[geeks] FW: [rescue] UPS Recommendation

Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez lefa at ucsc.edu
Tue Jul 22 09:36:46 CDT 2003


On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
>
> > ....So they killed all those students by throwing empty prescription
> > refill containers at them?
>
> If they did, would you be advocating a ban of all prescription drugs?

... but they didn't. They used GUNS.... IF statements are not really
that useful when dealing with reality.

> How about if they killed people with their bare hands?  Perhaps our
> hands should all be removed!  What harm they cause!

... again, but they didn't. They happen to use GUNS... There are I guess
plenty of murders commited via strangling. You are born with a pair of
hands, so we can not do much about that -you can use your hands for good
in fact you pretty much need them to survive, or you can use them for
evil- however we can do plenty to limit the access of people to guns. I
believe noone has ever been born with a gun as part of their bodies (no
matter how much certain males use guns to compensate for whatever they
were born with :) ).

> All things in moderation.  No inanimate object is inherenly good or bad,
> but they tend to reflect the attitude of their user.

... Not really. A gun is designed to kill people, that is its only purpose
of being, from the drawing board til its roll out of the machining room,
to the QA tests, the main modus operandi of a gun is to: Kill. See it
takes a looooot of effort to kill another person using your bare hands, or
by throwing empty prescription bottles. It is a little bit more difficult
to survive an attacker that has a real gun on his or her hands.

So far all I hear from the pro-gun people are tangential argument (pools
also kill people, but they were using psychotic drugs, etc. etc...). A
random inanimate object killing a person is an unfortunate accident or
side effect, a gun killing another person is a mission accomplished. That
is the main difference...

> Now, didn't someone already make a Nazi reference?

I don't remember it, is this when we try to speculate how far Hitler would
have got if the average German would have been able to privately own guns
or something?



More information about the geeks mailing list