Gun Control

SilverStarApple/Epsilon7 said:
Hey, remember that time Trump said "VIDEO GAMES CAUSE VIOLENCE!" and the left suddenly did a complete 180 so they didn't get seen agreeing with Trump, until Trump laughed and said "Just kidding"?
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I don't remember the "Just kidding" but yes, I remember the media squirming over it. I still don't appreciate him using the hobby to play chicken with the media, if for no other reason than I'm absolutely tired of people making that faulty association (even as a joke). We've already had some close calls courtesy of people like Lieberman and Clinton.

SilverStarApple/Epsilon7 said:
Hey, remember that time Trump said "I'M COMING FO YA GUNS, MWAHAHAHA!" and all the liberal news media outlets suddenly admitted there's a war against legal gun owners and started warning people of the dangers of gun-grabbing?
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I actually don't remember the media ever doing that, but again, playing chicken with the 2nd in the passenger seat rubs me the wrong way. EDIT: I see an article or two going the predictable route and making Hitler/Nazi/disarmament of the Jews comparisons, so apparently this happened but I question its worth.

SilverStarApple/Epsilon7 said:
Remember how everyone with an IQ above room temperature saw what Trump was doing, these two times, and how everyone using confirmation bias to search for reasons to hate Trump as much as the magical TV says to just bought it blindly?
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I honestly think Trump didn't really accomplish anything of note with these two stunts other than potentially upset his base. The people who actually HATE Trump usually don't hate him for any rational reason, though they will rationalize like crazy when you ask them, so attempting a "wtf I love Trump now" kind of mental coup is probably futile at best. The media is a soulless machine powered by greed and they have no honestly-held opinions, they know opposing whatever Trump is saying is big money and they act accordingly. They have no shame, so shaming them doesn't really work either.

Jogre said:
I don't think it was left wing people who were pushing the whole "Video Games cause violence" thing.

From experience, it tends to be ageing boomers who are pushing that whole thing.
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Some of whom are solidly left (at least by American standards). The vilification of video games was somewhat bipartisan in nature. There are reasons why this is so, but expounding upon them risks derailing the thread.

SilverStarApple/Epsilon7 said:
Plus "The left" is not a monolith, and even if some of them did believe video games cause violence, most of them probably don't, so to say "Did a complete 180" when it's likely the same people who always disagreed with that statement continuing to do so is kinda silly.
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The problem is that the ones who don't believe that shit are nowhere near as vociferous as the ones who supposedly do. True on both sides. We've had to rely on non-political scientific sources and industry voices to make our defense against these claims, because our supposed "allies" in political spaces are about as effectual as wet paper bags compared to the puritanical screeching coming from people like Lieberman and Clinton and others.
 
TheGM said:
You've been shitposting in the this thread unironically since page one and are surprised it has come to this. You literally equated support of gun ownership to support of slavery at one point.

Not to mention the left can't meme worth shit.
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It would be nice if you also mentioned to context, as I didn't compare gun ownership with slavery. Slavery was used as example that the second amendment isn't set in stone, as answer to someone who said that constitutions can't be changed. Granted, it's nigh to impossible that this will ever happen and I don't support such a change, but there is a procedure for it.

See, that's what I mean people. You read what you want to read, not what I write.

But I get it, I am the asshole here, I mean someone has to be, right?


TheGM said:
Not to mention the left can't meme worth shit.
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We don't have to, you ellected one.
 
Crni Vuk said:
It would be nice if you also mentioned to context, as I didn't compare gun ownership with slavery. Slavery was used as example that the second amendment isn't set in stone, as answer to someone who said that constitutions can't be changed. Granted, it's nigh to impossible that this will ever happen and I don't support such a change, but there is a procedure for it.

See, that's what I mean people. You read what you want to read, not what I write.

But I get it, I am the asshole here, I mean someone has to be, right?
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You're advocating for the removal of a fundamental human right because of faulty reasons that have been debunked in this thread multiple times. And you're still sticking to your irrational leftist position out of spite. Your final remaining argument for getting your way is "We've changed the constitution before", which is utterly nonsensical. So what if we have? Should we also get rid of the first amendment, which you also hate? Or how about the amendment that gives you the right to a fair trial, or the amendment that gives you the right to not recieve cruel and unusual punishment? How about you stop making nonsensical arguments for bad reasons and start asking yourself why your current beliefs are so easy to debunk?

