Monday, January 4, 2010
Penn Jillette on Freedom
And I echo his sentiment. Especially when it comes to gun control. Anti-gunners will forever wave around body counts. No number will be low enough for them. It doesn't matter if 30,000, 3,000, or 30 people die each year from gun shots. They will always use that number to call for greater restriction and even prohibition of guns.
Look at England for example. Anti-gunners constantly use England as the benchmark for gun control in the western world. Yet even with their incredibly low firearms death rate, the gun controllers in England are still calling for more restrictions.
Just as you can't "placate a lion by letting him eat only your foot", you cannot placate the gun controllers by "compromising" with any of their demands. Any "compromise" with the gun controllers will be thanked with another campaign to further restrict your rights.
So when the gun controllers ask if being inconvenienced is worth saving a few lives, I say no, only because I know enough lives can never be saved to stop them from wanting to further inconvenience me. I refuse to offer my foot to the lion.
4 comments:
Ask a gun controller if they would be "inconvenienced" in the same manner each and every time they wanted to speak in public?
Or even in private--guess what the answer would be.
Ask if they would be willing to put up with a background check to go to church each week--guess what the answer would be.
If they aren't willing to put up with the same minor "inconveniences" to exercise their rights, why should we put up with them to exercise our rights?
Of course, they'd make the excuse that speaking in public and going to church doesn't kill people and that the only purpose of guns is to kill people.
Isn't it amazing the dichotomy in their thinking.
They are okay with millions of people being able to commit fraud, libel, heck even say things like "Give me all your money or I'm going to beat you to death" without requiring restrictions on that right.
But let one thug wave a gun at a cash register and NOW we have to have body cavity searches to buy a .22 caliber target pistol.
I think one of the reasons gun controllers would never advocate the same restrictions on speech as they do guns is because they benefit from unrestricted, irresponsible speech.
It allows the media to do things like say criminals are running around with machine pistols in Times Square and portray "assault weapons" as machine guns.
If journalists were held to the same standards as gun owners, there would be no journalists left. They'd all be prohibited persons and the gun controllers would lose their most powerful allies.
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