blackshoe, on Nov 27 2007, 06:08 PM, said:
That some parents are too stupid to keep their guns away from their kids - or teach the kids how to properly handle them and to respect what they can do - does not imply that the rest of the population should be denied their rights.
This is a complex issue - and from the tone of your post, Mike, I doubt anything I can say will affect your opinion. And vice versa.

Well, it really comes down to whose rights are we speaking of?
In most of the world, the concept of individual rights, while recognized to varying degrees, is tempered by a much greater regard for societal interests than is popular in the US. I like to think that we Canadians have a society that is every bit as free, in meaningful ways, than the US...
And the truth is that any balancing of individual rights against societal rights is a complex matter. Not only is there a continuum or spectrum of opinion, rather than two distinct camps, but many members of one camp hold views on specific issues that seem at odds with the main theme of their camp.
Thus proponents of the supremacy of individual rights are often strong advocates of a harsh penal justice system, including heavily armed police, mandatory jail terms, limited parole, and the death penalty...all of which require a strong government presence and role. They are usually anti-abortion: they claim the right to tell a woman what to do. They are often proponents of amendments to the constitution to ban flag-burning (which surely is a matter of freedom of individual expression), banning certain political parties, supporting the Patriot Act and its invasion of civil liberties, and so on. While proponents of societal interests will argue that a woman has the right to choose: that society's interest in the unborn child is trumped by individual freedom, and so on.
Furthermore, it is always possible to engage in pushing an opponent's argument to conclusions that are unfair.
Thus, and I stress that I am merely doing this to show how it could be done, not because I for one moment think Blackshoe feels this way:
My opinion is that the rights of the people killed or wounded by privately owned handguns in the US should trump the rights of the (far greater) number of perfectly innocent and responsible gun owners: take away their handguns and what have they lost, in comparision to the restoration of life and health to the victims of stolen, carelessly stored, or owned-by-irrational-people handguns. Society's interest in preserving these lives, in reducing the human and economic cost of these shootings outwieghs the selfish interests of gun owners..
And I'd argue that presumably those who disagree view their right to own a handgun as far more important than the lives of the thousands who die every year as a result of inadequate gun laws. Don't take away the handgun I never use, just so a few thousand people I don't know and don't want to know can go on living: what have they ever done for me? Besides, I'm sure that it is their fault if they get killed.
Of course, the truth is far more complex than that, and the arguments of the gun owners are neither as heartless nor as foolish as this would suggest. And only the most naive would expect a strong gun law to have a significant immediate impact.... but only the most naive of gun owners can really 'blame' careless gun owners for the death of innocent children... is any one really arguing that careless parenting is not now nor ever will be a fact of life? And is the therefore inevitable loss of innocent life (the children are often too young to be morally at fault) really a fair price to pay for anyone to own a handgun?
And so on. Blackshoe, I agree that it is unlikely that either of us will change our minds, but I do realize that there are two sides to the issue.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari