I don't think there's an issue with being angry with American left-wing "reasonable restrictions", but that's because those are never reasonable, they cater to exclusive philosophical ideals that do not account for certain freedoms that should hold true for the American people. And those freedoms should not hold true because they are in the Constitution, but because they are the most all-inclusive of any ideal or because they are the closest to being purely or morally right. The restrictions that have been proposed, or at least the major ones, in the last 20-30 years, or even the GCA, are not reasonable, but arbitrary because they are based on empiricism, and not philosophy. That is one flaw of our governing body, that it equates what is right to an arbitrary "majority" perspective (which can lead to 50/50 deadlocks) as opposed to a moral perspective that tries to account for everyone and not over or under-reach. What's more is that in creating a government, or any institutonalized system, is that there are selfish assholes who have personal desires and exploit sensationalism and partisanism in order to make a quick buck or to make themselves content, the ramifications or implications of their actions be damned. This is the underlying reason why we hate ALL politicians.
In the end, this attachment to arbitration, or to ideals that reinforce any form of selfishness, is what is wrong with any topic, especially the gun debate in America. We have people on the left exploiting the political system either for their own agenda and success in the game that is the systemic institution which is man-made and in the grand scheme, irrelevant, and we have people on the right that do the same thing, even if their fight correlates with ours. But there are people who believe for whatever reason that owning a firearm and self-reliance are good things, or bad, and they look at it with varying types of MORAL arguments and not empirical ones. The ones that are more moral are clearly the ones that are correct, and many come to the conclusion that it's more moral to own a gun and defend ones life than it is to not defend ones life. That's a whole other topic in and of itself but that's an overlay of it.
And in an institution where there are numerous semantic differences between person to person, there ought to be some TRULY reasonable guidelines as to who is allowed a gun and who isn't, and they should be based in MORAL REASONING and not EMPIRICISM, which is just observation of data, which can be skewed or flawed by any number of individuals that contribute to it. This is what Metcalf meant, or ought to have meant, that at the very least, what we determine to be the limit for gun ownership in America (or any issue) should not be absolute or polarizing, but that it should be based in what is morally right.
Not what any statistic says. Statistics are empirical and therefore flawed in dictating what is "right" so to speak.
Not what any document dictates, including the Constitution (the Constitution is only valuable if it adheres to a morality that is all-inclusive, bear in mind, and whether or not it does this now, or has ever, is up to philosophical interpretation, which can be and is skewed and dictated properly numerous times in history, depending on morality's current progress. I'm sure the world's worst dictators all had their own "constitutions" and laws of the land which were bullshit and exclusionary)
But in what we philosophically determine is for the greatest benefit of ALL people, a la John Stuart Mill. When we apply this philosophy to law and society, and consider practical application (confiscation would not necessarily work in America, and it would disenfranchise a lot of people) The answer is there.
I say it's closer to the right wing where guns are present, but not reverting to a world where everyone can walk around carrying an M4A1 with an affixed M203. The whole goal of creating a society is to make life not brutish to the point where that is necessary. But we are transitioning from being vulgar predatatorial animals into civilized beings, always, so there will be a need for the means of self-protection from those who choose to be more irrationally animal than those who are rationally human. But it's not a state of nature just as much as it is not a utopia. We're somewhere in the middle, and there should be a REASONABLE limit in that middle ground, and, again, the determining factor for that cannot be on one side or the other because of how morally inconsiderate or self-defeating that is toward human progress.
tl;dr Philosophy morality and rationale, not empirical evidential induction/deduction, because that will be easily skewed or flawed by anyone.
|