I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
This is a topic I’ve gotten disagreement on from my fellow lefties for a long time, and I’m glad they’re finally starting to understand. I’ve always believed in strong gun control laws, but not a ban.
The issue with strong gun control laws is that they would definitely be leveraged by authoritarian governments against the interests of the common people. I’m not really a fan of complete gun ownership freedom, but even in the not-quite-as-overtly-fascist past of US politics, it’s been conspicuous how often state gun laws were tightened when minorities started arming themselves, while the ‘white men shooting up schools’-issue is pretty much being ignored.
But you can’t start your scenario from after there’s already a fully situated authoritarian government in place. If you’re starting from there then there’s no actual law about anything at all anyway, guns or otherwise.
And secondly, you’re arguing as if strong gun control laws means a gun ban, which aren’t at all the same thing.
Fair enough. I guess it depends on how authoritarian and anti-progressive you think most western governments were before they started to tune into the Trump bs; it’s a completely different conversation if you think that we need a revolution before enacting strong gun control laws.
It’s really easy to declare someone who belongs to a political movement or politicized minority as ‘not fit for gun ownership’, the further away from the current political center the easier.
Strong gun laws doesn’t mean a test of political views for gun ownership. Strong gun laws means things like for example to have access to a gun a person must not have a recent conviction of initiating physical violence. Calling these things “strong gun laws” is really a purposely misleading term, because what we’re actually talking about is truly dirt-basic levels of obviously warranted restrictions.
But imo if you meet these extremely reasonable precaution requirements then after that you should be able to own basically any type of weapon you want short of WMDs. As long as you can meet increasingly tighter training and ownership restrictions then imo you should even be able to own the top of lethality weapons like a tank, rpg, or jet fighter
Which is pretty easy to get if you attend protests and the government intents to effectively ban leftist activists from having legal access to guns. Wrongfully charging protesters with resisting arrest is already commonplace in many EU countries, and “the protesters started it” is standard fare when people ask why the police attacked a peaceful protest. If activists started arming themselves, they would definitely use these, especially if they took them to protests (though that would be illegal anyway in my country).
So what you’re saying is, we basically can’t have strong gun laws until our political systems are deeply changed in one way or another?
I’d agree