In the twenty-first century when we are supposedly smarter, more civilised, and better at being a society, it is pretty obvious that when you look around at the amount of disdain that a lot of people have for the poor, refugees, the elderly, and anyone who looks different in terms of race and/or nationality, that the improvements made in society were all fought for by the masses and won and then fought against by the rich and powerful, who are now very much winning.
Society doesn't tend towards justice, it doesn't tend towards equality, it doesn't tend towards equity, it doesn't tend towards what is morally good or what is kind, or what is fit and proper. Everything has to be fought for. Since everyone fights for what they think is to their personal advantage, then competing interests will naturally fall to whomever can control the most power. Power in society is very closely correlated to how much capital one has and can control.
On the whole, people have always been naturally selfish but as the last forty years have seen the silverware of the state sold off for a song and the size and scope of government shrink to the point where it has become anaemic and increasingly unable to function, the level of people's selfishness and outright hostility to anyone vulnerable has more than made up the difference.
We don't really live in an Orwellian future because government is too small to care about the details of people's lives except when they might owe taxation or other obligations to it. The future land that we live in is more like the drugged up Huxwellian 'Brave New World', Arendt's banal evil metastasised, and Bonhoeffer's merry land of stupidity where sections of the population are more likely to speak in slogans than actually engage any part of their brains to consider anything. Life in western nations is becoming more brutal, nasty and short; empirically.
This brings me to the two most popular pieces of duckspeak which are yelled by the vocal band of howling stupids. These are 'rights' and 'liberty'; which are nominally very noble words which used to mean things but are now employed as magic words by people who look sillier than a crowd cosplaying as wizards. These are the bands of howling stupid people who walk around with upside down flags and spout notions of maritime law, while being a hundred miles inland.
Words should mean things. Although I like the semantics of whether or not a '15 Items Or Less' sign at a supermarket checkout is acceptable or not, or whether the use of the word 'literally' as an intensifier is wrong but meaningful, using words like 'rights', 'liberty', and 'freedom' implies that the speaker wants to convey some quanta of information. Using words in duckspeak where no inform is being conveyed at all, is worse than using words incorrectly. I intend to take some words back and add meaning to them before I go further.
A 'right' is an ownable interest in some good, which may or may not be real, or an ownable interest in performing some action. That ownable interest is always backed up by force of law; because if it is not, then the good in question or the ability to perform the action, may be carried off, stolen, or destroyed.
If we want to be brutally brunt about it, the only genuine inalienable right is one's right to life. Literally every other right which exists is backed up by force of law, whether statutory, common, or natural. The reason for this is that although someone's life might be destroyed by the actions of another or even one's self, one's right to life is unable to become aliened because nobody can give their life to someone else. You can not give away minutes or hours of your life, any more than you can package it up in a gift box.
All of the crimes against a person or against humanity, are crimes which destroy people's lives outright or violate that part of someone which is inseparable. I do not care if you believe whether or not there is a god in this line of argument or not, we shall take it as fact is that there is some essential part of a person which is somehow attached to the electrobiomechanical meatbag which they inhabit; which in the olden days was called a 'soul' and which secularism doesn't really have useful terminology for. This is important.
You can argue the toss until you are blue in the face about what kind of things constitute one's rights but at very least, one's right to life is the most essential and basic. It is the unit from which all other rights extend.
Crimes such as torture and rape, are so hideous because although they fall short of outright destroying someone's life, they very much violate people's soul and people's dignity.
'Liberty' on the other hand is a condition where one is free from obstacles and hindrances to do an action. I argue that every instance of the existence of law, is an impedance of liberty in some regard. When people talk about freedom, they are taking about the application of liberty, in that freedom is the crystallisation of liberty to do something or the crystallisation to be absent from something. I am at liberty to do a thing if there aren't any impedances to me doing the thing.
To the one person who I am specifically addressing with this blog post, this is where we have a fundamental disagreement. The right to bear arms is specifically a right to an ownable interest in arms and is explicitly stated and defined by law. Whether it is Section 7 of the Bill of Rights Act 1689 or the United States' Constitution, those are both ownable interests defined by and backed by force of law. To suggest that it is God-given when the thing that you rely upon as evidence is a piece of statute law which was passed by sweaty and smelly men in small rooms, is a nonsense and a lie.
Second to this, statute law can be and is changed by acts of parliaments, congresses, referenda and even modified in operation by judges in courts, all the time. If you can not amend a thing called an amendment, then what exactly is it? For the love of banging one's head against the wall, it's literally called an amendment.
Also, I do not think that one can speak about liberty without acknowledging that every increase in the right to bear arms is itself a reduction in the liberty of other people.
Remember, 'liberty' is a condition where one is free from obstacles and hindrances to do an action. The widespread ownership of the instruments which destroy people's lives is very much a hindrance to liberty. One can not say that one is more free to do things if there is an increased expectation that someone else can and will kill you. If you want to talk about the intangible goods of rights and liberties, then you have already conceded that placing obstacles and hindrances to other people by virtue of creating a threat, almost by definition reduces liberty of other people.
"Your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins."
I assume that comments like this from around the 1890s are designed to say that the purpose of civil government is only to prevent bloodshed, adjust rights, and settle disputes. I reject this claim outright, on the basis that if any intangible goods can be claimed then they can also be violated by intangible means. The law has the right to rule on anything where danger might arise, where order might be violated, and where things aught to conform to a common standard.
The only reason that someone owns a weapon is that they want the ability to do harm to some thing or someone else (that also includes for sport). As a gun is purely an offensive piece, its only purpose is to attack someone else. There might be an excuse that guns are used for one's defence but as they fire projectiles, this excuse is a lie. Defence is the state of diffusion of an attack and it is virtually impossible to stop a projectile moving at hundreds of metres per second with another projectile which is moving at hundreds of metres per second. The defence against attacks almost by definition are shields and walls, and parries and blocks. There are no defensive uses of guns.
The desire to own a gun is itself a tacit admission that one's individual liberty has been reduced. Clearly such a person admits that they are not free to go about their business in quiet enjoyment of their surroundings if they need to 'defend' themselves against a threat.
As for the suggestion that a ban on guns would mean that only criminals would get them, I am unmoved by this line of argument as a gun is an offensive piece which its only purpose is to attack someone else. The prevalence of gun shops and legal methods of obtaining them, means that the United States has more guns and more guns per capita than any other nation in the world. It is far easier for a criminal to obtain a gun in the United States than in most countries in the world.
Also, the fact that there is a right to bear arms means that criminals also have the right; which merely means that if someone 'needs' a gun, them it is because of the operation of the law in the first place.
I also reject the platitude that "an armed society is a polite society" because there is simply zero evidence to prove this statement. Killing people is very very rude indeed. By demonstration, the most vocal individuals who are in favour of expanding the right to bear arms, are some of the most boorish and rudest people in the world. Remember, they are fighting for the instruments to cause harm and death, on selfish grounds because they want people to have the means to violate other people's life and liberty.
It makes sense that societies which have decided to abandon their responsibility and care for the vulnerable should demand individual rights at the expense of other people's lives and liberty. People who demand rights at the expense of people's liberty have already decided that other people's lives and liberty are acceptable carrying costs. If you view everyone else in society as expenses and not assets to be defended, then it follows that the improvements in society were all fought for and won are no longer worth the effort.
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