After all, if you're going to deny context and deny that rich democrats owned slaves and all fought against freeing the slaves, of course you're the asshole. If you think that "Sarcastically admit it" trick will work, you're wrong. Why do you still believe we "Ellected a meme"? Why are you wilfully ignorant when it comes to Trump's good deeds and your own ideology's failings?

You're on the wrong side of history, and you're constantly trying to downplay the misdeeds of your cancerous political dogma while painting yourself as the poor innocent victim and us as the mean old aggressors who just aren't listening to you and being fair to you if we don't drop all our convictions and morals and let you walk over us. We're done pretending that you and your ideology aren't the reason why America is so divided, polarized, and sick of your shit.

No More.
 
Hassknecht said:
Wait, gun ownership is a fundamental human right? The UN must have missed that one.
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I don't know about guns in specific, but self-defense absolutely is one. Gun ownership would fall under that umbrella. In today's world to say "you have the right to self-defense but NOT to own a gun" is rather silly given that the fundamental right to self-defense does include the use of deadly force as necessary, and last I checked swords were considered pretty anachronistic/passé as deadly weapons.
 
Except that no one here ever, like EVER made the claim to take away guns or to ban them completely. Hell I would even say that most of us who are in favour of gun regulation are even very modest about it. I think Switzerland has pretty great gun laws for example - it's quite often named as positive example by gun owners/supperters.
 
Crni Vuk said:
Except that no one here ever, like EVER made the claim to take away guns or to ban them completely. Hell I would even say that most of us who are in favour of gun regulation are even very modest about it. I think Switzerland has pretty great gun laws for example - it's quite often named as positive example by gun owners/supperters.
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Yes, of all the ways to fuck the right to bear arms in the ass Switzerland's solution arguably uses the most lube. Yippee. Of course it never occurs to people to stop trying to buttfuck the 2nd Amendment because... think of the kids, or something. Yeah. People like to forget what the road to hell is generally paved with. Anyway, moving on.

http://nj1015.com/nj-cops-came-to-confiscate-guns-after-son-discussed-school-safety-dad-says/

Now mind you, NJ is a shithole in just about every way, but still - this is absurd.
 
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It's part of the broader problem which has to be expected when you have authorities who don't know how to respond to the current gun-crysis or what ever you want to call it. The government is either not willing or abble to to respond to this issue outside of sending prayers to the victims, so the local authorities are kinda left alone with it. I am not saying that this kind of action is good, but I understand that a lot of people are right now in panick mode. And when you consider how there is like one shooting every week or month or something, who can blame people? You have on one side the issue that arms are seen by some as a right, many say for self defence and on the other side you have people that feel more and more insecure and threatened by this 'armed' society and demanding from the authorities to make sure people don't take a weapon and storm some office building or school, which I believe is reasonable.

Both sides make valid points because you have two rights colluding here, individual rights and collective rights.
 
Individual rights > collective rights. You can be excluded from a collective with the appropriate mental gymnastics and deprived of rights accordingly. The only way to make someone no longer an individual is to kill them. An individual's right to bear arms (read as: NOT have their guns confiscated on a whim) should absolutely trump the "right" of a bunch of soccer moms to not "feel threatened", for example. Rights must have their root in the individual, first and foremost.
 
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Crni Vuk said:
Slavery was used as example that the second amendment isn't set in stone, as answer to someone who said that constitutions can't be changed.
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The only times slavery was mentioned in the constitution was to establish a 3/5 compromise on counting slaves in population, not allow any prohibition of the slave trade until 1808, and the fugitive slave act.

The 2nd amendment is in the bill of rights and includes the words "shall not be infringed" they never did this with slavery so I don't think that is a good comparison.
 
Pariah Dog said:
Individual rights > collective rights. You can be excluded from a collective with the appropriate mental gymnastics and deprived of rights accordingly. The only way to make someone no longer an individual is to kill them. An individual's right to bear arms should absolutely trump the right of a bunch of soccer moms to not "feel threatened", for example. Rights must have their root in the individual, first and foremost.
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Except, when they don't, it's not mental gymnastics. Like when those individual rights hurt the society you're living in by affecting a lot of people. This is not a question of either - or. Every modern society has to find a balance between individual and collective rights.

