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Notes -
Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
I think you are neglecting what to me seems to be the main argument against legal gun ownership, which is that the telos of a gun (especially ones that are not traditional hunting guns, which are legal in many more places anyhow) is to kill people. The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first), and given such a principle it doesn't seem hard to argue for the prohibition of a tool whose principal purpose is just that.
I don't see this value as introducing any obvious slippery slope in itself, and moreover your line of interpretation ("strip every single joy out of life") that aims to connect it to one can only work by way of trading a sacred value (no killing) off for a profane one (fun). The profane-sacred boundary in general is pretty good at stopping slope-slipping, and the argument that the weaker form of this slippery slope ("strip every single joy that grates against a sacred value out of life") is still all that bad has not been made.
This is an argument that you will have to contend with if you want to persuade people of this value system (which I gather is no longer solely a European thing, but has spread deep into urban globalised parts of the US). Of course, from over in Germany, there is also a lower-hanging question to ask: are you for speed limits on your highways?
There are around 400 million civilian-owned guns in the US now. Over the last century US guns have been responsible for something like a million homicides and a million suicides. Were the other 99.5+% of the guns designed or made wrong?
How can you avoid exceptions? Should the enforcers of a gun ban have guns? If so, then you're making an exception before gun supporters even have to lobby you for it. If not, then it's not going to be much of a ban.
I hope that exception gets more sophisticated than "of course people Following Orders still get guns". Europeans under those rules were responsible for way more than just one million homicides over the last century, even if you only count the civilian victims.
This seems like an important one, right?
We're happy to drip literal poison into our veins in some cases, because the poisons used in chemotherapy kill cancerous cells faster than non-cancerous cells. The direct purpose of those chemicals, what you're calling the "telos", is to kill human cells: if only 0.5% of doses of a prospective chemo drug killed any human cells, then we really would conclude that it was probably designed and/or made wrong. Their direct effects are pretty lousy. Their specificity kinda sucks and they kill good cells too. But they're still worth it, so long as you realize you can't ignore the distinctions between targets or the indirect effects of the killing in a final analysis.
About a quarter of Europeans live in a country where assisted suicide is now legal.
No. They’re awaiting the opportune moment. Kind of like a SIG.
In all seriousness, the purpose of a thing can be divorced from its usage statistics. The vast majority of nuclear weapons have never killed anyone. Instead they work via the threat of fulfilling their purpose.
Guns are an effective threat against almost anyone. That makes them useful whether or not they actual kill.
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Assisted suicide is not morally analysed or perceived as the assistant killing the recipient by those who support it.
I think the answer many would give is "in an ideal world, no". Unarmed British police are admired all over the continent.
Really, no. Germany and Austria have seen a lot of lethal bladed-weapon attacks by our dear immigrants in recent years, but sentiment to the effect of "if only a victim/bystander could have killed the assailant first" was almost never voiced as far as I could see. (Fantasies took the shape of overwhelming/tacking/disarming the attacker.) The value system is really that different. Try to not typical-mind as much.
I do, but I also try to be charitable, and the idea that you want to win a knife fight with an unarmed tackle wouldn't have passed that test even if it had occurred to me.
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