bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 10:07 pm
Nortaneous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 9:47 pm
Samurai carried swords because they were samurai; peasants didn't because they couldn't. The point of the US is that all decent citizens should be samurai. Many parts of Europe had similar restrictions, but decided that all decent citizens should be... peasants. This has never made sense to me -
obviously the point of a republic should be to
elevate the citizenry.
And this argument has never made sense to
me. Sure, I can accept that you, and the people in your community, are sensible enough and responsible enough to own and use guns. But then there’s the domestic abuser who wants to kill his wife.
And get away with it? He wouldn't use a gun. On impulse? People who are that impulsive and that evil aren't suited to be samurai. We send them to peasant housing and set them to work making license plates for cheap. Ideally they'd be uplifted, but republican virtue can't cure Charles Whitman's brain tumor.
Or the mentally ill guy who believes God is telling him to murder all the gay people.
Schizophrenia is culturally mediated. If the voices are evil, there's a problem to begin with.
Or the drug gang who is trying to have a war with the other drug gang next door.
The continued existence of gangs in the US is a complicated issue, but a lot of it boils down to
people thinking gangs are cool. And a lot of the rest is bad policy - bad immigration policy, bad criminal policy, bad sentencing policy, in at least two cases the CIA, etc.
And sure, there are other weapons available, but guns are designed for killing people in a way which other weapons aren’t.
What else are swords designed for?
(For comparison: a few days ago, there was a shooting in Sydney, in which exactly two people from one gang were killed by a rival gang, or something like that. It was front-page news here. The police launched a huge investigation and everything. Would it be front-page news where you live?)
It depends on the place and the news. One guy killing another guy in self-defense can be international news for a year, but nobody cares about gang wars in Baltimore. (Which is really too bad. They should. The government can't be expected to do
everything, but what's the point of
having a government if they can't delete the Crips and Bloods? And MS-13, and Latin Kings, etc.)
(The argument can be applied more broadly, actually. Owning a gun is perfectly legal in Australia, as long as you can prove that you are sane and that you know how to use it. I’ve never understood the idea of a system which lets you own a gun without requiring proof of sanity.)
How do you
prove sanity?
I'm not up to date on the law, but IIRC it's at least extremely difficult to get a gun if you've ever seen the inside of a psych ward.
And what does a functioning society look like? Can a society in which the people abdicate all responsibility to the government really be characterized as "functioning"?
Um… yes? Because if they
don’t, some idiot will come along and do idiotic things, and no-one has the power to stop them.
[/quote]
We have a government, and a lot of people who want all responsibility to be abdicated to the government. This has not stopped idiots from doing idiotic things, but has
enabled idiots (and some very smart or at least crafty people) to do idiotic things at scale.
Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 10:16 pm
And you threatening him with a gun would do what, exactly?
Put the fear of God into him, or at least the fear of man. Some people have no respect and need to learn it. But obviously it doesn't work if you do it alone - or if you're too threatening. I don't think carrying is even a load-bearing element.
(If you're losing dominance contests all over the place, why
would they have respect? Winning dominance contests is
fun. It's like winning fights, but nobody gets hurt and the loser is an abstract group more often than not.)
The Second Amendment has to do with well-regulated militias, which are not involved here.
It's an absolute construction - it provides context but otherwise has no bearing.
Compared to death, yes, it is petty. You are not going to die of annoying neighbours.
Where does death enter into it? They're winning dominance contests and forcing you out, so you turn the tables and force
them out.
Most citizens of the United States are not part of a historical Japanese military class, and I doubt very much that most of the population of North America at the time of the formation of the country knew terribly much (if anything) about who or what samurai were.
But the people engaged in the enterprise of forming the country
were familiar with
European history, which could well have included the ban on peasants carrying swords within cities. Why not? They had enough of a survey to construct an electoral college, and that wasn't even in England.
(Thomas Jefferson believed that the cultivation of republican virtue required that the people be educated in
philology - and to learn enough Old English to read books from before the Norman yoke. The true reactionary is either an anarchist or Confucius.)
To humour you, perhaps to actually get things enforced (huge onerous fines might be nice)? Change state laws about driving licenses (raising the driving age to 18, enforce more stringent penalties for violating laws; on this note, having police not carry guns)? Create a homeowner's association to exclude non-residents from the neighbourhood? Put in speedbumps and other infrastructure that forces slow driving through the neighbourhood (the more stuff is in your way, the slower you have to drive to not die)?
If you, a decent and law-abiding person who actually lives in the neighborhood, get a noise ordinance passed, and then it's noon on a Sunday and your kid's having a birthday party, what's to stop the pettiest person on the block from calling the cops on you? It's not a dominance contest, nor is it in genuine conflict with the customs of your people - it's your kid's birthday, and Karen is mad that you won the pie bakeoff.
Ideally people would live in communities and have much broader agreement on customs - not
total agreement, which can't happen, but things like "is it acceptable to, every weekend, turn your car on and leave it running in the driveway so that your fucking reggaeton can be heard three blocks away" - and these problems wouldn't arise in the first place. But once they do arise, there's little the government can do about it, unless they're supposed to be in the business of determining, block by block, whose customs apply, and formalizing them in the most literal-minded and exploitable way.
Any community can produce shithead kids, so speed bumps aren't a bad idea (although people are much more willing to be shithead kids on someone else's turf), but once you're talking about writing laws to deal with a difference in customs, you've already lost.
bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 11:08 pm
Wait, minors are allowed to drive in the US‽ Are you joking?
Typically you get a learner's permit around 15, take a driver's education course of about a week, jump through a variable number of hoops (in Maryland you need to prove 60 hours of driving practice; in Virginia you just need an instructor to sign off), become eligible for an intermediate license at 16, take a driving test of varying difficulty (unless you're in Virginia where you just need an instructor to sign off), and then the intermediate license becomes a full license after six months, for government values of "six months". (In my case I think it was 90 days, which became a year and a half because they had a backlog. This is completely representative of the quality of government services in the US.)
I support whatever system they have in New Jersey, a densely populated state with (IME) good drivers, and oppose whatever system they have in Virginia, where nobody knows how right of way works and you have to use hand signals. (This is completely representative of the quality of everything in Virginia. It's not a good state.)
Raising the driving age wouldn't work out. The vast majority of the US has no public transit and trapping kids at home stunts their growth.
Duaj teibohnggoe kyoe' quaqtoeq lucj lhaj k'yoejdej noeyn tucj.
K'yoejdaq fohm q'ujdoe duaj teibohnggoen dlehq lucj.
Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq. Teijp'vq.