You could see it as your right to dump the waste of your coal factory in the next river, because it's the cheapest alternative and you as the owner of the factory want to make the largest possible profit. But then you get the community, living next to the River who might even receive their water supply from it and a lot of people might have to deal with the effects, so they demand regulations to make sure that such things are prohibited. And any authority that's run by the people, will have to respond to it.

Those kind of things happen all the time, and even this scenario is not that uncommon, as there is a reason how regulations came into place at some point, like the clean air act or similar laws. A state that is ALL about individual rights, is a failed state and one that is only about collective rights is a dictatorship.

We're way to often thinking in terms of 'right' vs 'wrong' and which ideologiy is the best or the worst, when the reality is a lot more complex and actually about interests. This is just as much true like it is for environmental protection as it is with guns. Different people have different interests and ideas about how things should 'work' and the trick is to make sure that all of those people have an oportunity to co-exit together communicating those ideas to each other, without bashing their skulls in - which is something democracy and free speech does remarkably well by finding a political consensus, where when everything is said and done it comes down to a vote.

As I said it before, we are not living in the society of the 17th century anymore and that's beacuse of a free exchange of ideas and open criticism of ideas.
 
Crni Vuk said:
You could see it as your right to dump the waste of your coal factory in the next river, because it's the cheapest alternative and you as the owner of the factory want to make the largest possible profit. But then you get the community, living next to the River who might even receive their water supply from it and a lot of people might have to deal with the effects, so they demand regulations to make sure that such things are prohibited. And any authority that's run by the people, will have to respond to it.
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You don't need to play the collective rights game to protect against that, though. You just state that an individual has the right to not have his water source polluted by a corporation/other individual, whether he lives in a town or by his lonesome. One of the reasons I am leery as hell of using collective rights is that you get people who start thinking the Greater Good is a fantastic excuse for stepping on an individual's (or a smaller group's, even) neck(s). Majorities generally should not dictate the rights of minorities when clear conflicts of interest are present, and that's exactly the kind of thing that lurks further down that road.
 
Pariah Dog said:
You don't need to play the collective rights game to protect against that, though. You just state that an individual has the right to not have his water source polluted by a corporation/other individual, whether he lives in a town or by his lonesome. One of the reasons I am leery as hell of using collective rights is that you get people who start thinking the Greater Good is a fantastic excuse for stepping on an individual's (or a smaller group's, even) neck(s). Majorities generally should not dictate the rights of minorities when clear conflicts of interest are present, and that's exactly the kind of thing that lurks further down that road.
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And how do you do that? Trough laws and regulations, and how do they come in to action? By the authorities, which are voted in power by the majority of the people aka. the society. At least in a functioning democracy. The majority, in thise case, is enforcing their will up on an individual and this happens all the time. There is no unlimited individual rights.
 
Crni Vuk said:
And how do you do that? Trough laws and regulations, and how do they come in to action? By the authorities, which are voted in power by the majority of the people aka. the society. At least in a functioning democracy. The majority, in thise case, is enforcing their will up on an individual and this happens all the time. There is no unlimited individual rights.
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Let's flip the script a bit, then. Let's say the corporation dumping toxins into the water actually employs more people and has more stockholders than there are denizens of the little township of 25 or so nearby suffering from polluted water. Therefore, any regulation leveled against the corporation to make it stop dumping into the river affects more people negatively than NOT regulating the corporation's dumping habits. Hell, shrink it to one person who happens to live by themselves downstream who has raised a complaint. The collective "rights" of the majority to higher profit margins via lazy shortcuts obviously should not trump the right of an individual not to have his water poisoned. I would say so. Most sane people would say so. Can you differentiate why both the situation you described and the situation I described are both situations where the regulation needs to occur? Hint: it has nothing to do with collective rights.

Side note: Democracy is, by its nature, "Majority Rules", this is true. Keeping this in mind, if a group democratically votes to, say, ritually murder a minority within said group for whatever reason, that's obviously not good. In fact it's pretty bad. How do you avoid that kind of stuff? Well, you don't run a direct democracy, for one. The USA is not a direct democracy, and thank fuck it isn't.
 
