[spectrrr]

a few closing ramblings...

In this post I will say the word "utopia" a bit. By that, I am talking about the "end" goal of betterment that most of us would like to see in society. Even though we do not talk about it like this (I certainly don't use the word utopia in my everyday thought and speach), WE ALL, to one extent or another, use this as an unconcious foundation in shaping many of our thoughts and opinions. bear with me, because I think it is important that we recognize where some of our oppinions come from, because then we can judge their merit based on that.

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Everyone wants a utopian society. I want one. You want one. We all do. Nobody wants crime, no sane person wants violence. Everyone wants to live happily ever after.

Unfortunatly, this goal is NEVER attainable. we can take measures to reduce crime, this is easy. Tougher penalties for breaking the law, more police to catch a guy if he does break the law, better schools so fewer people to turn crime, more armed citizens to deter people that do turn to crime from risking the confrontation, etc.

There are lots of things we can do to lower the number of people committing crimes. BUT there is an inherent evil in this world that will never be fully eliminated. A certain portion of the population will always try to commit a crime against their fellow man. You can never control people to such an extent that it would be possible to eliminate all crime... and if you could, we would have far more troubling things to discuss, if at that point we even had the right could discuss anything....

Trying to take guns away from the hands of private, law abiding citizens by making them difficult and a pain in the ass to own, all in the hopes that you can prevent someone from misusing the gun, or prevent it from falling into the wrong hands, is in my oppinion, an offshoot of the quest for utopia that we often unconciously persue.

We think that if can just get the guns out of the wrong people's hands, we can prevent crime, and we can be one step closer to a perfect, better world. But when we fail to see, accept, and treat the cause of the problem rather than the tool, we are undertaking an excercise in futility. And when our atempts then result in the removal of guns from private citizens (either by legislative banning, or taxing it out of reach), we take one step forward and 5 steps backwards, destableizing more than stableizing, killing more than saving. (Which is NOT what you wanted in the first place when you passed the legislation!)

limiting, banning, or removing guns will never change the people that will laways commit crime (they've been there since Cain and Able, they're not going anywhere). Distrubiting guns into the hands of responsible private individuals however WILL serve to contain the damnage done by those who do not see fit to play by the rules of society.

Utopia simply is not availlable, because utopia at any cost ceases to be a utopia.



It's late, I'm probably making less and less sense here... I'll retire to bed before my thoughts lose all cohension whatsoever.

-Francis