Comment by rdm_blackhole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdm_blackhole | Hacker News Reader

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But you are cheery picking a few things while ignoring others.

In the US, you are free to buy a gun and walk around with it. In the EU you can't But if you ask a person from the EU, they will think that this "freedom to bear arms" does more harm than good in their eyes.

So who has more freedom here? The person who walks around with the gun or the person who can walk the streets with the freedom of knowing that guns are not allowed here.

Freedom is a sliding scale not a binary thing. Should you be free to marry your first cousin or children? Some freedom absolutist will tel you that governments shouldn't be able to tell you who you can marry but we can all agree that some freedoms need to be curtailed for the good of society.

Now you can argue that China is less free when it comes to political matters and that would be fine except the problem in this case is that the author simply expressed a very broad opinion which makes it impossible to falsify.

The person who is prohibited from having guns in any space has less freedom. The freedom of knowing guns aren't allowed isn't a freedom of its own, but a constraint on actions. Constraints provide security to do certain actions, improving their viability (hence why EU people may think it does more harm than good), but they don't increase the pool of legal actions, only reduce it.

Also, EU people would be wrong to assume that their countries are gun free. Focusing only on countries with a general ban, the are still a notable category of people who are allowed to bear arms: some government officials. So the security of "no guns" is already compromised. There also some downstream structural effects on building societies on such constraint. But I'd say this is besides the point.

I'm also not commenting on whether some freedom should be curtailed or not, as that's also besides the point.

In the end, given the laws of USA, its citizens do have more freedom than PRC's, even outside of politics. I've heard, for instance, that PRC's citizens have the "freedom to easy housing", but they don't. They, at best, have an promise of easy housing supply from the CCP. Given that housing supply depends on material conditions, it's not a formal guarantee. On the other hand, expressing the wrong opinion online in mainland China may net you arrest.

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