March 31, 2008
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Featured Question #235: Guns don’t kill people, unhealthy communal apathy kills people
Should guns be illegal? Why or why not?
Ha! I’d like to see them try to make guns illegal. At least in American, we have a right to bear arms.
Besides, so many things should be illegal, banning guns is almost anticlimactic. Should they be illegal? Yeah, sure… and nicotine, alcohol, sugar, all forms of pollution and littering, throwing cigarette butts from moving cars, hitting your children anywhere but their clothing covered behinds…
Obscenities… they should definitely be illegal. I hate when people use foul words when talking to me or near me. I don’t want to hear f*** or s*** or c*** or d*** or any other four or more letter curse words. I find it offensive and emotionally damaging. It should be illegal.
Yeah, I’m being ridiculous (mostly), but so is the idea of making guns illegal. I don’t own a gun. I don’t want to own a gun, but that doesn’t mean that I should try to force my views on others. It’s a protected right (for US citizens at least), and in my book that means don’t mess with it. In America, people have the right to be ignorant, gun-toting savages, who use recreational stimulants (sugar, caffeine, nicotine) and recreational depressants (alcohol), butcher the environment, and scar their children for life… yeah.
Should guns be illegal? Yes, yes they should. Will the be? Nope. Not gonna happen. Just like all the other stuff I mentioned will never happen. For one thing, we already tried Prohibition and we all know how well That turned out. Trying to ban anything only creates an unnatural interest in it. Ban guns? Everyone will want one…. and they will say it’s because everyone has the right to defend themselves and (holy moly!) the government is trying to take it away from us! Egads!
It would be much better to bolster people’s sense of pride in themselves and their community than it would to take away the guns of those people who feel they need one, or two, or a dozen. Give people pride in their community and they will seek to improve it, make it safer. A safe community has little need for guns.
Don’t make guns illegal. Convince people that they don’t need them by removing those things in their lives that make them believe that they do. The same goes for anything in our society which we don’t like. Remove the “cause” and the “effect” disappears with it.
I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!
March 31st
The Romans honor Luna, goddess of the Full Moon, with a festival at her temple on the Aventine hill.
Comments (9)
i saw somewhere… online or on the news where there is actually something going before the supreme court about weather or not we actually have the right to bear arms or not. some guy in washington d.c. is taking all the way because he wasn’t allowed to have a gun to protect himself there. so it might affect the rest of the country if they knock it down or not. i think a lot of things they are inacting in the courts these days are taking more rights away than they should. i don’t particularly want to hear some of the things i hear or like some of the things that are around but i want the right for myself and others to chose weather or not it happens or not and not have that choice taken from me.
I like your last line – take away the cause and nobody will want guns anymore. If only ’twere that easy.
I wonder what Luna the goddess of the full moon would say about gun control. “Not in my life time,” she sighs.
Hey, this is soul_meets_body767.
I had to delete my other xanga & create this one [the story is in my first post on my new xanga].
but i’m going to subscribe to you again.
& yeah, I think people should have as much freedom as possible as long as they don’t hurt other people: people should be allowed guns for defense unless they have a record of violence, people should be allowed their smokes & drugs as long as they don’t do them infront of children, etc.
but litter bugs & jaywalkers, of course, are the scum of the earth and should be persecuted. lol
<3
I like that you took this question in a refeshingly new direction. I heard a news story a few weeks ago that said almost all police officers would not even attempt to take away people’s firearms if they were made illegal. Who can blame them?
@NightlyDreams - I haven’t read the story, but I doubt it was a case of simple denial of his rights. Like as not, he has a police or psychiatric record that made gun ownership a questionable proposition. And it may just be my lack of faith in my fellow humans, but if he’s taken it to court, it’s probably more a question of money than rights.
@BoureeMusique - Everything worth having is worth working for. Maybe the reason our world has become such a cesspool is that most people are content to accept what is bad because of all they perceive to be good. We live better than our ancestors of a hundred years ago, but while our technological, medical, and psychological knowledge has grown by leaps and bounds, our sociological, economical, and environmental progress has been slower than molasses in January. People tend to forget that progress is something that should be measured across the board. Excellence in one or two areas, while all other areas fail, does not a perfect report card make.
@Jaynebug - lol… haven’t you ever heard of shooting the moon? I think she’d be for gun control. heh
@Madeliene767 - Thanks for the heads up. I’ll be right over. But yeah, nothing ticks me off more than seeing someone throw trash out their car window or just drop it in the street as they walk. Litterbugs are actually top of my list because unlike a lot of other pollution, it’s something that the person doing it can be held personally and solely responsible for. Can’t do much about pollution from cars or factories aside from push for greener transport and heavier regulations, but litter, that’s all on the people who do it. They were obviously not raised very respectfully.
@wearywalden - Thanks. I certainly don’t blame the police. A lot of them would likely get shot if they tried. When it comes to people protecting what they perceive to be their rights, most have a “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude.
@harmony0stars -
Ah yes… and progress is antithetical to conservatism, by definition. *sigh*
well, i basically agree with this, but i think we need things like sugar and profanity. they are overused, but i still think people need verbal ways ti deal with aggression. i made a post awhile back about how the problem is that the swear words are overused so then they don’t mean as much and they get kind of programmed in to the language and become deeper insults you can’t use to insult people with anymore.
plus, if there wasn’t sugar, i’d be out of a job.
@Viol3tt - I agree on the obscenities. I personally do not use swear words unless I am extremely angry. So when other people use them quite casually around me, it is very jarring. I expect they should be angrier or more upset than they obviously are. And so the words are insulting to me because they are not being used properly.
As for the sugar, there are other sweeteners that are not as bad for you… honey for small projects, stevia for larger ones. Stevia is a sweetener about 100X sweeter than sugar, but which has no affect on insulin levels. Unlike artificial sweeteners, stevia is an herbal extract. Besides, beyond the affect sugar has on our bodies, growing the cane is just as bad for the environment.