flynn23 wrote:

k wrote:

Penn & Teller's "Gun Control is Bullshit"

Worth a watch, I reckon.

My take? Guns don't kill people... Americans kill people.

Somehow other countries manage to get by without them, whereas we can't feel safe unless we've got one. That says something about us and it's not merely the presumptive "We don't and shouldn't trust our government."

A decent wrap up (I'm not a big fan of Penn's idiotic rantings about religion) and does a good job of crystalizing the issue. I'd like to see less gun control and more laws for gun and ammunition tagging, even for hunting munitions. The technology is there and it would allow for massive improvements in crime solving.

Interesting. I seem to recall in The Diamond Age, how everything but everything had some nano-scale identifier.

It seems like a useful crime solving mechanism, so, sure, but it's still after the fact. That's secondary to the gun control debate, I think. I see no logical argument against it. The "the gubmint may need to be overthrown" POV is fine, and if you're already in open rebellion against the Government, who cares if bullets are tracable? So yeah, I think your proposal has merit.

As for gun control, more specifically, I have trouble reconciling the fact that these kinds of rampages are perhaps effectively inevitable and that, truly, if more people were armed, less people would probably die with the fact that I fundamentally don't trust the people around me enough to want them armed.

Penn makes an argument that "most people are good" and thus if you armed everyone the balance of power shifts to the good people. I find that to be a vast oversimplification because I don't think classifying people in general as "good" or "evil" makes sense. You can say that a particular individual (such as this fucker at VT) is evil, after the fact. That's ok with me. Beyond that, all you can say about any other randomly selected individual is that they haven't yet done anything that makes them evil.

The spectrum of emotional stability is broad and arming everyone makes me nervous because I just don't -- and can't -- know what's going to make someone snap. The repercussions of otherwise casual breakdowns of emotional interactions are increased dramatically.

I study aikido in part because the philosophy that many lethal situations can be defused with no injury to anyone - assailant included - appeals to me. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe my practice applies well to a situation where someone has a gun; a gun is not a sword, certainly. Rather, it leads me to consider more carefully how such situations can be avoided in the first place. In the same way that I've been taught that walking away from a fight is just as much an Aiki technique as kaitenage, it seems that we ought to put some focus on easing the social precursors to the kind of alienation that causes these breakdowns.

To me, use of a gun represents the final breakdown of civil society. I think it's crucial to identify why ours thinks they're so necessary, and try to create a society in which they aren't. I know the pro-arms folks think it's unconscionably naive to even consider such a thing, but I simply can't escape that fact that there are plenty of places that have strict gun control and don't face the same problems as us.

It leads me to the conclusion that American society just isn't that civil.

RE: Penn & Teller's