anti gun leftists nutjobs
It's kinda surreal seeing someone expressing right-wing views on this forum, especially with basically everyone else being somewhere left of possibly slightly right of centre.
When you get called a psychopath and are told to "Get some fucking help before you hurt somebody" for posting pro-gun views, people tend to stop posting them.
There are two types of radical opinions however.
One, is ideas that have never been tried, or haven't worked out in the past. You're free to call someone a nutjob if they keep proposing those sorts of ideas (e.g. complete anarchy or complete libertarianism fall in this category).
The other is ideas where you can point to an example of those ideas being successfully deployed. If you've got a good example of it working, then an idea isn't nutjob, because you can see it in action.
Most of the arguments against gun control are proven wrong because there are plenty of countries which have strong gun control laws, and they don't suffer from the problems gun rights activists claim will happen. I live in Australia, and would I like to own a gun more easily? Well, I guess so, why not. Except for the fact that I definitely feel safer being pretty sure I'll never have someone pull a gun on me in my whole life, nobody I've ever met has told me a story about someone having a gun pulled on them, and I can live fairly certain that I won't get shot by the cops by mistake when I pull my wallet out because they think I went for a gun.
"but guns are fun and about freedom" is literally the only upside to looser gun laws that gun rights activists can offer me. Sure, it's hella fun to be shit scared that every other fucker will have a gun when I leave the house, great freedom. Freedom to have more trigger-happy heavily armored cops everywhere. Free to be forced to carry a gun because everyone else is, and I just might need it for that reason.
Another example would be things like public hospitals. Sure, the theory goes that if you have a public hospital it will all go to shit, costs will rise and service will fall. Except none of that matches the results in the ~200 nations on Earth. The most expensive systems by far are those which are highly privatized and unregulated. They've got you by the balls -
the literal balls - when it's your life and death at stake. if you don't regulate health services then the health providers
will milk everyone dry. There's no limit to how much money people with cough up when the choice is life or death.
The third example would be education spending in the USA. The theory is that the USA federal government spends too much on public schools, and that we should get the feds out of education, and that private schools would do it better and cheaper. Nice theory, except for the fact that there's no country on Earth where this has worked out. Sure, you can be the first to try a completely-private education system and hope that works out, but there's no rational basis for it working, it's purely theoretical. And there's a good reason to doubt it. If private schools
could do the same thing cheaper then they would have been offering to take kids in exchange for the education tax funding for years now. And since education in the USA is split between hundreds of local education boards, you have to believe that either every single education board is conspiring to not outsource to private schools, even though they will save money. If it would save money then education boards would pay for private tuition. Since they're not doing that, we can surmise that nobody is offering that service.
the US federal government spent
$39 billion on elementary-highschools and there are
50 million public students. And state governments only pay $6.7 billion for school education. That's just $800 federal dollars per student per year, and the
average private tuition is $9500. The school fees of the 5 million students in private schools is higher than federal + state education spending on the other 50 million kids. Almost all the public education spending comes from local government spending in America. Which means extra bureaucracy and extra local taxes (which are going to be more inefficient and confusing than a state or federal tax system). It also means kids from poorer neighborhoods are artificially penalized since their school board can't raise as much money. That means bright kids from poor neighborhoods miss out. Having consistent state or federal funding reduces the disparities in educational quality, which would help to reduce the poverty-cycle. Basically America needs to move to a state-funded education system. That would just be a lot more efficient and reduce inequality / wasted potential.
Author
Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9710566 times)