It just gets better and better for gun owners

[pErvinalia]

It's not really. It's the same black and white thinking that he accuses BG of.

Wrong.

It's the usual conservative false dichotomy.

Nope.

Either total freedom (actually, a level that agrees with the particular conservative)

I don't remember saying anything about "total freedom."

That's why I clarified it with the bit in parentheses.

Being in favor of freedom doesn't make you a "conservative.

I never said it did. Maybe you aren't a conservative, but I'd be very surprised from your writings here on this and the other forum. Either way, it's still a false dichotomy. That is, it's either a level of freedom you are willing to accept, or it's an eventual slide in the failure of society. What you and the conservatives seem to forget (or are unable to understand) is that there well could be a middle ground where freedom is curtailed below a level you find acceptable but doesn't cause society to collapse or function improperly. This is the problem with being ideological about anything. You start to view the world as "right or wrong", or "black and white". But there are many shades of grey out there. Perhaps 50?

" Freedom having to do with firearms, yes obviously, but that's not "total freedom" by any means. Since you like to talk about nukes, when have I ever advocated for total freedom including nuke ownership? I think you would find that I favor freedom on many subjects that a "conservative" never would.

Fair enough. I'll keep an eye out on your comments from now on and see what I can make of them (i'm planning to spend more time in these gun threads because certain issues in them are actually interesting to debate).

or you get failure of society through eventual total dependence.

There are many things that enable this, not just firearm laws.

However for my, and my family's safety it's something that's a high priority and waiting for the cops to show up is simply just not good enough.

There are so many firearm laws it's ridiculous. So, as it stands currently, it is definitely not black and white.

But your past comments don't reflect that. If it was just about your family in the American crime/gun context, then that would be true. But you start blathering on about how societies that don't let people carry firearms for safety are enslaving their populations. THAT is ideological and that is black and white thinking.

[Blind groper]

I do not advocate massive government interferance in people's lives. But one thing we do need is powerful policing of violent crime. A government that can effectively stop murders, assaults, rapes, and similar violent crimes is very much to the benefit of the people. Law and order is perhaps the oldest and most important of the benevolent aspects of government.

Stopping the excessive ownership and misuse of firearms is one of the things such governments should be doing. The two things go together. If too many people own firearms, and especially handguns, then it is impossible to stop a large number of them ending up in the hands of those who most definitely should not have them. The very high rate of firearms murder in the USA is a clear cut example of this happening.

The other aspect of government I think is very important is to somehow create a political environment in which foreign military adventures are very, very firmly discouraged. The old days when kings would send their country to war in order to expand their territory is largely over, but not all politicians yet show proper wisdom in relation to avoiding war.

[Seth]

Remember, I don't have a problem with society dictating what is and isn't acceptable behaviour. It's your alleged libertarian principles which seem at odds with that.

You're incorrect. Your argument is a strawman. Nowhere have I ever said that society is helpless to prevent wrongdoing or injury to others. The difference between socialists and Libertarians is that Libertarians place peaceable exercises of individual rights (ie: exercises of freedom of action that do not harm others in some tangible manner) above the needs or desires of the collective in most cases. There is no way in Libertarianism to violate an individuals rights "for the greater good" unless the individual has somehow misused his rights to initiate force or fraud on others.

This does create some ambiguity when it comes to prospective actions in self defense such as quarantining a person who may have been exposed to, say, Ebola. Obviously one cannot allow a carrier of a communicable disease to infect others, that would be an initiation of force. But how does one determine whether a particular individual poses that risk? Well, it depends on the nature of the risk. In the case of Ebola, exposure or possible exposure to the virus in an area where the virus is known to be creates a risk that the individual may be sick without knowing it, so quarantine is the appropriate protection for the public given that the consequences of not doing so are so harmful. Does this infringe on the individual's right to liberty? Yes, of course it does, but as I've said, no right is beyond regulation. The metric is that the regulation has to produce the least possible infringement possible consistent with achieving the legitimate goal of imposing the regulation in the interests of public safety.

