James Rogers wrote:
>
> On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, you wrote:
> > So, I don't think America's aversion against banning guns has any rational
> > structure at all. There is no need to buy them back. There is no need to be
> > easy on guns. You just ban them, instate a heavy fine on owning illegal
> > weapons, and that's it. Give everyone a year or two to get used to the fact,
> > and the problem is solved.
>
> "no need to buy them back"? Do you realize how much money many people
> have invested in firearms? Considering that the a quarter of the
> population owns guns in the US, and that most of them probably have guns
> and accessories valued in excess of a thousand dollars, this would be an
> extraordinarily vile policy and extremely unpopular.
With the number of privately owned guns at around 245 million guns in
the US, at a typical value of, say, $500, thats a confiscation of about
$100 billion worth of private property. Thats more than the entire value
of many countries (likely greater than the value of Herr Bider's home
country of Slovenia). How would you like it if a neighbor, say, Italy,
had a communist government and decided to confiscate the entire country
of Slovenia from its allegedly freedom loving citizens because it
decided that they couldn't be trusted with their freedom as an
independent nation? That is exactly the scale of the sort of measure Mr.
Bider is proposing.
Of course, a government that thinks it can tell a $100+ billion company
like Microsoft how to run its business is only a hairs breadth from
doing just that...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:21 MDT