests of saving my time, I don’t make arguments against imaginary positions, however. If someone isn’t making a claim, what’s the point of refuting a non-existent claim.
My lesson learned was that you can sue anyone over anything and win not over the facts of the case but through economic predation.
Also, big companies are in league with Dems to fix the market by crushing competitors with more regulations and taxes.
I will present one example. Let’s say there’s around 50 million people in California. 5 of them are in Oakland. Hypothetically for argument’s sake.
If you got rid of all the guns in California and Oakland, you could perhaps save 1 million of the 5 from being shot by guns. In place of that, 300,000 would be killed or crippled by knife attacks and brutal crime waves. But you’d still get 700,000 as a plus. So whatever happens to those 300k, doesn’t matter compared to the benefit of a greater number of people who were saved, 700k. Right?
So, when a terrorist mass Mumbai attack happens and 500k people die from it, because people were disarmed, was it still a good decision to get rid of guns? What if it wasn’t 500k dead. Just 5k dead. Would that still be a good decision to remove guns from Oakland? After all, you still save 695k deaths. It’s good, right? I mean, who cares what happens to the dead ones. I mean, theoretically, yeah, they could have all been saved if they had the power to defend themselves, but removing guns would definitely save 695k lives from early death and tragedy. Still good? Or not good?
Now having removed the guns, a foreign invasion happens and California is taken over by Islamic law and an Islamic army that enforces it. Is sexual slavery and executions for refusing to pay your jizya or convert, now a good price to pay for 695k people saved from guns?
The point is, people don’t know what the hell is going to happen when they get rid of guns from everybody. They are just making it up as they go along because it feels good at the time.
P.S. Guns made women and men equal in terms of force. Get rid of them, and say goodbye to your women’s lib social equality goodies. When it’s back to muscle power being the ruling factor in violence. Guess what, ladies. You’re out of luck. I suppose you could rely on lawyers and the law as power. Heck, lawyers even rely on lawyers in cases against themselves. But how effective that would be… is it worth it to save a bunch of people you don’t know from getting shot by guns, with the certainly that even more women will be enslaved, abused, and put into an untenable power equation as a result?
is that something ethical. Is that something a libertarian can be proud of. Yes, it is. To some people. It is. And that’s why Libertarian isn’t a serious party in America.