KPJ wrote:
>
> |> Now, feel free to state your comments. "The audience is listening."
> |
> |Because some creatures are too irrational to be trusted with so
> |much as an icepick doesn't mean that all beings are to be
> |forbidden what in the hands of the utterly irrational and
> |irresponsible is dangerous. The assumption that no citizen
> |should have what every citizen cannot be entrusted with is quite
> |questionable. The assumption that only citizens who have become
> |part of the government should have what most citizens are not to
> |be trusted with is also very questionable.
>
> Who gets to decide who "are too irrational", then, I wonder.
>
> A citizen, you write. So the local power mongers (''the Government'')
> shall bludgeon all others to do their bidding, in your world model?
> And the non-citizens become their slaves, I surmise.
Wow! I am amazed by your powers of extrapolation. Why, I
didn't even have any idea myself that what I really had in mind
included these things! Will wonders never cease?
"A citizen", I did write, but I wrote nothing in the above about
"the Government" nor did I address who decides who is sane
enough to own guns or anything else at all. And "the
Government" doesn't automatically mean some over-bearing
near-totalitarian state except to the most rabid of anarchist of
which I am not one. I believe there are sane ways to hold
people responsible for their actions and to extract sane
reasonable estimates (from past actions and so on) of how much
to entrust a person with. But very generous levels of trust
would be the default for all persons until they prove these
estimates are too generous in certain respects in my world
model. In my world view government is subservient to the
citizens, not the other way around, generally speaking.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:33 MDT