Premise: Supreme Court rules 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. All states eventually become shall issue states, where any person with a clean criminal record can buy and carry a handgun.
Larry: That’s insane, people would be shooting each other over parking spaces. It would be a shooting gallery everywhere!
Chuck: You must be a very trusting person.
Larry: Are you nuts? I don’t trust people to have guns, that’s the point!
Chuck: You trust the people in charge enough to let them decide who can and cannot be armed. You trust them with your life by letting them disarm even you personally, who you presumably do trust.
Who is the bigger idealist, Chuck or Larry? Which one is more cynical about human nature?
7 responses so far ↓
1 Jason // Mar 19, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Man, you libertarians…i’ll never get it. Neither one of these scenarios are good..but if you really think it’s a good thing that everyone and anyone can CARRY a handgun…ouch.
2 pax // Mar 19, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I’m not saying either scenario is an ideal situation, but in life there ARE no ideal situations.
It’s a simple either/or : Either you believe everyone should be allowed to have guns or you believe that someone should be given the power to decide who can have them.
I could just as easily turn your statement around and say “if you really think it’s a good thing that those in power should decide who can and cannot carry a gun… ouch.”
This goes to one of the essential differences between progressivism and libertarianism. As a libertarian I don’t claim that my solutions are perfect, but progressives seek perfection and have no qualms about using the hammer of state to achieve it.
You haven’t answered the question, by the way. Which character in my story is the bigger idealist?
3 Jason // Mar 20, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I honestly have no idea. It’s a conundrum. There’s no right answer.
When it comes down to it, the constitution says people have the right to bear arms, so they do. But that was also written 200+ years ago and there’s no NEED for people to carry guns in 2008.
The basis of libertarianism puts the ultimate trust in the individual. And, unfortunately, there’s too many people that can’t be trusted. The problem is, who gets to decide who can and cannot be trusted. And that, my friend, is ANOTHER question that can’t be answered in real terms.
All we can do on any real level is try to elect people that we can trust to make certain decisions for us. That’s the basis of government, and unfortunatley sometimes it works, lots of times it doesnt, but this is the world we live in.
And that gets us back to the Obama/Hilary/McCain discussion….and as an update, I am still not voting for any of these hacks.
4 pax // Mar 20, 2008 at 4:59 pm
We can’t elect people we can trust, since the nature of power is to corrupt anyone it touches, and the nature of the inherently corrupt is to seek power whenever possible.
This is why the only viable solution is to devolve power as locally as possible, shrinking government to the point that a political position has so little real power that it doesn’t give its holder the potential for corruption.
All political systems put their trust in some individual, the difference with libertarianism is that it puts the trust equally on each to be responsible for themselves, and no one else. Maybe some people can’t be trusted to be responsible for themselves, but it doesn’t then follow that we should trust someone else to be in charge of them either.
5 Jason // Mar 20, 2008 at 5:06 pm
The problem is, that you claim that this is the “only viable solution” when in fact it is 110% NOT VIABLE. Those in power will not give it up, and the people will NEVER be organized enough to take it from them. That’s why I keep saying that your views are amazing, fantastic and great on PAPER, but very few of them are viable in the real world.
6 pax // Mar 20, 2008 at 5:20 pm
They are viable in the real world, it’s just a difficult matter to get from here to there.
All we libertarians can do is speak and educate, changing one mind at a time. It’s still sort of a democracy, and enough people feeling the same way can move us in that direction. In the 70s the highest tax bracket was 90%, we used to be even less free than we are now.
There’s going to be a libertarian march on Washington DC on June 21st and I’ll be there. We have a guy here in NJ running for Senate named Murray Sabrin who is a Ron Paul Republican, he’s frontrunning for the Rep nomination at this point. These ideas are spreading, and maybe we’ll never get there, but if we can just start moving in the right direction it would be something.
7 Jason // Mar 21, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Umm, i think i have just watched the gayest video I have ever seen.
JJ French from Twisted Sister: “I Want Barack”
Add this to the list of reasons I wont be voting for the guy: http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=93389
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