Guns don't kill people ....

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by henry quirk

My iterations are neutral; yours drips with bias.

Neutral? C'mon. You are just saying why should Person 2 get punished for the stupid actions of Person 1.

This is an extremely libertarian way of thinking. I'm pretty sure no one else but libertarians or traditional small government conservatives solely think this way.

"Every action an individual takes, no matter how large or small, affects the environment around that individual."

Demonstrably not the case.

If Joe, who lives alone, masturbates himself to sleep every night, how does this affect anything (other than his bedsheets)?

Your rephrasing trades precision and accuracy for bias.

How old are you? First of all, to be nitpicky (since you were), you affect take in electricity, water, and produce wastewater when washing your sheets. Second, I assumes we were mature enough not to be nitpicky when making generalizing statements.

Back to my point. Almost everything we do affects someone else somehow. If I smoke a cigarette I exhale toxic chemicals that can be inhaled by someone else. If I get drunk I can break other people's properties, commit crimes, verbally and physically abuse people, etc. If I use electricity I am getting that from some energy source which most likely releases CO2 and toxic gas into our environment. If I preach hate I can potentially get other people to act on my beliefs, hurting and killing people. If I vote for a politician, I have some responsibility for the politician's votes. I can go on forever.

The point is that we as a society are constantly trying to find an equilibrium between individual rights (right to smoke, drink, use electricity, speech, vote, etc.) and social rights (rights not to inhale toxic chemicals, not to be a victim of someone's misuse of alcohol, not to be affected by man-made climate change, not to be a target of hate, etc.).

There is no formula or line where we can put actions into "allowable" and "not allowable" because we feel differently about them. We recognize electricity is a necessity so we don't ban its use even though the negative consequences can be great. We failed at banning alcohol because our culture will not allow for it and we feel the positive personal effects outweigh the negative personal and social consequences. We banned weed because there is a social stigma against it even though its positive consequences are greater and negative consequences are much less than alcohol.

This leads me to your quote:

And 'my' question stands (rephrased yet again): If Joe does wrong, with bare hand or with gun, why should Joe’s actions affect Jack's hands or Jack’s ownership of a gun?<

You see gun laws are not enacted because the actions of one person. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. People try to ban guns because there is a history of gun owners using guns for violence. If both Joe and Jack try to get guns, it is very difficult to determine that Joe will use it for violence while Jack will not. There is that uncertainty so it leads people to try to ban them all together.

I disagree with banning guns and support tougher regulation but, once again, it largely comes down to culture. Also, to complicate it, if Joe has a nuclear weapon, he has the power to kill millions of people and we as a society do not trust that power with any non-government official. The power of the weapon has a large influence in regulation as well.