- Hot
- New
- Categories...
- Producer's Lounge
- Producer's Vault
- The Gulch: Live! (New)
- Ask the Gulch!
- Going Galt
- Books
- Business
- Classifieds
- Culture
- Economics
- Education
- Entertainment
- Government
- History
- Humor
- Legislation
- Movies
- News
- Philosophy
- Pics
- Politics
- Science
- Technology
- Video
- The Gulch: Best of
- The Gulch: Bugs
- The Gulch: Feature Requests
- The Gulch: Featured Producers
- The Gulch: General
- The Gulch: Introductions
- The Gulch: Local
- The Gulch: Promotions
- Marketplace
- Members
- Store
- More...
Now is it reasonably possible for my next door neighbor to construct a nuke....hopefully not but it should be within their legal ability. Then again it should also be within my legal right to let's say defend myself against the imminent threat of a neighbor with a nuke.
And don't say that limiting what weaponry I can own is for the protection of the public. Law breakers by definition will break that law,too.
If you say that everyone has the right to buy nuclear material -- which presumably you are advocating then someone will think it's cool to have one. Testing it could be a bitch, though.
Military ships of that time were not much different than the Merchant ships (in complexity and cost). But if a private citizen were to build and launch a USS Iowa Battleship, it would cost ~$1,500 million. And that doesn't count the cost to staff it, keep it running, armament, and the fuel it guzzles.
According to the constitution and its history, anyone can buy any of these weapons if they have the cash floating around. But Modern Day interpretations interpret "Arms" as anything a soldier could carry. Such as a Rifle, Handgun, SMG's, Heavy or Light Machine Guns, Grenades, Explosives, Mines, Bladed Weapons (of various sizes), Shotguns (of all lengths), Mortars, and more I'm probably forgetting.
Remember in the Revolution, many of the cannons, shot, and powder as well as ships were privately owned.
Some fight against it and are having to stand strong against the hordes.
By John W. Rickman, John Philip Wisser, Andrew Hero (Jr.)" which relates the private ownership of canons on plantations in Virginia.
Additionally, there are private owned cannons today and even tanks with operable guns. Paul Allen owns his own SU-29, a Russian Fighter Jet.
The populace must be allowed to have equivalent individual weaponry as the government or its agents. e.g. police and military.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” does indeed not GRANT the right, it acknowledges It’s existence!
The amendment can therefore be seen as re-enforcing an existing right by stating the need for militia being a particular reason for not infringing upon it. Other potential infringements are not addressed but they would nevertheless be just that, infringements.
“Someday, my friend, you will learn that words have exact meanings.”
Francisco, in Atlas Shrugged.>>>>>
I came across this opinion by the Supreme Court.
"The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms."
Therefore, you could repeal the Amendment and that would only result in the need for a militia no longer being a reason not to infringe!
There are some who say that,” OK, you have the right to bear arms but at the time the amendment was written, there were only muskets etc. The Founding Fathers did not envision the modern weaponry of today and only were addressing the right to bear the arms that existed at that time.”
Well of course the weapons were what they were, but the Amendment was written in the context of the citizens being armed at the same level of weaponry as the Government. By that comparison, I see the Amendment as granting us the right to stockpile some tanks, a couple of F-111”s and a maybe a “Ship-of-the-Line.”
What is a weapon?
A rock? A twig? Sharp finger nail? A fist? A screw driver? A pencil/pen? A line of thought? A soda can/bottle? My mouse?
1) The intent of the 2nd amendment was to provide a proficient civilian militia not under the control of a central government, with the implied warning to an overbearing government that it can be removed by force if necessary. That implies that more than just a force of riflemen should be permitted. What weapons that implies I leave to everyone's imagination.
2) "Arms" under the 2nd amendment does not just apply to firearms. During the revolution, knives, hatchets, swords, cavalry lances, and spear called a "spontoon" were also considered legitimate tools for defense, but government at all levels have chosen to deny citizens the right to carry many of these weapons. It seems perverse that I can carry a powerful handgun while at the same time not be allowed to carry a knife with a blade longer than 3". Few 2nd amendment supporters have raised this issue; why I'm not sure.
3) Technology has created new "weapons" that government is unsure if citizens ownership should be denied. Cyber attacks can be devastating to government structure, but so far, ownership of certain kinds of software tools haven't been restricted, so long as malicious use isn't demonstrated. Restrictions on ownership of these "arms" would inevitably lead to an invasive police state.
How many American tanks and sophisticated arms are currently in the hands of ISIS?
http://www.hoplofobia.info/wp-content...
which covers the 1934 and 1968 laws.
It appears much of the philosophy behind their passage was simple 'fear.' In any cases it traces the methods used to 'get around' minor impediments such as the Constitutional Second Amendment question.
