You can't really compare a public health & safety issue with piracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.