monotonous_iterancy
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- May 27, 2012
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I found a newer book in a library called The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know by Philip J. Cook and Kristen A. Gloss. I half-expected it to be in favor of gun control, but skimming it, it seemed fairly balanced in it's Q & A.
One question asks whether gun ownership deters tyranny and prevents genocide - "the core of gun-rights ideology" as the book says. First, we heard the pro-gun argument. Then the anti-gun argument. It was fairly intelligent, and I was wondering what you all have to say about it.
One question asks whether gun ownership deters tyranny and prevents genocide - "the core of gun-rights ideology" as the book says. First, we heard the pro-gun argument. Then the anti-gun argument. It was fairly intelligent, and I was wondering what you all have to say about it.
[...]Gun control advocates see these lessons differently. To them, the best guarantee against tyranny is a strong system of laws and ingrained traditions of tolerance and equality. States tend not to oppress their citizens if they have institutional arrangements that disperse power, safeguard individual rights and political representation, and have mechanisms for peacefully resolving disputes and transferring power. The longer such traditions are locked in, the harder they are to dislodge.
The founders rested their faith in a system of ordered liberty - not private gun owners - to frustrate would-be tyrants. To supporters of this institutional view of democracy, the mass ownership of firearms only increases mayhem. They note that gun violence is higher in societies with more guns and less regulation thereof, so there is a present day cost of stockpiling weapons. What's more, all those citizen gun owners can easily be mobilized to suppress freedom and threaten democracy - think the Klu Klux Klan in the American South or Hitler's brownshirts. Gun control advocates note that history is littered with examples of revolutionaries who took up arms to throw off tyranny but ended up establishing very undemocratic regimes - China, Russia, and Cuba for starters.
So is it true, as gun-rights supporters argue, that a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country's civilian weapons policy and its "liability to commit genocide against it's people" - or even to impose tyranny upon them? The simplest and perhaps least satisfying answer is that we don't have enough data to judge. To feel comfortable asserting that guns preserve freedom, we would need to be able to point to well-armed democracies that have maintained their liberty, and poorly armed (but otherwise similar) democracies that have backslid into tyranny. The problem is that there are not a lot of countries in either category to justify sweeping conclusions.
[...]
Heavily-armed America is a long standing beacon of democracy, but so is the United Kingdom, even though few in Britain own guns. And as we discuss later, Germany was actually liberalizing its gun laws when Hitler came to power. [...] America has both strong democratic institutions and traditions and hundreds of millions of firearms in private hands. Which one is holding the nation together after more than two centuries is subject to opinion, not science.
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