Deepbluediver wrote:The left believes that people are violent and private citizens shouldn't be allowed to own guns.
The latter belief may be less discriminatory, but it's also more restrictive.
This is a tangent, but I'm not certain of this. I actually support the basic right for law-abiding citizens to own and carry weapons, within reasonable restrictions and with intelligent oversight, so I may not have a clear understanding of the reasoning behind the liberal position in this case, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the idea was that if fewer people have access to guns and they're restricted from more public places, violence itself might not be reduced but that especially deadly and uncontrollable gun violence would be. (The biggest counterargument being that a law-abiding citizen who carries a firearm and knows how to use it is not a source of criminal violence, but a necessary counter to it, and that someone who intends to use a firearm for criminal purposes is never going to be realistically deterred by laws restricting them from owning or carrying guns.)
I've heard from my father many times the much more extreme notion that law-abiding citizens need to have the right to own and bear firearms so that they will be equipped to defend themselves in the event of the police and/or military being turned against the civilian population, and that therefore gun laws should principally never restrict citizens' armaments more than it restricts police armaments. I don't agree with
that, of course, but with recent events I can't help but think that any law-abiding citizen who belongs to one of a few targeted demographics would be entirely justified in thinking "I need to carry a gun because I might have to defend myself against the police." (The idea of being able to successfully defend yourself in this situation is probably entirely unrealistic, of course, but I think it says something if that line of thinking is beginning to sound reasonable.)
Anyway, yes, <redacted> is a horrible human being, a blatant racist, warmonger, and also the candidate every member of my immediate family is voting for.
