Re: Sharing docum... OT gun control

On 23/05/15 02:51, Chris Bannister wrote:
> On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 03:33:27PM +1200, worik wrote:
>> The face that there is a good use for some thing does not mean we should
>> accept it.  It is a trade off, mostly, between the good and bad.  Take
>> guns: There are good reasons to own guns.  I do not own any guns because
>> the most likely use case for a gun at my place is too horrid to think
>> about.
> I wonder what is considered a good reason to own a gun. Is it to hunt
> down some poor defenceless animal in the weekend?
>
Now we're starting to really get off-topic but I'll go even further. 
Most of the gun control rhetoric I know of comes out of the US so, if 
anyone cares, some of the original reasons for why the US enshrined gun 
ownership, as understood by some random guy on the other side of the 
world hundreds of years later...

The founders saw that one of the problems with governments was standing 
armies: if you have them they are expensive so you tend to use them to 
take over your neighbours and get money to pay them. If you go back to 
the Romans, governments/Casears/coalitions rose or fell based on the 
support they had from the military.

The solution was to be a 'stay at home' country, do away with the 
majority of the army, and have everyone potentially able to be called up 
in times when defensive actions were needed. The idea was that the rump 
army 'professionals' could lead and train the 'amateurs' and the 
government would save even more money if the ordinary citizen had his 
own weapon that he knew how to use and trained with it occasionally in 
peace time with the the local militia organisation. In WWI this was 
still mostly the situation so that even though the US entered the war 
officially in 1917 they didn't actually see casualties on the Western 
front until 1918 due to transporting and training the troops (and they 
trained them without referring to the lessons learnt by the other allies 
so their initial casualties numbers were *really* bad). This only really 
changed after WWII when the modern US found they were in a position 
where the whole 'miltary-industrial complex' money making meant that 
they didn't draw down spending on the miltary after the war as everyone 
else did.

Another argument for wholesale gun-ownership coming from the US that may 
or may not be what the founders had in mind (but seems to now be one of 
the founding myths put around by the NRA and friends) is that an armed 
citizenry can rise up and overthrow the government if it gets out of 
control i.e. what the American revolution was all about.

(For context I tend to agree with self-proclaimed US Democrats in 
various comments sections around the internet, read military sci-fi 
written by US Republicans, and get most of my historical and US specific 
current affairs knowledge from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and Common 
Sense shows: http://dancarlin.com/)

-- 
"Believing men would act in their own interest was not cynicism, it turned out, but sheerest optimism; in reality men do not meet so high a standard."
-- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Chapter 84)
http://hpmor.com/

Reece Arnott
Dunedin
New Zealand


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