Nonsense. There is no equivalent of MPAA etc interested in taking away guns - on the contrary, firearms is a billion dollar industry with more than enough lobby power to convince everybody to stock up on guns.
Nice conversation derailer, though.
Nice conversation derailer, though.
Example: California recently enacted a law to "create a powerful incentive for the firearm industry" by allowing citizens to sue them for "failured to implement 'reasonable' controls", by using a similar mechanism as Texas' bill that enables people to sue doctors who perform abortions.
Senator Portantino: "If Texas can outrageously use this type of law to attack a woman’s reproductive freedom, we can do the same thing in California to hold gun dealers accountable for their actions."
OP said:
> The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well.
Which seems to be exactly what was done in California with its lawsuit legislation that was modeled after Texas'.
I can't help but agree with OP that this is a similar tactic of using lawsuits to bully people into compliance by draining their resources. It's an old tactic, but it's still unjust, regardless of the particular legal issue.
Firearms are not freedom of speech. Guns kill. Just like vehicles kill and are therefore subject to regulation (or outright prohibition in many spaces) above individual freedom.
I'm talking about whether it's justified to bully your adversaries with lawsuits in order to drain their resources. The particular legal issue doesn't matter--it's subverting and abusing the justice system.
They should have made the second amendment the first. Then I think you'd get it.
Pro-gun does fit the comparison much better, because there are obvious industry profits behind the lobbies - at the cost of violence and death.
edit: tired of this. i own lots of guns and have never killed anybody. i had this same argument with somebody else yesterday over financial KYC: we do not fight crime by stripping law-abiding Americans of their freedoms and subjecting them to increased state control.
Society has done a really good job of allowing people to pretend reality doesn't exist and not die for it.
See, in the past, you had to believe bears were not to be poked or you risked dying from poking a bear. At some point someone had to learn this lesson. Probably Bold Billy poked a bear, his buddy Timid Terry watched the bear eat him, then decided poking bears wasn't a good idea. Timid Terry then went back to the village and described what happened to Bold Billy, showed everyone Bold Billy's remains, and thus was their respect for reality both reaffirmed and their survival increased.
So then the village started teaching its children to be careful around caves and not to poke bears. Jackass Jerry grew up hearing stories by Timid Terry about the time Bold Billy helped a bear make it through winter by allowing said bear to partake of his flesh. Only Jackass Jerry never believed it, so one day, he decided to go poke the bear. Well, Jackass Jerry turned into Jambalaya Jerry and thus the bear once again get assisted in it's preparations for the winter.
And thus was the lesson taught by Bold Billy reinforced years later by Jambalaya Jerry, who wanted to make sure the rest of the village was kept safe by their understanding of reality.
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Society in general has become so good at protecting its members that many of those members can survive despite believing things that are patently untrue. Today, Jackass Jerry may never have turned into Jambalaya Jerry despite the mistaken belief that poking a bear isn't dangerous. That's just how good the guard rails are.
The point is that your reasoning here is _PATENTLY_ untrue, but you've been allowed to rationalize your way into whatever feels right because the guardrails of society don't force a respect of reality on you.
In this case, the reasons for regulation are many and varied. Something NOT outright killing someone is not, nor has it ever been, a justification for letting it remain unregulated.
You disagree with the poster you responded to. And that's great, it's certainly within your rights to do so. But your rationalization of that disagreement is patently untrue and makes me wonder if we're looking at what would have happened if Jackass Jerry had never met a bear.
Imagine if someone argued theft should be unregulated because no one died.
If you wanna own a gun, great, but the regulations should be extreme - just like anything else hazardous, like motorized vehicles. I can't speed in urban areas just because "it's muh freedom of movement" and I haven't run anybody over (yet). Statistics are statistics and guns increase crime, violence, and death.
Also the current limits on arms are all unconstitutional. There's no question about it. But there is a whole host of things that are unconstitutional that don't seem to matter anyway, like social security and minimum wage.
Well funded by people for selfless political reasons, not by large corporations: as the parent comment says, the situation with USA gun control is the exact opposite of MPAA-related entities suing citizens.
Meanwhile most firearm manufacturers are not super viable and the NRA gets almost all of it's money from donations below $1,000.
I think parent-poster's point is that there's a fundamental funding asymmetry between (A) a political-action group directly sustained by a current money-making industry and its future growth opportunities (B) a political-action group which is not and relies on ideological/altruistic donations.
In the case of media/DRM/piracy, the profit/politics nexus mainly lies with the big media companies and the RIAA/MPAA etc.
In the case of US-gun-stuff, the profit/politics nexus predominantly lies with the gun-manufacturers and NRA etc.