Re: RMS

Thant Tessman schrieb:
Gun
control: is my right to feel safer by being armed more or less
important than your right to feel safer by me not being armed?

That one's easy. Everyone most absolutely has a right to defend themselves. They don't have a right to threaten others. As long as you don't threaten anyone with your gun, you have every right to have it.

You're overlooking an important point here:

I'm not feeling threatened by the fact that you are armed.
However, I *do* feel threatened if everybody around me may have a gun and use it against me - be it because he wants to rob me, or just because he's drunk, or not handling the gun properly.
In other words, my general risk of having a fatal accident rises if there are more loaded guns in my vicinity.

And historically one of the first things a tyrant always does before imposing massive oppression on a populace is disarm them.

That doesn't mean that any gun control movement is motivated by the will to oppress.

Yes, there are people who may feel threatened by the mere fact that you own a gun, but they may also feel offended that you refuse to recycle your trash, or that you watch dirty movies, or smoke marijuana, or raise your kids Protestant.

Actually, there's a world of difference.
If everybody around me is armed, there's a real chance that I get hurt or killed by accident. That's a very direct threat against my personal interests.

> What matters is avoiding genuine conflict over
resources whose use by one person precludes their use by another person. All these 'psychic' offenses are not the proper subject of natural law.

Yup.
Firearms (actually anything that has a high energy concentration) are a question of risk of physical damage though. That's quite a different story than "I don't like what he does but am not harmed otherwise".

Where it gets tricky is things like nuclear weapons. They cannot be used without killing innocent people. They are inherently not defensive weapons. (From an international stability point of view, a situation where every household is armed, but the government doesn't have any nuclear weapons seems far more desirable.)

Well, maybe desirable from a liberal point of view taken to the last consequences, but not desirable from a quality-of-life perspective.

Imagine somebody threatening his neighbour to detonate his warhead because that neighbour refuses to cut his trees. (Yes, people can be that silly. German courts have to deal with this kind of nut case every day. If everybody had his personal nuclear weapon, you couldn't tell these nutheads to simply shut up and cooperate.)

A slightly less silly cause would be a religious group (whether radical islamists or puritan TV preachers) threatening to detonate their personal warheads if the world at large doesn't follow their teachings.
Well, silly from the outside, but these sects can be dead serious (pun intended). There are people who believe that the End of the World is Nigh, and that furthering that end will give them a place in whatever their idea of Heaven is; I consider them deluded, but if they have a nuclear warhead at their disposal, I'd consider them terrorists.

And I haven't even started on accidents.
If a meth addict burns his house because he's acting irresponsibly, he'll kill himself. If a meth addict has a nuclear warhead in the cellar, he may accidentally set it off.
(Meth addicts who became paranoid through drug abuse might even set their warhead off on purpose, though that's just a special case of delusional use.)

No, I don't think that a nuclear warhead in everybody's custody would be a good idea. The world wouldn't remain an inhabitable place for long.

Adhering to stringently to principle leads to extremes (either
allowing private armies or banning kitchen knives, prohibiting
condoms or allowing late abortions).

What's wrong with private armies?

That would give those with the money to hire such an army the power to physicall oppress those who don't have the money.
Just take a look what private armies are doing wherever they are active.

> Is the security guard your insurance
company hires to check on your house during a blackout a "private army" of some sort? The only problem I see with private armies is when they are financed coercively by a politically privileged class, e.g. Blackwater USA.

The ability to hire a private army (be it through money, connections, or whatever) immediately translates to power.
The situation that you have hired one alone is enough to imply that. Imagine: the mercenaries devote a substantial part of their lifetime to your service; in fact they even run a non-negligible risk that they lose their live in your service. In other words, there's a single person who is powerful enough to command many - and that's one of the many forms of power.
I.e. the mere ability to set up a private army is a symptom of a power imbalance.

Things are slightly different if a collective hires a private army.
Of course, this can be extrapolated rather seamlessly from private night guards (where the collective can be a small company) right up to state armies (where the collective is the entire state).

Even then, an army tends to invite abuse. Armies are good at hurting people and breaking things; if you have an army, you can threaten your neighbourhood with that, and humans being what their are, at least some of them will abuse their private army to restrict their fellow humans in their rights.
E.g. in medieval times, initially, peasant villages paid for one of them to buy arms, learn to fight, and keep in shape for military works. After a while, these warriors got out of control; they didn't consider themselves to be appointed by the peasants anymore, instead, they considere the peasants their property.
This is radically simplified, and the whole process took decades and centuries. The real picture is far more complicated and riddled with exceptions and special circumstances, but the end of that was this: the military caste had nearly absolute control over all the non-military types; they had invented all kinds of ritual to make this seem the natural order of things.

Offense is always more expensive than defense.

Um... not really. The offensive side in a war can concentrate firepower in one place, while the defensive side must deploy firepower everywhere.

There's another rule: breaking things is easier than making things.
The person with a weapon is in a better position to threaten his neighbour than the person who has invested the same money into, say, furniture.
However, the person with the gun can now force the unarmed person to hand over his furniture. Buying guns hence is more rational than buying furniture if there's no arms control.

Well, of course you'll make laws against this kind of threat. But if you don't have an authority that's strong enough to overpower the man with the gun, these laws will be unenforceable.
If you wish to maintain any kind of freedom, you need some kind of violence monopoly. The difference between the U.S. (where civilians are allowed guns) and Europe (where guns are largely disallowed) is just the level of violence at which that takes place: in the U.S., it's automatic weapons against semiautomatics, in Europe, it's pistols against fists.
(The net result of the European way is that we don't have as many dead policemen, criminals, and bystanders. Otherwise, things are rather similar: too many rules, a judicative that's just independent enough that it's better than nothing, and a political caste that's abusing its power.)

> That's why governments go
to extreme lengths to disguise the cost of war.

The cost of war is usually imposed because the other side can do similar amounts of damage.
One of the main causes if Iraq War expenses is that the U.S. try to trade money for human life (of their own personnel - civilian casualties on the Iraqi side are usually brushed asides as "collateral damage").

> There is no way the U.S.
invasion of Iraq for example would have happened if people were forced to pay for it directly through taxation. Instead, the government finances it through the expansion of the money supply. You and I (and actually the entire world) pay for it indirectly through the massive and inevitable decrease in the purchasing power of dollars (a.k.a. 'inflation').

Well, at least it's not the world at large that's paying through dollar inflation.
Not anymore at any rate - the dollar once was the only relevant global reserve currency, but according to Wikipedia, the Euro has partially replaced it in this role.
If the U.S. continue with war expenses the way they did, the dollar will finally lose its reserve currency status.

Regards,
Jo
.

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