What threat?

The threat posed by their mental illness of course.

And even if they had "threatened" someone, they still haven't exported harm.

You don't understand the "exported harm" concept. That concept is not about public behavior of the individual, it's about allowing your activities on your land causing harm to others outside the boundaries of your property as in polluting a flowing stream or the air or allowing projectiles from a shooting range to impact on the property of others.

You've made it quite clear in the past that you think words don't have the power to harm people without the "harmed" person allowing it.

Correct. Words are minor vibrations in the air or ink on a page and cannot by themselves harm anyone. Any disturbance that occurs as the result of hearing or reading words occurs in the mind of the person reading or hearing them, and therefore that disturbance is beyond the control of the writer or speaker.

We choose to be more sophisticated in how we deal with dangerous persons and apply reason and logic to resolving conflicts in the exercise of rights.

Sophistication? Sounds like gubment interference to me.

Libertarianism does not eschew government.

You seem totally incapable of understanding the most basic of points. The point is - a person with Ebola HASN'T HARMED ANYONE YET, just by being infected with Ebola. Under your bollocks beliefs, they should be free to exercise their right to free movement and association up until the point that they actually export some harm. THEN they have infringed on the rights of others, and THEN they can supposedly be stripped of their "fundamental" and "objective" rights.

That's quite right. An individual with Ebola may go about his or her business in a manner that does not spread, or threaten to spread the virus to others.

Once again, this is totally inconsistent with what you've said about this issue in the past. You've advocated the mandatory quarantining of anyone flying in from west Africa. So which is it?

The statements made in one thread do not necessarily limit the statements made in another thread, this being a discussion forum. I'm free to argue any side of any issue at any time without being subject to either the fallacies of circumstantial ad hominem or ad hominem tu quoque.

I may discuss the migration of persons from Ebola zones into the US in a different manner than I discuss Libertarian philosophy.

[Seth]

When it comes to achieving the greatest level of welfare for the greatest number of people, then central government legislation and policing is vital.

Marxist propaganda.

The Libertarian approach is quite similar to anarchy.

It's not at all like anarchy.

Too much freedom from interferance by central government also results in individuals doing things that are detrimental to society as a whole.

If that happens, then society can and will deal with the initiation of force or fraud without the need for central government interference. If I don't like the way you act in public, I can ban you from entering my business establishment and I can work to convince other business persons and individuals in the community to do likewise. By shunning you we can, collectively, cause you to amend your behavior by refusing to trade with you, serve you or associate with you. I don't need the government to tell me who I must associate with and who I cannot associate with or why. I can refuse to associate with you because you're ugly, or because you're an Atheist, or a Catholic, or simply because I don't like the way you smell. That's my absolute right under the Constitution's First Amendment.

If what you are doing is not an initiation of force or fraud that would trigger my right (or the collective's right) to self defense, then I have two choices: I can tolerate your behavior and respect your right to live as you please or I can shun you and not participate in any way in supporting your chosen behavior. Government has no authority to tell me I must associate with you if I choose not to do so. This is why anti-discrimination laws are flatly unconstitutional, even as applied to commerce.

One of those nasty outcomes is a high murder rate.

You only get a high murder rate when the victims are disarmed. In a Libertarian society everyone has the right to be armed and the duty to provide for their own defense, which makes them much harder to murder and much less likely to be victimized.

Anthropologists have shown that primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, with no strong central authority, have a terribly high death rate by violence among males (and a shockingly high rate of rape for females). Some Amazon tribes, for example, have been found to lose up to 20% of their males in male on male violence.

So? Live free or die.

When the authority of the central government rises, that level of murder falls.

Not really. Usually all government authority does is institutionalize and mechanize the level of murder by shifting the perpetration of murder from the individual to the government, which has killed hundreds of millions more than individual criminals ever have.

Before William the Conqueror invaded England, the murder rate was estimated to be 100 to 300 killings per 100,000 people per year.

