[DanielBMarkham]

I normally might flag something like this, but there's an important point in here that has to do with our relationship to technology.

Guns fill a role in society that allows any person, no matter how weak, to execute deadly force against another. For many, this is the height of idiocy. Why would we allow individuals to have such power?

But technology is doing the same thing that guns do -- it's giving every person unprecedented power over his fellow man. DDOS attacks can bring down banks. Bio-research could unleash a deadly plague. As technology increases, the powers that one person has continue to grow.

So the issue of gun ownership is the same issue as freedom in technology. How much power should one person have? Every time somebody commits a crime on the internet, we're going to hear the same cries: why should individuals have so much power over others?

I don't have a facile or slogan-worthy answer. As a libertarian, I always want to err on the side of empowering individuals. But I can see a powerful argument to continue to take freedoms away from all of us. The issue of gun control was just the first shot fired in the larger war that is now upon us.

[tjic]

> Why would we allow individuals to have such power?

Who is this "we" that has either the power, right, or wisdom to overrule people on such things?

> So the issue of gun ownership is the same issue as freedom in technology

Wonderfully said.

Power is a zero-sum game. Either I have the right to { own a gun | duplicate a file | mix acid and water in a test tube | print a part on a 3-d printer } or someone else takes that right from me and holds it themself.

There are wonderful deontological arguments as to why it is wrong to take rights away from me (or you, or you, or you), but even at the utilitarian level: why should we expect better outcomes if a right is removed from individual A and given to individual B? Was Germany better off when the Jews and Gypsies had their right to firearms ownership transferred to the state? Was China better off under Mao when individuals had their right to plant, grow, harvest and sell their crops transferred to the state? Was the United States better off when each person had their right to make decisions about alcohol consumption taken away and transferred to the state?

I argue that restricting rights is wrong on both deontological AND utilitarian grounds.

The utitarian argument for these sorts of things tends to be "give me the power, and I'll make better decisions". The incentives don't usually support the fulfillment of that promise.

[potatolicious]

> "Who is this "we" that has either the power, right, or wisdom to overrule people on such things?"

The same "we" that has existed since the beginning of our species, when groups of humans decided to live together.

"We" is an expression of all people - not biased by East or West, Black or White. In all societies the price of living in a group, and enjoying the benefits thereof, are concessions to personal freedom, and the recognition of some authority that is capable of making the decision.

It's also important to note (because it's so frequently confused) that "we" is not necessarily a government. In the absence of a government, "we" will manifest itself in other formats, most frequently tyrannical.

The only way for you to extricate yourself from this (by your implication, malevolent) "we" is to live entirely without dependency on any semblance of society.

[grannyg00se]

And the difficulty is in determining the limitations that we allow the "we" to impose on the individual. In most cases agreement is easy to achieve, but in some cases there is a difference of opinion that is insurmountable. Without the possibility of agreement, it may be that the only option is to separate the group into those that believe option A and those that believe option B. Then individuals can move into whichever group fits their beliefs. This would be an iterative process.

Given the way that humans have handled one group separating into another, I think this might be a devastating experiment to try. But in theory, it seems plausible that after a number of iterations you would belong to a group that fits your ideals perfectly.

[jtc331]

The libertarian philosophical response would be that people only have the two basic rights to life and property. And one person cannot take away those rights from another. The government then exists solely to limit behavior strictly only in cases in which one of those two rights are being taken away by another individual.

The point of that argument is that no individual has the right to do with the government what he would not be right to do by himself. This means that since he can't individually limit the rights of another, he can't use the government to do it either.

This means that there are no concessions at all to personal freedom to live in a group. Not really anyway. I mean, yes, you can't take someone else's life (unless they attempt to take yours.) But that's hardly a restriction necessary only in large groups of people. It's kind-of implied as soon as you have at least two people.

[randallsquared]

In the absence of a government, "we" will manifest itself in other formats, most frequently tyrannical.

Tyranny implies government. In the absence of government, therefore, there can be no tyranny. It's not clear to most people whether society without government is possible, of course (or, rather, most would assert that it isn't).

[glomph]

Power is not a zero-sum game. Some restrictions of power/rights enable more power/freedom than they take away. This is obvious. The restriction (or convention, but I think the point still stands) to drive on a particular side of the road allows us to do so much more than if we did not have the restriction, our net 'power' has increased. Similarly in many other cases.

I think that many of your examples are good ones and that arbitrary restrictions of freedom are wrong, but restrictions on the possession of weapons by the general public is not arbitrary and if you want to make a utilitarian case you are going to need to talk about the pros and cons of gun control itself not more generally about freedom and rights.

[xiaoma]

There was an excellent essay George Orwell wrote in the late 40s titled The Bomb and You. It's on the relationship between technology and the power of individuals vs groups. He talks about how some weapons such as swords took a great deal of training to use well and tended to concentrate power. Other weapons such as muskets brought power to the since they were cheap and easy to use. Many modern weapons such as air craft carriers have been even more concentrating in nature, requiring the resources of a state to construct, but he was initially terrified that the bomb was an exception and would mean the end of civilization.

In time there probably will be something of that destructive power that small organizations or even individuals could create.

[_delirium]

I see it as more of a matter of where to draw the line than a big philosophical disagreement. In practice, as far as I can tell, most people (meaning something like >90% of the public) believes in restricting possession/manufacture of some items when they cross a threshold that is deemed too dangerous to allow unrestricted individual ownership. The main disagreement is over where the threshold is.

For example, a majority of Americans think that owning a handgun should be on the "legal" side of the line, while owning a cruise missile should be on the "illegal" side of the line, and owning a nuclear bomb or stockpiles of chemical weapons should be even more on the "illegal" side. People in other countries may draw the line somewhere else, for a variety of fairly complex reasons, but afaict it's still the same basic framework everyone's operating under.

[mtgx]

I don't think that being one in 10,000 people to "help bring down a bank", is the same as going to someone and executing him.

[jlgreco]

In the past century or so a similar thing has happened at the level of nations. Technology has allowed nations to reach the point where they are capable of causing unprecedented damage to not just other countries, but the world.

Now, maybe MAD works better with nations than it does with individuals, but maybe we've just been getting lucky.

[jQueryIsAwesome]

The sea of possibilities that internet gives is clearly being used mostly for good or neutral/trivial activities. But with a gun only two things can be done: kill or intimidate; for every shooted man you need to start the discussion of who was the "good" and who was the "bad"; there is no need for those discussions with most of the internet activities.

You are also talking like a paranoid; incidences with internet used to release deathly viruses are so far only videogames stories and DDOS attacks have more similarities with an electricity outage than to killing someone. And not a single bank got broke because some DDOS attack.