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Originally Posted by Radar
Why should he answer pierce's questions when pierce never answered mine?
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This one?
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You say society determines our rights. What is society? A group of individuals. How large a group? If everyone on your block says you don't have a right to live, does that mean it's ok for them to kill you? How about everyone in your town? Would it be ok these people to tell you that you don't own your own body? Does it take everyone in your county? Your state? Your country? How many people exactly make up "society"?
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I said I wasn't going to get into that because I have not met a single person who doesn't think that he or she does not have the right to life so trying to take away or debate the right to life becomes pointless but I will try to explain further.
First, I have changed my stance slightly from just society to a more justification standpoint. If someone attacks me with a knife I will defend myself because I think I have a right to life, no matter if society thinks I do or not. Like morals, how strong someone believes in which rights are worth defending are individual decisions, but society will play a role in molding and enforcing those rights.
Since right to life is basically universally accepted I will not get into that right now but if we look at the difference between gun culture in country of America, where belief in the right to bear arms is extremely high, and Britain, where belief in the right to bear arms is lower. Now, it is stupid to say that genetics has anything to do with views because most "rednecks" (I am not using that in a bad way, just a label for whites that live in the country in lack of better word) are Brits, so we can narrow that down to sociological effects.
In "redneck America", the feeling that we have a strong right to bear arms is enforced socially in many ways (preaching, seeing guns in households, learning to shoot guns early, learning importance of guns and gun safety, media) while that enforcement is not present in Britain so it is only natural for "redneck America" to defend the right to bear arms more than in Britain. These are obviously generalizations, it is extremely possible that someone raised in "redneck America" doesn't believe so highly about zero gun laws while there is an equally high possibility that someone in Britain thinks about gun laws in the same way as you Radar.
That is how I believe rights work. They seem to work in the same way I have seen morals work.
Now I will try to dwell into right to life. Now, as I said earlier, I haven't met a single person that doesn't think they have a right to life so not only will every society have a strong social enforcement of the right to life, the individuals that do stray from that will not last long and will be wiped from the gene pool. So assuming that everyone believes they have a right to life, our views come together where there is ideally no justification to taking a life. It would be seen the same, but just not to that extreme, as a group that forces another group to have extreme gun laws against their will or a group that forces another group to have zero gun laws when they do want some.
If a group does not want the right to own assault rifles, then enforce gun laws, its their choice. If a group does want the right to own assault rifles, then don't have gun laws, its their choice. If you live in a society where the sociological voice goes against your personal views, you can either deal with it, fight to get it changed, or move.
To answer your questions more throughly, when I say society, I am making a generalization about what that society says. It obviously gets extremely complicated when we deal with societies that are split on issues and getting into subgroups ("redneck" and Urban America are different societies but both part of American society).
Hopefully that explains my view that guns laws should be democratically voted on and enforced by state, country, or city governments because "redneck" and urban America have such different views on gun laws and rights a universal law would screw over one of the two groups. It makes things more complicated but it is the only solution that does not totally violate a group's wishes.