Reply #194: "Why aren't you hot to ban cars and booze?"

[iverglas]

Well now, that would be a perfectly reasonable question ... if the person you were speaking to had proposed to ban firearms. I didn't catch it, if s/he did. So it's quite beyond me why you'd ask. Why do you ask??

Funny, though, how cars & drivers (let's leave booze aside, since aiming one's gin bottle at someone and pulling the trigger/stepping on the gas isn't too likely to result in a fatality) are subject to all sorts of restrictions.

Registration of ownership of the thing and licensing of the user, after s/he passes a knowledge/skill test, are required. Just for starters.

Liability insurance is required if the user uses the thing in public.

In many places, it's an offence to fail to secure the item (i.e. to leave the keys in the ignition), leaving it vulnerable to theft and the risk that stolen cars and their drivers often lead to for the public.

Those are a few things that it might be advisable to apply, mutatis mutandis, to firearms, eh?

"Maybe the Branch Davidians were just a bunch of nutjobs, but try the shoe on the other foot. What if YOU were the one inside the compound and Dubya's storm troopers were beating down the door?"

Yeah, but if we stick to reality, what if YOU were the one whose kid was inside the compound being abused by a delusional cretin? *I* am just not likely to be doing that, myself.

"Freedom isn't free, for every "right" there is an equal and opposite 'responsibility'."

No, actually, there is not. That's just right-wing horseshit.

Even *if* you could make a coherent statement of what this "equal and opposite responsibility" is for whatever the hell right you think you're talking about.

In point of fact, for every right there is some point at which some interest, of other people or of society, outweighs the individual's interest in exercising the right, at least in certain ways and in certain circumstances. And that applies to the right to do, or to own and use, anything, including firearms.

*That* is how it works in a liberal democracy.