Kimstu
May 31, 2022, 4:40pm
628
Martin_Hyde:
Frankly maybe you just don’t understand that we trade lives for rights every single day, and that is why guns upset you. The rights that allow you to live your life today, are to some degree being traded for other lives all the time.
It is true that there’s always a tradeoff between lives and rights, but that tradeoff is especially, hugely, catastrophically unbalanced in the case of gun rights. As I remarked in a concurrent thread:
Kimstu:
[…] during the last few decades the gun industry and the conservative movement have built up a really toxic “gun-rights culture” in the US, where millions of people erroneously believe that the mere fact of owning or carrying a gun makes them some kind of patriotic hero fundamentally defending the rights and safety of their fellow-countrymen by their very existence.
This is delusional. Private gun ownership, even widespread private gun ownership, isn’t doing anything in reality to prevent government tyranny in these days of modern armies and law enforcement. But the people who believe that it does are understandably very resistant to any proposed measure that restricts their gun ownership rights in any way at all. (And of course, it’s also a very useful belief in that it rationalizes maximizing the gun owner’s own convenience and enjoyment while dismissing any negative consequences for other people.)
I don’t think we’re really going to significantly change that culture without uprooting this outdated and heavily fetishized constitutional enshrinement of a right to gun ownership. I know that for a couple hundred years the US managed to balance our interpretation of Second Amendment rights with common-sense approaches to limiting the risks of firearms, but I think that horse has left the barn.
I don’t think the gun industry is ever going to be satisfied again with anything less than uncompromising allegiance to the principle of unrestricted gun rights, let the chips (and corpses) fall where they may. That culture will not really change until the constitutional status of gun ownership as an inalienable right changes.
We are sacrificing tens of thousands of lives annually in service to maintaining a right that is far, far less meaningful and effective than most of its supporters wishfully believe. That’s the most frustrating part.