According to whom? And who exactly was being killed? Good guys or bad guys?

Within a couple centuries, under strong Norman kings, it dropped to below 100.

Want to guess why? Because they simply killed criminals when they came across them. They didn't fuck about.

Today, with a strong central government, and a competent police force, the murder rate in Britain is 1.2 per 100,000 people per year.

Now add in all those killed in all the various wars started by Britain since the Norman conquest and let us know what the actual murder rate is.

The point is that individual freedom, without a strong central government maintaining a high level of control, the level of violence rises.

Only when the victims are disarmed. An armed society is a polite society.

If you want maximum liberty, you pay the price through lack of security and a high death toll.

Only when you disarm the populace.

Against this background, the idea that Seth promotes, of having a "right" to carry weapons, looks a bit sick. That "right" leads to the current situation where 1 in 50 Americans receives a bullet through some part of their body once in their lifetime, and 1 in 150 dies from that cause.

Lies.

Standing up for the "right" to bear arms, is also standing up for a high murder rate.

Except that's a lie. More guns, less crime. Fact.

All strong central government does is shift the killing from individual criminals who can be effectively dealt with by armed citizens to the central government which cannot be stopped from killing millions once they've disarmed the populace.

[Seth]

It's not really. It's the same black and white thinking that he accuses BG of. It's the usual conservative false dichotomy. Either total freedom (actually, a level that agrees with the particular conservative) or you get failure of society through eventual total dependence. Same as Seth's idiotic claim that there are only two types of people, Libertarians or Marxists useful idiots (with a spattering of actual Marxists in amongst them).

Yes, it's exactly that. I rather suspect that BG (and certainly MrJonno, for example) are more prepared to put up with a higher level of government control than I am, but all functioning societies require some curtailing of individual freedom to allow for various types of common good.

Which is why BG and rEv's castigations of Libertarianism are ignorant strawmen and red herrings. Libertarianism doesn't eschew government, it merely severely restricts its authority and devolves what government exists to the most local authority possible, where it it is under the scrutiny and control of the members of the immediate community.

The less extreme versions of libertarianism serve a useful purpose of questioning whether certain government controls are really needed, particularly in areas of personal freedom that do not impinge on others, such as sexual, lifestyle or drug matters. The real point that any given democratic society ought to be able to find some form of reasonable balance between personal freedom and government controls, via both free political debate, and, at the end of the day,via the ballot box.

Libertarianism eschews "democracy" only insofar as it regulates anything that is not factually an initiation of force or fraud.

Government's appropriate role is as a policeman and adjudicator of initiations of force or fraud. Government acts inappropriately and violates the liberty interests of individuals when it engages in regulating or controlling activities that do not initiate force or fraud, such as aesthetic controls in land use regulation. It acts inappropriately when it involuntarily seizes the property of one person in order to benefit some other person when no force or fraud has been initiated, such as redistributive taxation for welfare payments. It acts appropriately in caring for the welfare of those in genuine need when it acts as an advocate for the poor in convincing members of the public to voluntarily act or donate to such causes by appealing to their ordinary tendency to be charitable, altruistic, compassionate and to act out of rational self interest.

Democracy can never be allowed to steamroller the individual merely because it's convenient or desirable for the collective to achieve some goal thereby.

Eminent domain is an example. Libertarianism doesn't recognize or permit actions in eminent domain because the government is not supreme and does not hold supreme title to anything at all. If you want my property so you can build a highway or a post office, then you have to buy it from me at a price that I agree with, if I'm willing to sell it to begin with. If I'm not willing, or if you don't like the price, then you have to find somewhere else to put your highway or post office. Just because the democratic wishes of the majority demand a particular convenience does not, in Libertarian philosophy, provide the collective with any power or authority to do anything that any individual cannot do. Might does not make right in Libertarianism. Might defends rights however.

