Well, then allow me to retort
I have a news flash for anyone who’s ever uttered the words “Guns have no place in a civil society,”
I don’t have a newsflash so much as the standard response that: without guns, there’d be no civil society.
14 Responses to “Well, then allow me to retort”
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
 |
|
Find Local
|
Categories
- ATF (769)
- Death Match (10)
- Eminent Domain (225)
- In the bag (9)
- Notes to Junior (546)
- Poker (74)
- Recipes (142)
- Shotgun Noob (11)
- The Airing of Grievances (19)
- uncategorized (47,725)
April 24th, 2008 at 8:46 am
“without guns, there’d be no civil society.”
I’d love to see the argument that backs this one up. No links. Your argument.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:47 am
I know you’re all cool with feigned hipster intellectual detachment and all but even you’re not that stupid.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Not a hipster.* Not detached.** I’d like to see a cogent argument as to how there would be no civil society without guns.
*This implies that I am somebody who is hip.
**Google “rachel pain.” I do what she does.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
very simple: try to imagine your urban lifestyle without the police who are armed. or your country without military, also armed.
Firearms/weapons take ‘brute force’ out of the equation whether it’s police or grandma telling the burglar to get out of her house.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
You are not talking about guns. You are talking about state power. It does not follow that guns/weapons, per se, are how the state derives its power. The threat of violence, in the form of application of power through weapons use, is not found in many aspects of state-subject relations. For example, heath care comes to mind. While it may not be done well in many places, there is no meaningful sense in which one can find the threat of violence as the operative notion behind that relationship between the state and individual. Even in some sort of capitalist* rendering of health care, there is no threat of violent retribution against the individual by the state if one decides to not purchase health care. Likewise, in Western social democracies, the state does not threaten violence if a person does not access health care, though it can easily be seen in both cases (capitalist and socialist) that a person not caring for himself could be injurious to society as a whole because of free-riding (at a minimum an appeal to charity) in the capitalist case and increased social cost in the other case.
*And no matter how hard one squints there is no sense in which capitalism is not produced by some state structure. At a minimum, society must agree by which the rules that create the artifice of property. Those rules are the state.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Grandma is the state? Who knew?
At the end of the day, the state is simply it’s ability to enforce its law and that is done through force. Otherwise, it may as well not exist.
And healthcare is not a function of the state, generally, so it’s a very bad example. Most functions of the state (tax collection, law enforcement, zoning requirements) are simply a matter of ‘do it or else’.
Nice try though.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Your conception of what the state is fairly elementary. Unfortunately, you don’t seem to be able to get past “It’s the Government.” It’s not.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
yes, it is. we’ve had this conversation before.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Government is not the state. It is a manifestation of the state. There can be states without governments. There can be governments without states.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Metulj Says:
April 24th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Government is not the state. It is a manifestation of the state. There can be states without governments. There can be governments without states.
Would you care to show some examples of how there can be a state WITHOUT a government? I’d like to know how that can be possible.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
“Would you care to show some examples of how there can be a state WITHOUT a government? I’d like to know how that can be possible.”
A quick examples would be Somalia. The Central Congo. The jungle highlands of Colombia.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
and those aren’t examples of, what’s that term I used, civil society?
April 24th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Lots of guns. Not much civil society. Gotcha.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I did not say (and never have) there was a correlation to number of guns and amount of civility. Plenty of other factors determine civility. Weapons and force maintain a society that already is civil. They do not create them out of thin air as that requires far more than guns.
Nice try, though.