[MT2008]

Originally Posted by S&Wshooter

I'm talking about those "permanantly locked up pscopaths" burt mentioned, not just any regular old felon

Except that he's considering unfit to own a firearm as somehow equivalent to being worthy of permanent lockup and/or death sentence.

Originally Posted by BurtReynoldsMoustache

I consider background checks, waiting periods, and all other associated paper work antithetical to the ideal. They only exist because of criminals.

Unfortunately, the world rarely works in "ideal" ways. Wanting to fulfill some sort of ideal is just not rational.

Those measures also exist because of people other than criminals - again, children, the mentally ill, people who aren't citizens, etc. Liberty isn't about being able to do anything you want without any laws whatsoever. It's about having the least intrusive government possible, which is not the same thing as complete anarchy. Most reasonable people accept that their personal liberty has limits where there are tensions with societal cohesion. And this isn't something new, either - John Locke, and Montesquieu, and almost every philosopher who inspired the founding fathers agreed. What people like you promote is basically total freedom for its own sake, as opposed to freedom for the sake of preserving life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (which is the intent of classic American liberalism).

Originally Posted by BurtReynoldsMoustache

Then should Colt and FN be held liable for selling to the US and our allies? They know what we're going to be doing with their products. The only difference between us and them is our ideological goals. Nobody ever fights on what they would consider to be the "wrong side", members of FARC have the same sense of duty and righteousness as any legitimate army.

"The only difference"? You talk about that like it's trivial? Are you so morally bankrupt that you see no important difference between the U.S. government and FARC?

This is quite curious to me. Libertarians claim to be "patriots", and yet when it comes to foreign policy, their sense of moral equivalence (equating the U.S. with FARC, as you are doing now) reeks of the same sort of idiocy I hear from leftists. Of course, it's possible (albeit rare) for leftists to be right about some things for the wrong reasons, but I still don't get how the Libertarians don't see how similar they are to the people they despise. If they had their way, America would be unassertive in the world.

Actually, it's one of the reasons I stopped identifying as a Libertarian...they talk so much naive bullshit about foreign affairs that I find them impossible to respect on almost anything else.

Originally Posted by BurtReynoldsMoustache

It's possible Viktor Bout genuinely believes that what he is doing is right. He doesn't see hurting Americans as wrong because we are not on his side.

Then we have no reason to see ourselves as wrong because he's hurting us. Besides, Bout isn't helping FARC for ideological reasons, anyway. His cause is himself, and profiting by selling weapons to people who need them but shouldn't have them. Leaving FARC and the U.S. aside, anyone who doesn't think it's wrong to sell weapons to people who use them to carry out ethnic cleaning, genocide, and campaigns of terror (like most of Bout's customers) obviously is not right in the head.