The main proponent back then was Senator Thomas Dodd Senior of Connecticutt and the story went - back in the sixties he had tasked the Library of Congress to translate the Gun Control Act of Germany in the 1930's and used it as a basis for US law.
Back to the purely philosophical part. Purely philosophical has gained us same sex marriage and Executive Orders and the punitive Income Tax.
The hue and cry back then was mail order weapons and coincided for a while when I worked for InterArmCo at #10 Prince Street in Alexandria. Sam Cummings the boss and owner had bought up as many WWII weapons out of Europe as fast as he could fund the purchase. No outdoor magazine was seen without it's back cover hosting Klein's of Chicago's advertising $19.95 plus S&H for every kind of rifle or pistol used in that war. One of them went to a barely qualified former Marine in Dallas TX. Described as a Marksman that is the lowest level of qualification Sharpshooter and Expert are the middle and highest. Side issue.
I myself had well over 30 weapons just from working at InterarmCo.
Philosophy never entered my head. the cost of shipping them home was more important so I bought a 57Chevy and loaded all of them in the trunk. Minus ammunition ....too heavy.
The philosophy then if any were thought of was I want that rifle I have the money. Now it's time for deer season.
What it is today is this. If I had the money i would not buy a nuclear bazooka. i had no use for it nor any training and it was no good for deer hunting.
Now my philosophy is simple. I want one because they say I can't have one. The rest is just technology.
Jan
"Don't be a dick" rules. In the medieval martial sport that I participate in, we have such a rule ("Combatants shall behave in a knightly and chivalrous manner..."). In any instance when there has been misbehavior on the field of combat, this rule is brought up...and virtually never enforced. It does not provide a hard standard by which one can say, "You did wrong!" So while I like the idea of a 'dont be a dick' rule, my experience with a self-selecting set of people is that this type of rule does not work.
I agree that Evil people will do evil things, even if all they have is a set of toenail clippers. But when I think of protecting myself against Y. pestis, I don't think of Evil. I think of one of my ex-employee's, "C". "C" is a very intelligent young man and he is entirely good- hearted. He also has the organization of a colony of sea sponges and the attention span of a squirrel. He would be exactly the type of person who would be willing to risk himself experimenting with Plague bacteria to try to discover a better vaccine...and who would then leave the window open. "C" is good, not evil. He also would be a danger to me. Since he is intelligent, if he had a Level 4 facility, he would have a set of SOP's he had to go through (and there would be no windows) and I would be safer...and we might get that vaccine.
Jan
So, Jan's right, it's not just the evil factor but the "oops" factor you have to take into account.
We live in a world where a suitably knowledgeable person can construct a virus that could kill virtually the entire human population if it got out of his lab.
Do we have no recourse until we are doomed.
As to it being the government, that's the appropriate agency for retaliatory use of force. Of course you have to make the argument that my R&D project forcibly damages your safety without your consent.
Example: If you drive impaired, you are committing attempted-murder. If you succeed in killing someone, you committed murder and your life is forfeit. The provider of the impairments only responsibility is reminding them of the above.
Apply to the Yersinia example. When you get the bug from someone, they have to tell you, and "society" as a whole tells you similarly, that if you screw up, you are committing attempted negligent homicide, and if someone gets sick, you are responsible for their medical care and jail time. If you screw up and someone dies, your life is forfeit. Period. Then let the deterrent effect take care of what regulations otherwise would expected (not necessarily succeed) to accomplish.
Same with weapons. You have the right to any weapon. If you kill an innocent, you die. If you attempt to use it against an innocent, your life is forfeit to your attempted victim (self defense). Therefore you are more careful.
You can already order have genetic material made to order GenScript will build them for you for .35 a base pair -- they have an online order discount http://www.genscript.com/gene_synthes...
This is just going to get faster and cheaper. Affordable solutions for doing it yourself will become available and you will be able to generate any genetic code that you want. I'm sure there will be lots of available 'interesting' sequences on the internet.
If you seriously try to kill someone you can do so with no weapons beyond what you were born with.
What you use to do the killing is less meaningful than the desire to do so and initiating the attack.
People have been killing each other long before modern weapons were invented. Doubtless the weapons a few centuries from now will be much different than current ones.
Humans do the killing, the weapons are just tools.
be there. . it's impossible to reverse history, anyway, to
prevent people from getting things which are dangerous.
there are those who know chemistry, physics, biology, etc.
where weapons-related science is located. . and if I could
power my house with a little nuke, and I could afford it,
I would do so. . but it could be turned into a weapon,
so the society disallows it ... almost no matter how many
bucks I have.
