I wasn't talking about campus police. I've never really seen them doing anything useful.

Oh, gracious...
 

Jebediah, do you happen to recall my ever mentioning a martial-arts background? What does the sensei tell his pupils about starting fights, provocations, and so on?

He tells 'em "Don't."

Your difficulty here, not so atypical of the 17-21y.o. set, is that you're mistaking me for an asshole when I'm merely stern and occasionally impatient. And on occasion, military, which has its effect too and grates upon the new and tender ego. This is yet well beyond what you've done.

So, being possessed of mature patience, I just laugh at the boomcar boys. They never get invited over for supper. I laugh louder when the boomcar also rattles and buzzes from poor equipment or blown speakers or the speakers loose in their mounts. I'm with you, though, on that those boys don't show any musical taste.

And if I should really require to serve up a cold dish of revenge, I can always find out for sure if they don't like bagpipes... :p

...or make new friends if they do.

If a situation where you need lethal force were to overtake you -- there is nothing the university could offer, either practicably or extravagantly. Less trouble, actually, for you to handle it rather than saddle the university with some kind of bodyguard obligation.

The power to save life is a worthy power indeed. I do not reject it.


I'd hardly call this "different" from any other gang-up assault. Such goblin-children need to be shot immediately they attempt such assault. One of them hit would likely be enough, but the self-defense man will try for three minimum. A group with ball bats is readily lethal enough to justify lethal force in self defense. Such nasty people must be rendered pantsfilling scared of ever doing such things again, for clearly their minds have insufficient check on their urge to be brutal. When that is the case, sufficient check must be supplied. While arrest and imprisonment may dissuade them sufficiently, seeing their pals-in-brutality go down in a pink mist dissuades permanently.

S-a good thing my rights are none of your business.

Guns also have the power to take lives. If allowing guns saves one life in three years but takes five a year, it is not worth it. You have to look at it from the other side too.

So if you had a gun and you got attacked by eight guys with guns you would shoot at them? You be dead before you got to guy number two, if that.

Everyone has equal rights so it is my business. The idea of the right to own guns was to satisfy our biological need of self-preservation. If you can effectively satisfy your biological need of self-preservation without guns, then you do not need guns for self-preservation.

No, sorry to dissapoint but I'm not printing out your every post and framing them on my wall - let alone reading all of them.

I'm not in the 17-21 year old range. Why would you think so? I never considered you an asshole; rigid and disregarding of others in disagreement sure, but never an asshole.

We're in agreement on their musical taste. What I was getting at is if you actually felt like it, would you tell them to knock it off? I've thought about it plenty of times and the thing that holds me back is you don't know who has a gun. Granted they could have a baseball bat instead, but it takes moderate effort to club somebody to death. My roundabout way of getting to to the point: suppose guns are on campus, will a similar oppression occur? How many people will bite their tongue about this or that because they MIGHT have a gun? Sure, they might have a gun anyway but currently you can be reasonably certain they don't.

I wasn't beating on you about that martial-arts question -- I simply had no idea whether this was something you knew about me or not.

In my personal experience, backed up by absolutely every time I go to a gun range, is that it's a psychological truth that when everyone is armed, everyone is also polite. They are, in fact, downright kindly to each other. This is really very pleasant. If I am any measure of average human psychology, this is not from fear of the other armed guys, but of the desire to keep them reassured.

It strikes me, as it has other philosophers, that the reasonable certainty the other fellow doesn't have a gun allows rudeness to crop up. A reasonable certainty that yes, he does, suppresses any urge to be rude, for the cost might be considerably too high, mightn't it?

Got to admit, I prefer good manners over bad. I'm willing to go to some lengths to get them.

The gun range is a subset of people who like to fire guns for sport or safety. No violent intentions there. I have the odd feeling your average thug doesn't go to the shooting range, though I could be wrong.

I'm imagining a return to the Wild West where things are settled by who draws their gun the quickest. Maybe it would create politeness but how much dissent would be squashed along with that? It's a balance and I don't like either extreme.

Really?
Cite.
Again and again, it is not your place to decide for others what they need.
Man, you are a nosy busybody tyrant.

You seem to fail to realize that guns are a double edged sword. It can hurt society just as much as it can help. No one is trying to take away your need to stay alive, it just happens because their can be bigger consequences. It is like the Iran nuclear issue. They have every right to make nuclear energy because they will need it in 8 or so years but we are taking away their right to do it. Why, because we feel that they don’t have the right to make the best available energy source? No, because it is a double edged sword as well. They could possibly use the nuclear technology to make nuclear weapons, which we find unacceptable. The same concept applies to guns.

Guns are not like heroine, I can not just avoid guns like I can heroine. If someone takes heroine, I will never be killed from it. That is the point of the whole debate, what may be worse for the individual may be best for the community.


The idea that we made rights to satisfy our need of self-preservation is the only idea that makes sense. To say we were born with infinite rights not only does not make sense or backed by nature, can be taken out with Occam's razor. The universe is a nihilistic cage, nothing more; it does not give us anything. It is much easier to say that everyone has no rights but just survives than it is to say that everyone has infinite rights. If you get in a street fight to the death there is no one telling you that you can do anything, you just survive. Nature supports the theory of just surviving as well since we don’t see animals doing whatever they want.

Then once society was more or less created, rights came with it to explain our biological feelings and to keep order. That is the only option that makes sense, the idea of a nihilistic cage gives us infinite rights does not.

To you.
I grew-up on a ranch using guns, yes, handguns, every day. A few times to save my life.
That does not matter... it is still not your place.

They don't? They do unless something interferes with their right to do that.

Tell that to my student loan holders. I think I actually still owe for CSU.

I am not trying to take your guns away from your ranch or the general public, just my college campus. That is the only place I have been fighting to get guns banned on this thread, or on this entire board I think.

That is making it too complicated. You can just say that “you can do whatever you need to survive”. The only law of nature could be simplified too "the most adaptive will have their genes passed on". Every action in nature, besides humans and altruistic behavior, can be seen to follow this law. To bring rights into the mix just makes it more complicated, which goes against Occam's razor.

If you attack a lion's "right to self-preservation" it will fight back because that is the best option to ensure its survival (or at least its instinct tell it so, which has stood the test of time). On the other hand, a lion will never attack a cheetah to eliminate competition because by attacking the cheetah, it will put its survival chances at risk. Sure, it can attack the cheetah, nothing is holding it back, but it won’t because the lion follows that one rule.

In order to have rights, something has to give them to us. I have not seen any evidence that suggests that the universe is anything but nihilistic, so the only other options are a god or humans. The god option has no proof either, which brings us to humans. Is that a definite statement? No, if proof comes up that the universe is not nihilistic or there is a god my statement will be turned around, but until then that is what all available evidence points too.

Hmm. I don't know about that. For the most part, my country is quite a polite place to be. There're the usual problems of loitering teenagers, swearing and getting in peoples' faces, but on the whole we're a relatively polite society. Also on the whole, we don't expect people to be carrying firearms. There is a growing problem in some inner city communities, with gangs and guns, but its a tiny, tiny proportion of the population who'll ever have any real contact with guns, beyond the odd air rifle.