Maggie's Farm

I have to admit that your reply to the ZBot's handwaving is spot on. And needs to be said far more often.

1. Life is hard, painful, and not uncommonly, unfairly terminal.
2. Defense is therein an obvious, irrefutable right.
3. The firearm was developed not to rob old ladies but to prevent old ladies being robbed, ergo defense.
4. Since defense is not an exclusive practice of an exclusive service, the right of the people to protect old ladies and everybody else shall not be infringed. See #2 and then see #1.

The left has upset this axiomatic logic for decades on only one point, one the right routinely concedes to it: That defense is an exclusive State service bestowed as a privilege.

The philosophical corollary is obvious: You don't deserve to live unless permitted to live, which is a complete inversion not just of the rights of non-machine* humans, but of empirical reality.

The end.

Did I mention the handwaving?

*not in ZBot's handwaving program.

If I were to engage the ZBot on its diminished level I'd probably say something like there are examples of bulimia where surpluses exist, living on sidewalks where houses exist, dead pedestrians where cars exist, cancer where hospitals exist, and in all cases, none of it saved by careful central management using force, coercion, enticement, or even enticing outright manipulation of an actor's environment by purported or putative protectors, including by the very stringent laws against severe gun misuse, it being criminal.

There has never been a single instance of a mass shooting where guns did not exist in the world as an instrument of defense. There has never been a single instance of a mass shooting where guns broke the law. There has never been a single instance of a mass shooting where humans did not have the a priori right to defend themselves, but there likely are and still may be cases where at a mass shooting that right had been interrupted by other actors who, it must be said, then played or play some part in the deaths that follow by their preventing the use of reasonable, recognized, effective, and rightful defenses.

The entire defensive civilian posture at such an unlawful event where people possess the inalienable, a priori right to save their lives and others is based on the defensive instrument. The entire defensive civilian posture may only be interrupted, wrongly, by another force that violates the inalienable, a priori right and thus endangers those civilians as much as the event itself does, and may even induce the event's perpetrators to illegally act where they otherwise would not, civilians whose rights "shall not be infringed" pursuant that prior contract.

Which is to say, 1. Life is hard, painful, and not uncommonly, unfairly terminal, and 2. Defense is therein an obvious, irrefutable right. And 3. To violate the individual's right is to become as the illegal actor.

Handwaving about violent psychopaths acting illegally among the legal citizen's daily activities and against his life shall not and in fact does not factor. Handwaving that even tacitly attacks rightful citizen defenses against violent psychopaths does factor, however, and attacks that citizen and risks adding to the body count he is bound to seek to mitigate.

Evidently some bot-machinery-code-programs does not contain this simple logic. The reader is advised not to engage the bot, but to engage its programmers. That is all.

If I were to engage the ZBot on its diminished level I'd probably say something like your hand-waving program is conflating the period of 1950-2010 with the period of 1950-2016, a distinction the author explicitly makes.

I'd further point out the vastly more important fact embedded in the evidence, that being that there is no evidence that even begins to prove the robotic assertion that such shootings are not lessened in places where citizens are granted their un-infringable, inalienable and therefore lawful right to protect themselves.

Lives being in the balance, this is kind of an important point. Fortunately the human mind can grasp the essential abstract distinction and engage accordingly.