I suppose that you wanted to talk about whether the society
should be "allowed to evaluate people" regarding weapon
purchase and ownership. . the fact is that it's going to do so,
and it will prevent ownership to the extent possible. -- j
p.s. this question just begs for a "control" comment. . social
control of individuals generally sucks. . conformity begets
sterility and decay. . creativity thrives on the lack of control.
so, whatever control a society exerts on itself speaks directly
to its health ... thus we have health versus health, a tightrope.
cultural thriving versus self-destruction. . we will debate this
forever.
.
or biological or chemical attack plans being finalized. . finding
those people, who are assuredly among us, might be the question. -- j
p.s. I will pose this as an "ask the gulch" question.
..
Your question is moot as we're all naturally "armed" from the day we're born.
Hope that helps.
Separately, it would be far superior if the weapons the military had were spread among the citizens and states, not centralized.
It seems to me that it is important to accurately define terms in the key part of your question: "...citizens be allowed to own any weaponry...".
Philosophy deals with individual humans. Citizenship has no significance in that context.
As others have pointed out, almost anything can be used as a weapon.
"Allowing" implies an authority to infringe on liberty of living, i.e. restricting freedom of action.
Owning means freedom of action in using, consuming and disposing of property.
I think that Objectivist philosophy accepts the necessity of a government of limited powers for a successful and perpetual thriving of large groups of individuals.
In my view, the only area where government may interfere with the freedom of an individual is as a reaction to the individual's actions. So, a government has good reason to impose rational rules about minimizing the risks to other from the fact that an individual's property exists. That does not include the right of the government to take the individual's property out of existence on a whim, so to speak.
What I am trying conclude is that only actions on the part of the individuals can cause a reaction from others, including the government in "others". The individuals must not initiate the use of force.
Does this make sense to you?
All the best!
Maritimus
Civilization draws strength from numbers. Large numbers of armed citizens deter the would-be criminal or dictator. If a Japanese general really did say any invading army would find a gun behind any blade of grass, he would not have been kidding.
The Triumvirate of Atlantis was in fact a Committee of Safety, after the mold of similar Committees before and during the American War for Independence, before we had a genuine Continental Army. And even then, Committees of Safety handled police functions before the advent of organized police in America's largest cities.
The first police in the world were the rhabdouchoi, or literally, stick bearers, of ancient Athens. These were municipal slaves carrying sticks and detailed for crowd control. That stick survives today as a police officer's baton.
So right away you know: a policeman is a creature of the government. Rand recognizes the legitimacy of the police. But I don't think she ever imagined disarming ordinary citizens. Recall: even Henry Rearden, at his lowest point, still carried a gun, and the police never questioned his right so to carry.
I mention all the above, to say this: modern police are over-militarized and strike many as more army of occupation than protective force.
(Especially those cool weapons that destroyed the WTC and the ones used in Tianjin, China.)
I really want one of those big saucers from Independence Day.
http://atlassociety.org/objectivism/a...
This implies that you have the right to own weaponry of all sorts.
Now, such a system would make it easier for a malevolent crazy to make some kind of horrible terrorist attack using weapons bought on the free market, up to and conceivably including nuclear weapons.
So how would a free society based on Objectivist premises deal with that? I think it is hard to know all the details in advance, because we don't live in that circumstance. But let me offer some thoughts:
Weapons makers might be held liable for (rights violating) damages caused with their weapons, in some circumstances. This might cause them to institute a licensing and oversight scheme (all private and contractual, of course). Think of Underwriters Laboratories' testing of electrical products.
Another thought: we currently own and operate many kinds of dangerous devices and chemicals, including cars, trucks, gasoline, natural gas, and airplanes (9/11 showed how dangerous an airplane can be). But we don't have much vehicular homicide (apart from car on car crashes). This is due to people being familiar with the technology and aware of its potential. Remember: not only the criminals or crazies will have access to weapons in a free society. So it may be harder for a crazy to put his plans into action in a free society than it would be in our controlled and mostly disarmed society.
There is also the doctrine of "clear and present danger." If you restrain an aggressive person before he assaults someone (say, in a bar fight), that's probably not a rights violation. And something similar would be true of restraining a crazy with big weapons.
A final thought: when people have freedom, they also have responsibility. So with greater arms freedom, we would expect (in time) for the vast majority of people to learn to use them responsibly. A free society would also incentivize productive living: people would be less tempted to lash out or dream of violent conquest. It's no accident that Middle-Easterners (with little freedom of any sort) dream of conquest and fight horrible wars, whereas people in the free world, even now much more able to make war as private citizens if we wanted to, live mostly at peace.
I hope these thoughts are helpful.
I also see a similar problem with your restraint of an 'aggressive' individual. The owner certainly has a full right to deny service to anyone he chooses and his decisions will affect his business, either positively or negatively. But for another patron(s) to restrain based on a suspicion (fear) or just not liking aggressive people is not justified under Objective individual rights.
