🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <rsutc-1411941532030001@nsc189t100.twu.ca> rsutc@twu.ca (Rick Sutcliffe) writes:

>I wonder if the pro gun lobby would care to try their hand at writing gun
>control legislation that would recognize their hobby and yet improve the
>liklihood of assault victims surviving because there were fewer deadly
>weapons with which to conduct attacks available to the less responsible. 

It's been done before, in the Southern states.  They just ignored
the Fifteenth Amendment and wrote laws banning the ownership of
guns by blacks, who were, by the prejudice of that time, "the
less responsible" people in question.

These laws are off the books now, but various gimmicks, like bans on
inexpensive guns that the poor can afford ("Niggertown Saturday Night
Specials"), while failing to ban expensive guns that the wealthy can
afford.

You've hit the nail on the head when you identify "the less
responsible" as being your target.  All you have to be is elitist
and authoritarian, and pick and choose among the citizenry: these
citizens are worthy; these citizens are not.

In Canada, the equivalent to this kind of law would be, say, to
require that an applicant pass a test available only in English, to
keep the French-speaking riff-raff from gaining access to weapons.
Same concept.  Same attitude.  Same elitism.  Same immorality.

>What would the gun hobbiests accept?  No controls at all?  Better ones? 
>What would they consider better?

Arms are a right, not a hobby.  It's no problem getting
authoritarians, elitists, and racists to allow well-educated,
articulate, affluent white men to have a gun hobby.  Even the Nazis
had no problem with such things.  But that ignores the idea that
people who are not rich white guys have rights, too.  And that
self-defense and the right to bear arms are as basic as the right to
liberty or free speech.

My solution is: let the riff-raff have guns.  Liberty is safer
than entrusting your fate to the State.

	-- Robert
-- 
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