If you, the individual, have no authority or power to force me to sell my property to you for your convenience at what you consider to be a "fair market price" then two of you cannot do so. Nor can 20 of you or 2,000, or 2 million. All governmental power and authority flows from the People, and government can exercise no power or authority that does not exist in the individuals who make up the society to begin with. Mere numbers do not grant legitimacy or authority to violate the rights of the individual, although they may provide the naked force to impose "democratic" decisions on others against their will. And that is what Libertarianism eschews. Democratic processes like elections may determine the wishes of the majority, but the majority's wishes have no power or authority to overwhelm the rights of the individual. Instead, Libertarianism holds that if the collective wishes to do something that interferes with the rights of the individual, it must ask permission and persuade the individual to agree to that infringement voluntarily. If it cannot do so, then it must abandon the plan because the individual's rights are supreme.

[Seth]

I do not advocate massive government interferance in people's lives.

Yes you do.

But one thing we do need is powerful policing of violent crime.

Guess where the power of policing originates: It's not from government, it originates, like every other power exercised by government, from the People. And policing is not a power that is abdicated by the People, it is authority granted to the government to act that does not interfere with the root authority of the individual and the People to police society.

A government that can effectively stop murders, assaults, rapes, and similar violent crimes is very much to the benefit of the people.

Indeed. But no government can do that without the participation and cooperation of the public.

Law and order is perhaps the oldest and most important of the benevolent aspects of government.

Indeed. But law and order flow from the people, not from the government. Government merely organizes and codifies the principles of law and order society demands. It does not take exclusive control of creating order because it cannot do so. Government cannot be there to protect the individual, at best its role is as an investigator and enforcer of the law. Preventing violations of the law is both the duty and the right of every individual who makes up the society.

Stopping the excessive ownership and misuse of firearms is one of the things such governments should be doing. The two things go together.

Of course YOU get to decide what "excessive" is...

If too many people own firearms, and especially handguns, then it is impossible to stop a large number of them ending up in the hands of those who most definitely should not have them.

In which case all automobiles must be banned, since they cause far more damage by "ending up in the hands of those who most definitely should not have them" than guns do. Demonstrably so.

The very high rate of firearms murder in the USA is a clear cut example of this happening.

You mean the constantly dropping rate of all categories of murder and other crime, including your favorite cherry "firearms murder" that continues to occur as hundreds of millions of guns fall into the hands of those who most certainly should have them.

[Seth]

VPC is full of lying sacks of shit:

NYT Claims Concealed Carry Holders are Bad Guys with Guns

by AWR Hawkins17 Feb 20150
On February 11 The New York Times armed itself with a report from the Violence Policy Center (VPC) and went to war against concealed carry permit holders, associating said permit holders with murder and other crimes and raising the specter that concealed carry permit holders may actually be the “bad guys” with guns in a scenario where “good guys” with guns are promised.

According to the NYT, the VPC report shows “722 nonself-defense deaths since 2007 were attributable to individuals with legal permits to carry concealed weapons.” The NYT jumps on this claim, adding, “the full death toll attributable to concealed carry is undoubtedly larger because the center’s study did not cover all 50 states.”

Moreover, the NYT makes it clear that the only thing preventing the discovery of complete death toll numbers is that pro-gun lawmakers “dare not allow a national tally.”

The problem with all these claims is that the VPC report contains inaccuracies and, therefore, so do the NYT’s resulting presumptions.

The Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott explains that the VPC study is written in a way that heightens crime numbers among concealed carry permit holders by lumping suicides and murders together in the states studied.

For example, VPC indicates “277 suicides or murders” for Michigan concealed carry permit holders for the time period 2007 to 2015. What Lott shows is that 217 of these “suicides or murders” were, in fact, suicides. This fact alone reduces the grand tally of “722 nonself-defense deaths” by “38 percent,” without even looking at how the numbers have or have not been represented in other states.

