orangeban said:
Mycroft Holmes said:
I am for having it be legal based on one point really. And that is that the government should avoid legislating morality as much as it possibly can. People need to be allowed to make their own mistakes and live their own lives. Seeing someone with an openly carried gun does not freak me out, make me afraid, or make me feel safe. And criminals will just get guns anyways because they don't care about laws.
I'm curious about this, maybe the government can legislate about morality (something I totally agree with), but surely it can legislate about safety. You say it yourself, guns are dangerous. And not just to their owners, but to others, particularly children (and yes, I am saying "Oh think of the children!" but it's a valid point when we're putting their lives at risk).
I've never seen gun control as a moral issue (though I'm British, I realise it's treated differently in the US), I've seen it more as a safety issue.
Not attacking you or anything, genuinally interested in why you think this is a moral issue as opposed to a safety issue.
I'm assuming you mean *can't* legislate about morality, which is incorrect as it absolutely does even at its basest level. Eg. laws about murdering and stealing which simply happen to be moral points that everyone except say eugenicists and communists(yes government mandated stealing is still stealing) agree with.
As for your question/point gun control is both a safety and a moral issue. When a government tries to legislate on safety then morality becomes inextricably intertwined in the problem. The reason for this is because governments really only use one way of getting people to do anything. That tool being violence.
They can bring military force to bear and kill you. They can pepper spray you, tear gas you or otherwise cause you bodily harm. They can send their agents to beat you up, arrest you, lock you in a cell for all your life. And it is that threat of force that backs up all their laws. Sure they can more heavily tax you as a deterrent to owning a gun, which outwardly does not seem like a violent action, but if you don't pay those taxes they will send their police to take from you with force. Thus any issue of legislating safety will be backed up how? With force.
The problem with legislating safety then, is the morality of it and the question of where does it stop. Do we have a duty or a moral justification to threaten others with incarceration or with fines backed up by incarceration if they don't act in a safe manner?
And where does it stop? While I agree that guns likely do more harm than good at this point, there are a lot more problems of safety that are statistically much much larger than guns will ever be. Where then should the line be drawn? Consuming tons of hamburgers is unhealthy, dangerous and expensive on a level that guns will never be. Do we outlaw them? Force companies to reduce fat content? Perhaps a yearly hamburger quota?
That may seem like a silly argument, but if we are really concerned about legislating to save lives, that would be one of the first and easiest places to cut back on deaths if we were so inclined. And there are dozens if not hundreds of others that we can legislate that would come in line before necessitating gun control.
In living life one will always risk bodily harm at some point. We will eat crap foods, we will own guns, we will drive too fast on the freeway, many of us will not wear seat belts, people will drink and run their mouths, people will push their bodies to their respective limits diving deep into the ocean or climbing high into mountains even going to far as to sleep dangling thousands of feet into the air held up only by a stake they pounded into the mountainside themselves. At a certain point you have to accept that you just can't control people to make their lives better. You can teach them in hopes of letting them make better choices, but at the end of the day you have to let them live their own lives and make their own mistakes for better or for worse.