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That's simply two conflicting groups, I thought we're talking about individual rights and collective rights. A company with thousands of employees is just a different kind of collective with their own interest, in this case a private one. By making it more complex and shifting the goals, we're not getting anywhere really. Besides you would still have the issue that one group is threatened in their well beeing where another just financially, are the profits of a company really more worth then people getting eventually cancer from drinking polluted water? Even if the group we're talking about is a minority. We can recently see how those kind of things go, when you consider the oil spill by Shell and how they have been forced to pay billions to the government as compensation.

In September 2014, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct.[28] In July 2015, BP agreed to pay $18.7 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in U.S. history.[29]​

No matter how you spin it, a society is always about balancing individual rights/freedoms with collective rights.

Pariah Dog said:
Side note: Democracy is, by its nature, "Majority Rules", this is true. Keeping this in mind, if a group democratically votes to, say, ritually murder a minority within said group for whatever reason, that's obviously not good. In fact it's pretty bad. How do you avoid that kind of stuff? Well, you don't run a direct democracy, for one. The USA is not a direct democracy, and thank fuck it isn't.
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Yeah, I guess Socrates wouldn't disagree with you on that point, since the Atheans voted for his death penality and Socrates lost by a very small margin, he was a known critic on democracy. That's the point where any modern democracy has to make sure that it also defends the individual rights of each person against the collective or well 'mob rule' if you want so. It is also a very good example why protecting minorities is such an important part in a society.
 
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Crni Vuk said:
That's simply two conflicting groups, I thought we're talking about individual rights and collective rights. A company with thousands of employees is just a different kind of collective with their own interest, in this case a private one. By making it more complex and shifting the goals, we're not getting anywhere really. Besides you would still have the issue that one group is threatened in their well beeing where another just financially, are the profits of a company really more worth then people getting eventually cancer from drinking polluted water? Even if the group we're talking about is a minority. We can recently see how those kind of things go, when you consider the oil spill by Shell and how they have been forced to pay billions to the government as compensation.

In September 2014, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct.[28] In July 2015, BP agreed to pay $18.7 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in U.S. history.[29]​

No matter how you spin it, a society is always about balancing individual rights/freedoms with collective rights. Besides, most companies are not run by their employees.
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Employees garner benefit from their company continuing to at least break even, otherwise things like layoffs happen. Anyway, my point was that your example was pretty cut and dry and the collective rights part of it was irrelevant, a right to clean water should supersede a right to profit whether it's one person affected or millions. To say nothing of the environmental concerns.

Crni Vuk said:
Yeah, I guess Socrates wouldn't disagree with you on that point, since the Atheans voted for his death penality and Socrates lost by a very small margin, he was a known critic on democracy. That's the point where any modern democracy has to make sure that it also defends the individual rights of each person against the collective or well 'mob rule' if you want so. It is also a very good example why protecting minorities is such an important part in a society.
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Democracy is the worst system we've ever tried, except all the others - t. fat Britbong

I'm very happy we're a constitutional republic and not a direct democracy though, seriously. As for protecting minorities from majority mob rule, I agree, and you'll be interested to know that probably less than a third of Americans own guns, making gun owners technically a minority.
 
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The collective rights are not irelevant and I am puzzled that you think they are based on your example, which is a different kind of case. And of course I keept it somewhat simple to make a point here. We're not experts after all. However it's not an unrealistic scenario. To be honest, I don't get it why you don't see (or accept?) the fact that any society is always about balancing the collective with the individual. Again, this is not a black or white scenario - a missunderstanding maybe? A collective is made of individuals, and collective rights and individual rights supplement each other, where the collective can also serve to protect the individual and vice versa. This is even true for free speech which has limitations, namely where the rights of someone else are violated since you can't just run around and cause a mass panick for example. But only the agreement of enough people can makes sure that you have the right to free speech, which is when you look it actually a privilige granted by the majority to the minority (or the individual). The Weimar Republic had a constitution too, with free speech, free press and all that, but it was swept away, without any revolution or a lot of viollence because the population didn't really believed in those rights to be of importance anymore.
 
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