“At any rate, the book sales lost as a result of Google are surely dwarfed by the book sales lost as a result of libraries. Yet far from crusading against libraries, writers regularly campaign on their behalf. Most authors appreciate the fact that libraries help us far more than they hurt us. I just wish the folks who run the Authors Guild understood that the same is true of Google.”
At yesterday’s Book Club meeting, we had quite a bit of discussion about gun rights. The discussion centered around whether ownership of powerful weapons constitutes and implicit threat to others, and whether various restrictions on types of guns, or where they can be carried, are justified to make society safer.
One of the problems of gun rights is that guns are intended for situations we don’t expect, and hope never to encounter. This makes it difficult to determine in advance what sort of restrictions or limits may be reasonable. There is the additional problem that, even if you agree that certain limits are reasonable, you need to empower an authority to enforce those limits, and that power is vulnerable to abuse.
Ultimately, the reason for gun rights is to empower people to defend themselves without being reliant on government, whether against muggers, rapists, home invaders, lunatics, angry mobs, or anyone else who may attack them. Check out the video below for a dramatic presentation of this argument:
