Books, though that may come under the First. But I’d be pretty pissed if they came for my books, even if I could still go to the library or read online.
My car would be annoying, but not if there were a government subsidized Lyft. I don’t think it would work, but assuming it did okay.
Swapping cars for equivalent electric vehicles would be fine with me.
Well I did read the whole question, but clearly not well enough :smack:
Free education and UHC. Not sure if the last comes in under “things you can’t live without” or not. I can, at least at my current age, but many people can’t and at some point as I age the odds are good Ill join them.
Carbon related stuff (cars, or air travel could be another) have been given as examples but some limit in comparability there IMO. A radical ‘Green New Deal’ could really tank the economy IMO (not to go on too much of a tangent on that), or maybe hurt growth and asset values somewhat but not disastrously, or maybe there’s a lot of hype to it but at the end of the day the policies that only push slightly more toward new ways to travel than people would adopt themselves without pushing. Lots of variation in degree there, and ‘let’s eliminate ICE cars’ without a viable replacement doesn’t seem that actually likely.
Although I supposed you could say that gun control is just as much a matter of degree, as in ‘fight to keep’ which guns, any guns? relatively narrow category of guns? fight not to have to meet licensing requirements some people could meet and others couldn’t? etc.
Maybe I have just a different way of thinking but to me being provided govt benefits from other people’s taxes, even if you ‘paid your fair share’ some other time, is not the same thing as being allowed to buy and keep something with your own money. Nor a consumer product, which first amendment rights or rights inferred (by some) from the 14th amendent like abortion rights aren’t either.
Pets sort of fits and I’m not so sure it’s trivial, depends on your worldview in a number of ways. Sure people dying from guns are overwhelmingly more numerous than people dying from dogs, but in between there is one’s view about how much gun control, that could really happen, would make a lot of difference in that. I doubt it could, and also there’s a societal cost from constantly pushing divisive proposals which I think some pro-gun control people ignore, or are even of the mindset that politics should be all about pissing off other people in demographic groups you hold in contempt. Also pet restrictions as in Breed Specific Laws are real in some places. And are completely idiotic policies, not debatable like gun control. I’d ‘fight’ (not literally) very hard to opposed BSL in my town if it were possible (but NJ doesn’t allow municipalities to enact BSL and there seems no support for it statewide).
There is nothing that fits within the limits you give that I’d be willing to sacrifice thousands of other people’s lives for.
I understand liking guns. I understand wanting to own one (or more). I’ve considered it myself several times. I don’t, however, understand that desire trumping all other rational thought. If I were a gun owner and I had a choice between a rational Democrat who might restrict gun ownership in some way, and a person like Trump who might not restrict gun ownership, I think I should be a pretty easy choice. Sure, being able to keep my gun and buy more would be better, but not worth sacrificing everything else I care about. Some people seem to think about their guns the Wayfair I think about my children.
To answe the OP, nothing. I love my boat. It’s our main recreational outlet. I spend a lot of money and time on my boat. I feel free when on the water. If recreational boating were outlawed or restricted, I wouldn’t like it one bit. I’d do what I could to lobby to preserve my access to boating. I would not, however, vote for candidates promising boat-rights if they were awful in every other way. So, I don’t think there is any product I care about like (some) gun owners seem to care about their guns.
Porn.
I’m with Uke on this, porn.
What right do the rest of you have to drive a car or other motorized vehicle. There is a reason such things require training, registration, insurance and licensing to own and operate, they are deadly devices and no where in the comstitution do I see a right to them unless you intend to use it as a weapon.
We know that at least one Democratic candidate has said that people will no longer own their own cars. This would make life in rural areas impossible.
For shared cars or public transportation to work, everyone would need to live closer together. With that would come restrictions on housing: where you live, what kind of home you live in, how big it can be, how much land (if any) you can own. My right to own a house of my choosing is as important to me as my right to self-defense.
Cite?
Why?
Lots of people want to live in walkable cities; that’s why the center cities of many of our older cities have become so damned expensive. But zoning, parking minimums, setback requirements and the like prevent such clustered housing/retail environments from being built today.
To get people to live closer together, nobody needs to make laws mandating it; the need is to get rid of the laws preventing it.
Yes, Universal Health Care please.
I’m content that I’ve never owned a gun or a car (though if I had a family, I’d want a car.)
While you arbitrarily rule out “pet ownership” from your hypothetical, this is a reality for people who live with bully-breed dogs (pit bull types and their relatives). Some jurisdictions ban them, some have taken them from their families by force, and some have reversed bans after second thoughts (and evidence of the ineffectiveness of breed bans) piled up.
It shouldn’t be surprising that “underground railroad”-type organizations have sprung up to move dogs of banned breeds to safety.
Legislators have responded by writing BSL (breed-specific legislation) that explicitly forbids veterinary opinions from being used to define a dog’s breed – because the legislators suspect vets will say whatever’s necessary to protect the dogs. In other words, the legislators anticipate civil resistance to their law (but somehow still assume it’s a good idea).
Defiance of the government to protect nonhuman family members extends beyond dogs, of course. Despite repeated warnings not to bring animals along on hurricane evacuations, enough people have started to refuse evacuation – or bring them anyway – that law and gov’t policy have been changing.
