by: Owen Gunden
2012-12-16
tags: animal rights, freedom, vegan
There is a lot of talk of gun control after the recent school shooting in Connecticut. I consider "nonviolence" to be the term that most closely aligns with my political views. Why then do I generally disagree with gun control laws?
First, there are the practical problems:
3d printed guns are not far off. Are we going to outlaw 3d printing? Or try and regulate access to the plans? With anonymity networks like tor and other freedom-enabling technologies, it's going to be difficult to effectively control access to weapons in the near future, without a level of surveillance that most people would find 1984-esque.
Even if you do keep guns away from people, they will just build bombs. If somebody really wants to kill people and make a big stink, they can always build a homebrew bomb.
So we can try and keep the guns away from the killers, but will it actually be effective at what it seeks to do? Maybe somewhat, and for a short while. But is it worth it given the tradeoff in terms of our freedom?
Often when somebody uses their freedom to do something we don't like, we are tempted to say "people shouldn't have that freedom." But if we follow this to its logical conclusion, we wind up living in a world where the lowest common denominator dictates the freedoms we all have.
Outlawing guns is kind of self-defeating. How is such a law going to be enforced? Ultimately, with guns. So what we're saying is that we want to allow a certain class of people -- those in the government with the blessings of the majority (at least ideally) -- access to guns, but not ordinary citizens.
I reject the idea that the individuals within our government are any more responsible to carry a gun than the average citizen. As evidence for my position, I give you the fact that our government is regularly engaged in the killing of innocent children overseas. I don't think the government has demonstrated enough restraint with their use of guns, so my stance is this: you can take away guns from the people only after the government has also laid theirs down.
Finally, there are spiritual problems with the whole argument of gun control vs gun freedom. It avoids the underlying question of why we want to kill each other in the first place. The only real solution is one which addresses why there is so much violence in our culture to begin with. This answer can not be understood without a critical look at our plates.