And to the thought that, 'when people have freedom, they also have responsibility', do they? And if they do, who says so? I would take the position that there is a set of morals that derive from the metaphysics and epistemology of Objectivism that places one in the position, in society dependent on interactions with others, that in order to defend one's individual rights, one can only do so morally if he also respects other's individual rights. I would argue that is not 'responsibility', it's self-interest.
I think that sometimes, many in the Objectivist camps focus on the non-initiation of force, rather than the reasons or causes of non-initiations of force.
But since the evidence is that when a population is well-armed, educated, and free, there tends to be little successful abuse, I'm not going to go there yet.
Currently, we live largely disarmed throughout the developed world, and we panic over terror attacks that affect a very small percentage of our population. Many Americans felt less safe in 2002 than they had in 1992, but violent crime had been falling and continued to fall, so that, despite the terror attacks, Americans had become safer.
I repeat whenever I can that we can't fully predict the institutions of a modern free society, because it's just very hard to predict circumstances one doesn't live in. Think of the technology predictions or cultural predictions from circa 1980: our current circumstances, from internet to smart phones to global jihad, are very different from what any of us imagined then.
Even for Objectivist that have extensive understanding and knowledge of the underlying principles, and that have given considerable thought to the applications in life centered on the best for the individual, still have a desire for something other than the 'chaos' of the laissez faire model. And I think that desire, or fear of that 'chaos' particularly arises with the issue of 'non-initiation of force'. Not so much that one shouldn't do it, but the continual fear that one remains subject to the vagaries of nature, the nature of man, and one's abilities to defend his own rights--the what if's of life. The reality of human nature and the fragility of human life overrides the concept of the ideal.
There are (3) three quotes I like when I consider this issue:
“As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” —Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
“There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading, a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice , not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.” —Marcus Tulles Cicero (106– 43 BC)
“Of every One Hundred men, Ten shouldn’t even be there, Eighty are nothing but targets, Nine are real fighters . . . We are lucky to have them . . . They make the battle, Ah, but the One, One of them is a Warrior . . . and He will bring the others back.” —Heraclitus (circa 500 B.C.)
The concepts I take from these are in Smith's case, society gains most when it stays out of the way of the individual pursuing his own self interest. From Cicero, that we must expect as the natural condition, that we must accept and be prepared to defend our own lives in any way possible, and that such action is at all times moral. And from Heraclitus, that most are not suited for such conditions and requirements of life, but that one man that is able and willing may bring the rest with him into safety, even though that is not his personal goal over the ability to save himself.
Although I can agree with you that we (as in all of us) can't fully predict the circumstances we don't live in (though I worked with individuals in the 70's from Motorola and MSA that predicted the cell phone age, and others from Intel, GE, Square D, and Modicon that predicted the internet--though none of those could predict the exact infrastructure or the impacts on institutions and society), we can predict with a fair amount of certainty that approximately 5% of the male population will be psychopaths and will inflict their individual harms on society and other individuals, barring individuals preparing and acting to defend themselves from those predations. We can predict with equal certainty that at least 50% of the population will have IQ's below 100 and will drag the rest of us in directions we don't want to go, again barring genetic intervention or halting societal support of those that can't make it on their own. And we can predict with near absolute certainty that there will be war on some part of the planet.
But the market that Smith describes exists in a context of law. It doesn't provide that law, and what the limits of that law should be, is what we are discussing here. Also, people don't always act for their self-interest. But by and large, they tend to do so.
The moral right to survive that Cicero describes is ours, but it makes a big difference to us whether we live in an environment of continual warfare or general peace.
But I take the main point: that we do best when we are free, and that even in the best society there will still be war and crime. In those cases, in a free society, those willing and able to deal with highly dangerous criminals will do so.
If a government is not a proper government then you can use force in a revolution. Locke and the Founders were explicit on this point and it is implicit in Atlas Shrugged.
Under a proper government there is going to be very little interest in owning a rocket launcher, for example, except by historians.
More important than the types of weapons we can own in case of revolution was the Founders idea that we should not have a standing army. While taking this literally right now would not make sense, it also does not make sense to have police with military weapons nor to have our military still occupying countries 70 years after WWII.
The principle here is that the law puts the use of force under objective oversight. This could amount to nothing more than that any private use of force must submit to after-action adjudication by the courts.
Again, exactly how such a system should work is a matter to settle when our laws are in that context.
I would think that there might not as sharp a distinction as we now make between professional police, private investigators, and deputized citizens.
If we had a system where everyone was acting as a vigilante all the time, responding as they saw fit to what they saw as rights violations (this is what many anarchists advocate), the result would be warfare, since people often misjudge the justice of a case when they act off-the-cuff.
my thugs are stronger than yours, therefore I am in the right
Load more comments...