Carrying a Gun Is an Act of Civilization

[Alex Libman]

What if you have a voice activated gun and you say "Shoot at John Doe."?

See here.

[Jim Johnson]

See there, that's the Libertarian shit; just because something is voice operated doesn't mean you're doing violence with your words.
Your equivocating on 'word' as both sound vibrations and as an utterance with semantic or pragmatic content.

[brycen]

The original article is awesome, I posted a link on Facebook.

Now, it doesn't dismantle all the statist anti-gun fallacies, such as the risk of accidental shootings, but it does demolish several of them pretty well, and it is well-reasoned and, I don't know how to say this classily, but the guy just sounds like he knows what he's talking about.

[MaineShark]

A threat may or may not cause a feeling.  How one responds to those feelings, a quickened heart rate or a clinched fist, is a reaction; a fist striking something can be violent.

A threat still directly and non-consensually impacts the life of the victim.  If I threaten to kill you if I see you walk in front of my house, so you have to walk the long way around to avoid a confrontation in which either you would die, or you would have to defend yourself from my attack, then your life has been impacted against your will.  Even if you choose to ignore my threat and go about your business, the fact that you were forced to make such a choice is an impact I had on your life.

If you say something like, that guy should die, and he is later found dead, are you a murder?  No.

No, that's just stating an opinion.  Sort of like how lies aren't always fraud; only certain specific sorts of lies are fraud.

Has any resent president, by his own hand, killed a man?  I doubt it; taking part in planing murders makes one culpable as an accessory to murder and I would not fault any one for calling that person a murder.  But his words did not kill, and the actions other men took where of their own free will.  Which is the point of this conversation.

Words pass through the emptiness between people.  There is no connection in words that magically makes other people do what you want them to do.  You can't lift stones or hurl bullets with words.

But, how can Bush be a murderer?  He just spoke words.  Those other men took action, launching bombs, missiles, bullets, etc. at innocents (actually, most of them didn't do anything more than speak words, either, and they spoke words to other individuals who probably just spoke words, on down the line, to some grunt who pushed a button or pulled a trigger).  Bush just spoke words, so he must be totally innocent, right?

Either words can be used as a form of force, or they cannot.  If "taking part in planing murders" is a sort of word-usage that can make one guilty, then "taking part in committing fraud" can be a sort of word-usage that can make one guilty.

As a matter of fact, if you don't know the meaning of a word it has no affect on you what so ever.  Every bit of action has to come from with in you, through your free will.

And...?  Clearly, part of communicating a threat, or communicating something fraudulent, is doing so in a language that the victim understands.

If a mugger says, "give me all your money or I'll kill you," is that violence?  It's just words, right?  What if he shows you a knife?  He hasn't touched you with it - there's still an "emptiness" between you and the point of the knife.  Do you have to wait to be stabbed and bleeding, before his actions become violent?

Or, let's flip it around and look at it from the other side... what's the limit that may be considered non-violent?  Would Gandhi's actions have been non-violent, if he had threatened to go to war with the British, so long as he did not actually do so?  If Rosa Parks had sat fast in her bus seat and snarled at the cops, "touch me and die! I'm staying in this seat," would she still be doing nonviolent disobedience, so long as she didn't actually follow through with her threat?

Words are tools.  Like any other tool, they can be used for peaceful things, or for violent things.  Just because something was "only words" does not mean that it was automatically peaceful.

Joe

[Russell Kanning]

where is my gun

[littlehawk]

I disagree with almost the entire article. Sorry, folks.

[Lloyd Danforth]

What if you have a voice activated gun and you say "Shoot at John Doe."?

In fact, with a voice activated robot all of the things you said can't be done suddenly become possible. You can order the robot to lift stones and hurl bullets. The robot is not a person and does not have free will.

So that is what Lex has been up to

[Becky Thatcher]

So what if they did have dinosaurs and the man from UNCLE, would it still be a big box of Libertarian stupid?

[brycen]

I disagree with almost the entire article. Sorry, folks.

That's all right. Care to elaborate your reasons for disagreement?