[jgon]

No one is pointing a gun to your head. Okay someone is "pointing a gun to your head" in the same sense they are "pointing a gun to your head" to prevent you from murdering someone.

But unless you are posting from North Korea you live in a country with the world's longest undefended border (aka the Canadian border). You can leave at any time and renounce your citizenship and literally no one will stop you.

Seriously, "pointing a gun at my head" is child talk for "making me follow the rules that I have implicitly agreed to obey by living in society", and you can at any time stop agreeing with those rules by leaving the society. Living in the society, enjoying its benefits and then crying about having to follow the rules is childish and hypocritical. If you don't like it, leave.

No one will try to stop you from leaving at gunpoint.

[wissler]

"If you don't like it, leave."

Might doesn't make right. This land is not all your land. You may have total and utter domination of it, but that's not a moral argument.

[jgon]

No it doesn't make right. But, excepting various inalienable rights, majority makes right in a representative democracy. And the majority have said that they derive greater utility out of having these rules and regulations than not having them. By staying in the society you are agreeing to abide by them, and to deal with the punishments for breaking them. You are not forced to stay in society though, so you can reject this deal at any time.

You claim there is a gun to your head, but this is the weirdest robbery I've ever heard of, where you can opt out at any time you choose. Any and all guns that may be metaphorically pointed at you are ones you have agreed to have pointed at you. Our system for determining what guns point where boils down to where the majority would like them to point, subject to the constraints of a constitution.

I normally hate the love it or leave it argument as well, but if you are going to insist on using this childish metaphor, then I have no alternative but to point out that you can end this apparently life or death matter at any time of your choosing. Literally any time.

[wissler]

You're begging the question, which is: is it legitimately "your land" to tell me to leave in the first place? (The answer by the way is "no.")

If the property legitimately belonged to you, then I'd have no problem with "my house, my rules, love them or leave them", but nothing but ownership gives you that kind of prerogative. You are making a pure might makes right argument, it's completely amoral. (Incidentally, do some research about what this megalomanical kind of "ownership" leads to, e.g. "Trail of Tears.")

Your reasoning is that of a child, not mine.

[jaaron]

That depends on our definition of property rights and sovereignty. You may "own" the land, but you are not sovereign on that land. The larger society, which claimed and defended the land prior to your ownership claims, has sovereignty over it and thus you while within those borders. If you do not wish to abide by the laws of the society, then you cannot claim land within that society's borders without emancipating the land. For better or worse, such rebellions are difficult to pull off.

[wissler]

Your conception is, to pick a metaphor, straight out of "The Matrix." Check your assumptions, you'll find that one of them is wrong, or arbitrary (which is really the same thing).