Of course you’re not. We know you’re beyond the reach of facts and logic and lacking in human empathy. But it may be a surprise to you to know that not everyone does everything for personal benefit. Exposing you as an unscrupulous troglodyte is something of a public service, so that others who see your posts – especially your reprehensible opinions about guns, gun violence, law enforcement, and (going back to the OP) about the terrific benefits of routinely beating up one’s kids, thus inculcating them with the idea that violence is the first and best approach to dealing with conflict – will know to give your posts all the consideration they deserve.
Nope.
That’s a stupid statement, anyway.
What the drug dealer is doing is 100% illegal and 100% of his product hurts somebody in some form. What I do is 100% legal and heavily regulated, and I pay taxes and employ people. And less than 1% of all firearms in existance ever harms anyone. Bad analogy on your part.
Nah. I’m just pointing out that if you’re going to take pride in the fact that “No gun used in a crime has been traced back” to you, then you should accept a couple of other facts: one, the things were originally sold legally, and possibly the ones used in a crime haven’t been traced yet. As long as you’ve followed the law–and I have no doubt that you have–I’ve no issue with you selling the thing. My complaint is the ease in our society of getting the weapons for nefarious purposes.
Then why are you taking it out on me?
I didn’t think I was. I’m genuinely curious. I do now, though, that some weapons are stolen from the military and some, no doubt, are stolen from the manufacturer. But in general, aren’t the vast majority (approaching damn near 100%) legally sold in the first place?
Huh. Most illegal drug use doesn’t hurt anyone. Especially in states where weed is illegal. Sure, some does. Is it a higher percent than the percent of guns that hurt someone? Maybe? Guns hurt a lot of people. My grandfather killed himself because he happened to have a gun handy-by when he had a fit a depression. My husband’s cousin killed his girlfriend because he was careless while cleaning a gun.
The 100% illegal may be partially true - though not so in countries like Portugal - but the second part of the phrase not so much. Do LSD, MDMA, and cannabis hurt somebody in some form? Sure, they can hurt people who take them but the industry providing them is not aiming to hurt their customers, they’d prefer repeat orders.
And the manufacture/growth and distribution of those substances is only “hurting someone” in that it is a competitive industry run in an illegal market.
I could theoretically kill you with MDMA, if I could convince you to take a dose sufficient to give you serotonin syndrome, but that is not going to happen with LSD or cannabis.
Unlike guns.
If one of the guns you personally sold was in that less than 1% what would you feel?
Other than the total lack of recoil of course.
To be fair, drug dealers employ people too, and they all pay at least some taxes of some kind, even if they never file any tax forms for their drug-dealing business. And as puzzlegal and scudsucker noted, even many illegal drugs aren’t actually harming their users, especially not when used in strict moderation.
By that reasoning, we could equally well argue that it’s fine to encourage people to deliberately expose themselves to rabies or lightning strikes. After all, less than 0.0001% (and that’s probably a generous overestimate by several orders of magnitude) of all rabies virus cells ever harm anyone. And hey, less than one in a million lightning strikes ever harms anyone, either.
In reality, of course, those comfortably tiny-looking percentages don’t mean that rabies germs or lightning strikes aren’t harmful and dangerous. If somebody was wilfully trying to increase other people’s proximity and exposure to rabies germs or lightning strikes, that would rightly be considered stupid and unethical behavior.
“There’s so much of this dangerous stuff around that only a minuscule percentage of it ends up actively hurting someone, so there can’t be any objection to spreading around more of it” is not a logical or persuasive argument.
Guess you never heard of the opiod epidemic.
And how many billions of dollars has Purdue been sued for, despite them manufacturing 100% legal and heavily regulated opiods?
You’re blaming the wrong people. It’s 100% the fault of the opioid users and their lack of willpower. Unless they are your friends and family, in which case you can blame the doctors.
