|
I see no compelling state interest in the prosecution of this man.
And when was *that* ever necessary??
"Compelling state interest" really isn't the standard for deciding whether to prosecute someone under a valid law.
Doing as you please without harming others. That's what liberty means to me and citing examples of when our liberty is already restricted does not make it any more justified.
So you go ahead and advocate for the elimination of all highway traffic laws. We'll just all turn left when we feel like it, and as long as we don't hurt anybody in any particular instance, everything will be just fine. Me, I won't be joining you.
You protect the right of the woman not to have a C-section because "so would have created serious and immediate risks to her life and health that she did not wish to assume." How do you know for a fact that this man did not keep his collection to manage the risk of crimes against him or of a government tyranny?
Well, in the first place, you've quoted what I said and then ignored it. I really don't type to say nothing, despite what some would have us believe.
I specifically said that compelling someone to undergo a Caesarian section would have created serious and immediate risks to her life and health, and that if harm had resulted, the surgery she had been compelled to have would have been a major proximate cause of the harm.
I.e. she would not have had any opportunity, in the chain of causation leading to the harm she suffered, to avoid that harm, once her rights were violated.
How does this compare to prohibiting someone from owning 150 firearms and other weapons?? How does that taking away his firearms cause him harm? It doesn't. He has a host of other ways of avoiding whatever harm the amassed firearms might have been meant to avert.
But the plain fact appears to be that he was NOT amassing those firearms for "self-protection", no matter who might want to adopt him as their mascot. His lawyer said that the weapons were an obsession (which, in and of itself, is purely his business; some people are obsessed with sportscars, some with stamp collections, him with weapons). No one has claimed that he kept them for self-protection, or that his right to protect himself was being violated if they were taken away.
His defense may not have included this because as far as I'm aware, Austrailia does not protect the right to keep and bear arms, so this argument would have been futile anyway.
No, but one might have thought that if his own lawyer were going to describe him as having an obsession, he might have mentioned that he was concerned for his safety.
Funny thing how he's a gunsmith by trade. You wouldn't think that a tyrannical gun-grabbing place like Australia would need many of them, would you?
I am assuming that since you are defending the right to self-defense and the right to overthrow a tyrannical government, that you recognize that the right to keep and bear arms is necessary for those rights to be exercised?
Why would you assume this when I've pretty much said quite the opposite?
In discussing the second amendment to the US Constitution, I have indeed said that it appears that your founders & framers thought that "arms" in the possession of individuals were essential to the exercise of the collective right of self-determination: to guarantee the security of a free state.
They may well have thought that arms in the possession of individuals were also essential to the exercise of the individual right to life, but since I don't put much store by much of anything they may have said about individual rights when I think about individual rights in the modern world, I wouldn't care if they had.
I have no way of knowing what they would have said about things in the modern world, where a couple of dozen people a day are killed with firearms in the US, *not* in self-defence, and dog knows how many crimes are committed using firearms and children are killed and injured by firearms in their own or others' hands, and disabled and elderly people kill themselves with firearms. I have no way of knowing how aghast, or not, they might have been at such a state of affairs, and what they might have thought to be appropriate arrangements for addressing it. And I don't find what they said about things in their world in this respect any more worth thinking about than what they said about women voting or African-Americans working at the jobs of their own choice, or the proper arrangements for ensuring that power isn't exercised tyrannically. I just do not care, and it's beyond me why anyone else would, but there we are.
But in any event, no, I most certainly do not believe that firearms are "necessary" for self-defence or self-determination any more than I believe that a skateboard is "necessary" for getting to school in the morning.
On the other hand, I know of vast numbers of instances where a firearm *was* necessary to kill someone or to commit a serious crime, and many instances where firearms *were* necessary if a tyrannical government was going to maintain its grip on power.
So while firearms might be handy for some legitimate purposes, they are all too handy, and all too commonly used, for illegitimate purposes. Unlike most skateboards, for instance. But like numerous other things that we prohibit the possession of, regardless of how "innocent" the possession.
A firearm, or firearms, simply DOES NOT and DO NOT guarantee safety. And prohibiting someone from possessing a firearms simply does not guarantee or even create a serious risk that s/he will be harmed in a way that s/he would not have been had s/he had a firearm.
If a country cannot trust its citizens with arms, how can its citizens trust the country to do the right thing?
Oh, I dunno. If the country can't trust me and the 30,000,000+ other people here with the keys to our local nuclear reactors, how can we trust the country to operate the damned things? What a silly question, for Pete Puma's sake.
.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