Years ago, an outbreak of some disease in California caused factory farms to worry about their investment in birds, so the legislature considered a bill requiring the agriculture department to kill large numbers of chickens and other fowl to prevent the spread. The order included birds kept as pets, like parrots and pigeons, and included strict quarantine rules – no birds were to leave the infected zones or the state.
I was active on a lot of parrot message boards and online sites at the time (living with parrots myself, although on the East coast) and I can tell you that large numbers of people smuggled their parrots out of California immediately in a sort or “underground railroad.” Large numbers of people either transported birds out of the quarantine zone, prepared to do so, or cooperated.
As it happened, the “we’re coming to kill your family members” part of the bill never was put into effect, but the mere word of being considered it immediately invalidated the quarantine, as birds were moved out of the zone without medical supervision.
People are generally pretty serious about the government banning or killing their family members.
Apparently this is an issue that continues to be in the news.
Wait… I did?
You may wish to reread that… I mentioned that taking of current pets is out of consideration, but I surely didn’t rule out the banning of pet ownership- it was literally my answer!
Under the limitations of the OP, there is nothing that I would fight that hard for. As long as we have the basic necessities, food, shelter, etc., and the civil rights enshrined in the Constitution, I’m good (enough). That doesn’t mean there aren’t certain things I would miss, but I wouldn’t be marching on Washington for them.
Smokers sacrifice 50,000 of other peoples lives every year. 35,000 people, many of them “others”, die in auto crashes. Stats are tough, but alcohol kills 90,000 people a year and of those there are nearly 8000 homicides and 13000 drunk driving deaths, so it appears that alcohol kills more "others’ than guns kill “other”. I could give up booze.
**
Let us not turn this into yet another gun debate, eh? **
Myself, to answer the OP- I wouldnt give up the internet or cars. Cars more than internet.
Also, pets, and single family homes. (Yes, the Op ruled out homes, but single family homes have been a target)
Guns endanger other people’s lives. The only thing I own that has a realistic chance of killing someone else is my car, and I’d be happy to give that up if we can get decent public transport in our city.
(Also in the UK) Quite so - although I might narrow the BBC down to Radio 4* & BBC4 - I’m not sure I’d notice if Radio 1/2/3 & BBC1/2/3 went away. I am aware that there must be people who think otherwise.
As for “keeping” guns, I’m rather happy that (due to UK law) guns are very seldom seen here** and that the Old Bill you see on the street day-to-day are not armed. A change to allow “armed police” or armed civilians/concealed carried or any of that US weirdness would not be welcome. (Hot Fuzz was not a documentary).
** FWIW - knife crime seems to be the fashion right now, fortunately, you cannot (background check or not) buy a gun in B&Q, thugs essentially have to resort to sharpend sticks.
Well like OP later said, banning pet ownership was not excluded and even OP’s actual answer, though an earlier statement said ‘existing’ pets being taken was excluded so that’s a little confusing.
BSL and gun control are actually somewhat parallel issues. Not that your opinion of each has to be the same, or that you have to view each as equally important. But like I said in earlier post comparing them just based on number of people killed by dogs and guns makes the implicit assumption that realistically achievable gun control could make a big difference in the number of people killed by guns. I really doubt that’s true in US conditions, although I’m not actually that opposed to the relative strict gun control in my state (NJ)*, which are much stricter than federal or what there’s any political likelihood of achieving at the federal level in the US IMO.
But in both cases it’s saying you can’t have something other people deem dangerous that even those people (the thinking among them) realize isn’t necessarily dangerous. They are (again the thinking, honest ones) just saying you have to deal with less freedom to have better societal outcomes overall in their opinion. That’s not the equation with having more or less social benefits like ‘free’ healthcare. It’s not freedom to receive free stuff from the govt. Might be desirable, but it’s not freedom. And people can at least argue halfway honestly ‘nobody has ever said take away your car’. That’s BS when it comes to guns, that cat is out of the bag at this point, a lot of people obviously now want to take away various types of guns (will it actually happen is a different issue). And it’s BS when it comes to ‘pit bulls’ also. So pretty parallel, though again fair to opine that guns are a much bigger issue for a given personal POV.
To make me act like a gun-gripper is a high bar to clear. That would require me to openly lie, disregard human life, and threaten to personally murder policemen and wage physical war on the government if they attempted to take my possessions. I’m not sure that there’s ANYTHING that would make me do that, including low-Maslow things.
But if we roll things back, oh, say two orders of magnitude and only require me to be very unhappy about the ban and perhaps willing to try and covertly break the law and keep the contraband (for however well that would work out), there are probably a few things:
Air conditioning.
Toilet paper.
Computers.
Internet.
Cars. (These are actually a low-level Maslow item for me, since getting to work/get paid/get food needs it.)
Also I have numerous hobbies that involve physical objects, and could grudgingly give up any of them if I had to. However if the government systematically came after all my hobbies and demanded I live like an ascetic monk, that would cross a line.
Though again, even there, there’s nothing here that I would threaten to murder people over.
How is banning of pet ownership off the table if your pets can’t be taken away from you?