I probably know a lot more about the opioid epidemic than you do. I work for a large insurance company that is likely to pay a big chunk of money over the actions of the pharmaceutical industry, drug stores, and certain doctors who helped make it happen, and my team estimates how much my employer will pay.
A large fraction of the people who die from illegal opioids were first hooked on legal ones.
But yes, people who sell illegal drugs and lace them with fentanyl get a special room in hell.
However, you might have noticed that i mentioned “especially states where weed is illegal”. I forget where you live, if you’ve said, but i suspect you live in a state that outlaws most uses of cannabis. And a large fraction of the illegal drug industry is cannabis, which is less harmful than booze, and quite possibly less harmful than cigarettes.
And back in the 80s, i had an employee who needed chemotherapy, and whose doctor recommended cannabis to help with the nausea. He bought clean, hydroponically grown weed from an illegal operation. They were a godsend, who added a lot more value to the world than gun merchants.
So is driving without a seatbelt, but as you told us you think that this rule is bullshit so you don’t enforce it. Curious, how something being illegal matters when you want it to, and doesn’t matter when you don’t.
This is a laughable lie. A drug dealer selling pot isn’t hurting anyone. Even a drug dealer selling harder drugs may or may not hurt someone.
Besides, a drug user may hurt themselves, but a gun user may hurt others. A gun owner takes agency away from others while a drug user does not.
I agree that we should legalize, regulate, and tax drugs.
Oh, you mean the opiod epidemic that was fueled by legal perscription drugs? Where many people became addicted while following the advice of their doctor in good faith? Just to be clear, THAT is the opiod epidemic you’re referring to?
Quick, short hijack here, but a pet peeve of mine. Hydroponic does not automatically mean it’s better. I’ve grown fantastic bud aeroponically, hydroponically, and in soil (all indoors).
It’s easier to flush fertilizers in a hydro system, but I’ve seen first timers in a hurry for weed skip flushing. Personally, I prefer soil grows using organic fertilizers and a long flush then cure, but I’ve grown great hydro bud.
Kinda like tomato growers arguing over staking plants vs using cages.
/rant party on.
Hydroponic growing doesn’t automatically mean “clean”/pesticide-free.
Large (or even small)-scale grow operations typically mean cramming a lot of plants together in an enclosed setting, so once bugs or disease are introduced they can spread rapidly without competition or natural predators. Pesticides and fertilizers that are used are often characterized as “organic” but may not be safer than their “chemical” counterparts. Hydroponic operations are not pest-free nirvanas.
I see that there’s a controversy in marijuana culture over the use of growth regulators (PGRs), which some think are potentially carcinogenic.
Well, in my employee’s case, “hydroponic” mostly meant, “this was grown locally, indoors, and hadn’t been sprayed with toxic stuff by the feds”. Back then, contaminating crops was part of what they did. I didn’t mean to imply that hydroponic was better than growing in pots.
Fwiw, my BIL has been growing (apparently very high quality) cannabis in pots. He has one pot for each plant that state law allows him, and he babies them, and moves them around on his driveway to maximize how much sun they get.
Allow me to introduce you to the book Dopesick and the award-winning miniseries derived from it, about Purdue Pharma and their trafficking of Oxycontin under false pretenses, manufacturing it in stronger and stronger doses and pushing doctors to prescribe it. Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin were the major contributor to the opioid epidemic. Perfectly legally at the time. Just like your gun shop.
And what you’re doing is “100% legal” only because of the perverted laws typical of the US (or rather, the lack of them) which are unlike gun laws anywhere else in the developed world. It’s not an exoneration of free-wheeling gun trafficking, it’s the major cause of American gun violence.
I’m extremely doubtful that such a wild claim can be backed up by reliable data, mainly because, thanks to gun nuts and Republicans in general, efforts to study gun violence are constantly being suppressed. It’s as if gun nuts are terrified of what the facts would show if systematic studies were done. What they can’t hide, though, is the tremendous rate of gun violence in the US compared to anywhere else in the civilized world.