My owning guns does absolutely nothing to harm anyone else. As soon as my *actions* harm someone else then I deserve retaliation. I deserve to have force enacted upon me because I have made the choice to use force.
I own my life, I make my own choices and I take full responsibility for how I choose to live.
When people such as yourself expect the government to use force to make me behave how you want, then you are stealing my freedom and stealing your own freedom. If you give power to the government to take my property and liberty at the point of a gun then you are personally responsible for the stealing of my freedom.
When you give the government power to enforce *your* view you are ignoring the fact that successive governments will still have that power. These successive governments may have a different view to yours but by then it's too late, you've already given your freedom away.
If I do not harm anyone then it is morally wrong for me to have my freedoms stolen.
This is the crux of my argument against what you want to impose on me. After the next paragraph I'll give some examples. If you're not in the mood for large blocks of text then feel free to ignore them.
Examples:
Smoking Bans
A large number of people are against smoking for health reasons and because they simply don't like the smell of tobacco. Instead of steering clear of businesses that allow smoking or letting the owner know that they are not giving them their money, they get the government to pass laws. The effect of these laws is that a private business owner on his/her property does not have the freedom to choose how to run their business. Smokers, who are choosing to use a legal drug, are also denied the freedom to frequent businesses of their choice.
If a business owner chooses not to obey these laws then he/she will be fined. If they don't pay the fine then they will ultimately be taken by force and incarcerated. People who support smoking bans are supporting this use of force.
The government now has the power to ban activities on private property in the interests of health. The critical question is now that they have this power, what else will they use it for? Alcohol? High sugar foods? high fat foods? This may sound a bit extreme but consider that the US had Prohibition, that high sugar foods are getting removed from schools and that New York city is trying to put through legislation to ban serving of certain high fat foods.
Anti-terror laws, secret arrests and national ID cards.
One of the most insidious tools of government at this point in time is the fear of terrorism. This is being horribly milked to destroy many of the freedoms that we have. People who support these draconian laws support: the government deciding *who* is a terrorist; ASIO being able to secretly arrest people without charge for seven days and penalising anyone who mentions that this has happened; tracking of our movements; invading our privacy.
Where do you realistically think this erosion of freedoms is going to stop? The UK currently has 14.3 million (yes, million) CCTV cameras monitoring their streets. Within 5 years they will be tracking (via number plate recognition) the movements of *all* vehicles in major urban centres. They are introducing an ID card that will be compulsory by 2008 with the current plan being that *everyone* will be fingerprinted.
Justification of income.
Currently in Victoria, if you are caught with an amount of cash $20,000 or greater and can't explain it to the satisfaction of the authorities then it can be confiscated until you do. Banks are also required to report transcations of $10,000+ to the government. The questions to ask are: where will this stop?; how low will the levels go?; who else will end up being responsible for reporting this sort of information?
The problem is that all these laws *sound* so good. People buy the pollywaffle that they will be safer and life will be better. The question that never seems to be asked is "What is the cost of believing these lies?"
