> > Until a reliable way exists of rendering harmless ALL the badguys
> > (including the ones with badges), I'm content to let everybody have a
> > gun. Yea, even unto the nutcases and the ex-cons; for the alternative
> > is to put my safety at the mercy of some bureaucrat.
>
> The above comment says it all: you are anti-safety, not pro-safety,
> if you're in favor of granting criminals and the insane packing
> privileges.
Actually, that is rather the crux of the matter: if your use of the
term "anti-safety" means "opposed to the idea that people have a right
to be safe", then yes, I'm there too. No one has a right to be safe.
Reality doesn't come with that feature. What reality does give us,
though, is the judgment, intelligence, and free will to take charge
of our own lives and create our own future through their use. People of
vision and courage have used those gifts to give us technology: fire,
agriculture, language, transportation, construction--and weapons.
Short-sighted people try to control the misuse of those technologies by
restricting their use with government. What that generally accomplishes
is to limit their good uses while ensuring that they will still get into
the hands of criminals and the insane--especially those working for the
government.
It's no wonder this is a hot-button issue among Extropians; we are
the architects of the future and proponents of technology. How do we
expect to address the public's fears about its misuse when we still
have so much fear and misunderstanding of centuries-old technology?
If it seems like we are beating a dead horse with this issue, it's
because it is so central to our core values--to what it means to be
an Extropian--that we can't simply gloss over it. We need to decide
how access to future technologies will be controlled, and the best
way to do that is to examine how present ones are being controlled,
and how well current methods work.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:05:12 MDT