Wednesday 6 January 2016

Guns, Drugs, and the Backwards USA



Illegal drugs sometimes harm the people who decide to take them, but that's their choice, isn't it? The primary purpose of a drug is for personal use. It's not for shoving down someone else's throat, or injecting into someone else's arm. Why this should be illegal in any vaguely libertarian country is beyond me. If you want to swallow a gallon of bleach, you can go ahead and do it. It's your body.

Guns have a primary purpose that is to harm other people. Whether offensively or defensively, the purpose of a gun is to plant a piece of metal into another person's body at high velocity, causing grievous injury. Why such well-designed killing implements are legal in some countries is beyond me.

On this point about guns, not even libertarians should be able to disagree. Yes, we should have freedom over our own bodies and what we do with our bodies, but we don't have freedom to do harm. Guns are for harm. They are a tool for taking away the freedom of others. A tool for harming others. They are an anti-libertarian device.

It's useful to consider the evolution of weaponry. When we all had knives and muskets that could maybe be used to kill one or two people per minute, the problems weren't that serious. Today, we have assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades, and other weapons that can kill hundreds per minute. Tomorrow we might have weapons that could vaporize a room of people in a second. What happens then? Do we persevere with this corrupt libertarian idea that we should be free to harm other people if we choose? Or does the prospect of being vaporized on the train along with the rest of the passengers by someone who had a bad day at work not appeal?

So I ask, what kind of backwards country makes self-harm devices illegal, but other-harm devices legal? America, it seems, is the answer to that question.