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Old 01-23-2005, 05:25 PM   #85 (permalink)
Yakk
Wehret Den Anfängen!
 
Location: Ontario, Canada
Quote:
aren't being inconsistent. All I saw was that they were in a conundrum that could easily lead to that inconsistency. They should realize that trying to get from city C to city D involves denying many people the protection that they themselves are unwilling to give up.
Well, make them willing. Tax gun owership or make it criminal or make getting a gun liscence harder. Depending on how much cost you add to owning a gun, more people might decide they don't want to own a gun.

Quote:
That is a a problem of inconsistency, one that could be resolved by being an example to others first.
I don't demand that people who think that having fewer guns would be a good thing for society to be any more altruistic than anyone else. I don't require activists to be saints.

They could also do a better job at helping gun control if they lived like a begger and donated all their money to the cause.

Also note that this was one of the two examples of ways "I want to own a gun" and "guns should be harder to own" beliefs could be consistent. I don't know what people who think both think, I was just demonstrating consistent ways of thinking about both of them.

It could be that at all points, owning a gun lowers your chance of dieing, while every person owning a gun makes society worse off as a whole. In which case, the "proper" economic response is to make people pay the externalities (the costs that everyone else pays) for owning a gun.

If someone believed that, the only consistent thing they could do is own a gun, and lobby that owning a gun would be harder. Anything else would be hypocritical.

I'd suspect Michael Moore might want find having an armed bodyguard justificable for completely different reasons. As examples:

First, I'd be shocked if he doesn't recieve lots of death threats from gun-nuts.

And, in theory, a bodyguard is a professional, who could be liscenced and regulated pretty heavily. Few people who want to ban handguns want to ban police from owning them.

But, I don't know Moore's mind, or the mind of any pro-gun restriction person who owns guns. All I'm trying to show is there exist consistent, sensible belief systems, for which those two on the surface opposite ideas are consistent.
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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.
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