It's always amusing when people fail to realise that public attitudes towards guns and gun control are almost entirely cultural.
We realize that just fine. Public attitudes towards slavery also vary much from culture to culture, yet I bet that doesn't stop you from considering slavery wrong.
Likewise, we think owning a gun is a basic human right regardless of the gun culture a place might or might not have. That's the thing about basic human rights, they shouldn't be contingent on culture.
Yes, Slavery and Gun Control. What. A. Completely. Reasonable. Analogy.
Anyway I find the libertarian attitude towards gun control rather strange, in that the assumption is that the praise of gun ownership and guns somehow is equated with the rational ownership of guns, which I find doubtful or let me make a proposition: Any society which 'fetishizes' guns for their own purposes and not for any other than it is right, is going to be a violent society - I think the evidence backs me up on this; the United States is the most violent society of the "comfortable western societies", it is one where gun ownership for its own sake is most praised, debated and so on - of course Bono will invoke something like "Hume laughs at you" for my invoking of a completely unempirical causation - my retort to that is that libertarians have no clue how to stop crimes other than "WITH GUNS OMG!!!11 SELF DEFENSE!!!!111 IRRATIONAL INDIVIDUALISM!!11" and various other fantasties of people who like to pretend that society does not exist or has no impact on their actions. While I'm not invoking a welfare state per se here I think the question must be asked "Wouldn't we be better off if we didn't guns?". Go back to my earlier point - alot of violence is cultural as well
(P.S: I'm not for gun control, though not I'm against either. I would agree that basic human rights are not contingent upon culture; just question whether ownership to a gun is one)
I think it is a very reasonable analogy, given how oppressive governments resort to gun control as a preliminary step to enslave their people.
Let me ask you something. How do you propose to have what you call "the rational ownership of guns" when people cannot own guns at all, or if they can they have to jump through so many hoops that only a privileged few are able to?
How do you define if a society "fetishizes" guns? I think if is natural that a society with less gun control will have more guns than one without. People naturally don't like being helpless and want to defend themselves. Even in the UK, which people like to claim around here never had a gun culture and only associates guns with criminals, the right to keep and bear arms was considered important enough for regular people that it was inserted in the English Bill of Rights. Moreover, in January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down. Clearly these people were not criminals, in fact were helping the police against two true criminals. Charlotte Brontė describes her father regularly carrying a pistol. Did these people also "fetishized" guns?
Also, I don't see how for all your individualism you can possibly think it's a good idea to let the state have a monopoly on guns. I someone said that you should never give any power to your friends you wouldn't want to give your enemies. This is especially true of government. Just because today it is run by who you think may be the good guys, this is, as mutual fund prospects say, no guarantee of future performance.
Moreover, I think your idea that the presence of a welfare state will eliminate crime has been thoroughly refuted by the French muslim riots in 2005, and by US inner cities too, by the way. Or rather, if not disproved--I wouldn't want Hume to laugh at me (I can't believe you remember that)--at shown to not be a categorical solution.