Additionally, Lott points out that suicides most often happen at home and, therefore, “are not in any meaningful way linked to the act of carrying a permitted concealed handgun outside of one’s home.” On top of this, he shows that the suicide rate among concealed carry permit holders in Michigan was “6.2 per 100,000 permit holders” while the rate among “the general adult population [was] 16.59 [per 100,000].”

Regarding VPC’s murder claims, Lott shows that the report adds “pending” charges and “conviction” numbers together. By doing so, they “[double] the supposed total number of murders” in some cases.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

[pErvinalia]

You seem totally incapable of understanding the most basic of points. The point is - a person with Ebola HASN'T HARMED ANYONE YET, just by being infected with Ebola. Under your bollocks beliefs, they should be free to exercise their right to free movement and association up until the point that they actually export some harm. THEN they have infringed on the rights of others, and THEN they can supposedly be stripped of their "fundamental" and "objective" rights.

That's quite right. An individual with Ebola may go about his or her business in a manner that does not spread, or threaten to spread the virus to others.

Once again, this is totally inconsistent with what you've said about this issue in the past. You've advocated the mandatory quarantining of anyone flying in from west Africa. So which is it?

The statements made in one thread do not necessarily limit the statements made in another thread, this being a discussion forum. I'm free to argue any side of any issue at any time without being subject to either the fallacies of circumstantial ad hominem or ad hominem tu quoque.

I may discuss the migration of persons from Ebola zones into the US in a different manner than I discuss Libertarian philosophy.

Oh right. So basically you are full of shit. Thanks for clarifying that.

[pErvinalia]

Anthropologists have shown that primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, with no strong central authority, have a terribly high death rate by violence among males (and a shockingly high rate of rape for females). Some Amazon tribes, for example, have been found to lose up to 20% of their males in male on male violence.

So? Live freeby the rules or dieget the fuck out.

[pErvinalia]

Standing up for the "right" to bear arms, is also standing up for a high murder rate.

Except that's a lie. More guns, less crime. Fact.

Less butter consumed, less crime. FACT!

[pErvinalia]

It's not really. It's the same black and white thinking that he accuses BG of. It's the usual conservative false dichotomy. Either total freedom (actually, a level that agrees with the particular conservative) or you get failure of society through eventual total dependence. Same as Seth's idiotic claim that there are only two types of people, Libertarians or Marxists useful idiots (with a spattering of actual Marxists in amongst them).

Yes, it's exactly that. I rather suspect that BG (and certainly MrJonno, for example) are more prepared to put up with a higher level of government control than I am, but all functioning societies require some curtailing of individual freedom to allow for various types of common good.

Which is why BG and rEv's castigations of Libertarianism are ignorant strawmen and red herrings. Libertarianism doesn't eschew government, it merely severely restricts its authority and devolves what government exists to the most local authority possible, where it it is under the scrutiny and control of the members of the immediate community.

I understand that perfectly. This is a non-sequitur to what is being discussed here. I was discussing your and other conservatives constant use of the false dichotomy as a dodgy rhetoric tool. Or even worse is that possibility that you're so simple as to not be able to see in anything other than black and white.

[Seth]

I may discuss the migration of persons from Ebola zones into the US in a different manner than I discuss Libertarian philosophy.

Oh right. So basically you are full of shit. Thanks for clarifying that.

No, what it means is that as Aristotle said, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it," which leaves you out of the cadre of educated minds because you cannot distinguish between two different debates.

Your ad hominem tu quoque fallacy is laughably ignorant.

[Seth]

It's not really. It's the same black and white thinking that he accuses BG of. It's the usual conservative false dichotomy. Either total freedom (actually, a level that agrees with the particular conservative) or you get failure of society through eventual total dependence. Same as Seth's idiotic claim that there are only two types of people, Libertarians or Marxists useful idiots (with a spattering of actual Marxists in amongst them).

Yes, it's exactly that. I rather suspect that BG (and certainly MrJonno, for example) are more prepared to put up with a higher level of government control than I am, but all functioning societies require some curtailing of individual freedom to allow for various types of common good.

Which is why BG and rEv's castigations of Libertarianism are ignorant strawmen and red herrings. Libertarianism doesn't eschew government, it merely severely restricts its authority and devolves what government exists to the most local authority possible, where it it is under the scrutiny and control of the members of the immediate community.

I understand that perfectly. This is a non-sequitur to what is being discussed here. I was discussing your and other conservatives constant use of the false dichotomy as a dodgy rhetoric tool. Or even worse is that possibility that you're so simple as to not be able to see in anything other than black and white.

It's not non sequitur at all, nor are my thoughts on government black or white. I am merely rejecting as unfounded and unsupported the a priori Marxist notion that the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few, which is the very basis of Marxism and socialist philosophy.

We never get past the most simplistic analysis of Marxist socialism or Libertarianism because you are incapable of participating in a reasoned debate without resorting to invective and insult when you feel threatened. You make bald assertions about the benefits of socialism and then when I demonstrate how and why socialism fails, rather than rebutting with reason and logic, you get nasty and the whole debate simply vanishes in a miasma of personal insults because you are unwilling or unable (or both) to defend your arguments rationally and reasonably. You make a priori assumptions about socialism and will not brook any analysis or refutation of your assumptions, whereas I go to great lengths to explain my reasoning very carefully and completely, to which you respond with insults.

Interestingly, that sort of behavior is a classic part of the Marxist Big Lie dialectic: Never admit that you're wrong and when you are, attack the character of your opponent as a way to derail the exposure of the flaws of Marxism.

[pErvinalia]

I may discuss the migration of persons from Ebola zones into the US in a different manner than I discuss Libertarian philosophy.

Oh right. So basically you are full of shit. Thanks for clarifying that.

No, what it means is that as Aristotle said, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it,

Except, that's not what you are doing. You pull this bollocks every time someone points out one of your many inconsistencies. And you do it WITHIN the same topic and thread as well. You're basically a guy who has a set of beliefs that he thinks is encompassed by the ideology of libertarianism, but hasn't spent the time to look into the contradiction his beliefs hold with the ideology.

[pErvinalia]

It's not really. It's the same black and white thinking that he accuses BG of. It's the usual conservative false dichotomy. Either total freedom (actually, a level that agrees with the particular conservative) or you get failure of society through eventual total dependence. Same as Seth's idiotic claim that there are only two types of people, Libertarians or Marxists useful idiots (with a spattering of actual Marxists in amongst them).

Yes, it's exactly that. I rather suspect that BG (and certainly MrJonno, for example) are more prepared to put up with a higher level of government control than I am, but all functioning societies require some curtailing of individual freedom to allow for various types of common good.

Which is why BG and rEv's castigations of Libertarianism are ignorant strawmen and red herrings. Libertarianism doesn't eschew government, it merely severely restricts its authority and devolves what government exists to the most local authority possible, where it it is under the scrutiny and control of the members of the immediate community.

I understand that perfectly. This is a non-sequitur to what is being discussed here. I was discussing your and other conservatives constant use of the false dichotomy as a dodgy rhetoric tool. Or even worse is that possibility that you're so simple as to not be able to see in anything other than black and white.

It's not non sequitur at all, nor are my thoughts on government black or white. I am merely rejecting as unfounded and unsupported the a priori Marxist notion that the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few, which is the very basis of Marxism and socialist philosophy.

We never get past the most simplistic analysis of Marxist socialism or Libertarianism because you are incapable of participating in a reasoned debate without resorting to invective and insult when you feel threatened.

It's because you are a troll, cockhead. Stop trolling and people might start treating you with respect.

Interestingly, that sort of behavior is a classic part of the Marxist Big Lie dialectic: Never admit that you're wrong and when you are, attack the character of your opponent as a way to derail the exposure of the flaws of Marxism.

It's the classic behaviour of dealing with idiots and trolls. I can't believe you actually expect any respect around here. What a fucking laugh!