[PLUG] Mad SCO Disease

[Jeme A Brelin]

Cross-posted to plug-talk.  Follow-up will be there.

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004, AthlonRob wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-06-28 at 03:55 -0700, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> > Maybe just tha homocidal lunatics come in all different ideologies?
>
> The vast majority of gun owners... regardless of the OS they're running
> (SCO, Windows, Linux, Slowarus, OS X, whatever), never shoot at a human
> being.

Thank goodness!  If they did, we'd have many thousands more deaths every
year.

The concern, of course, wasn't with "most gun owners", but with folks who
carry weapons on their person in public.  And while most may never
_actually_ shoot at a human being, that is the intent of the weapon and
the carrying.

> Of those who do shoot at a human being, I'd have to guess most don't
> kill the person they're shooting at.  Of those who do kill who they're
> shooting at, not all would be considered 'homicidal' which is considered
> analogous with murderous.

Homicide is killing another human being in my book -- the law of the land
notwithstanding.  That hints at one of the major problems with capital
punishment -- it is permanent while the law of the land is transient --
and also one of the major problems with "vigilante justice" -- it
eliminates any notion of due process.

> I'd say calling gun owners homicidal lunatics is analogous to calling
> gay men pedophiles.

Well, nobody called gun owners homocidal and I think the stronger analogy
would be calling sexually interested people pedophiles (you'll find that
most pedophiliacs are men lusting after young women, so "gay men" doesn't
seem to apply -- unless, of course, you're hinting at the relative
proportion of homocides committed by gun versus pedophilic acts committed
by gay men, but I think that's unlikely because I don't think you consider
the homocidal weapon of choice (the automobile) to be muderous and so what
you'd call homicide is done by gun more often than anything else in this
country).

If you want argue this sanely and without specious analogy, let's take it
to plug-talk.

J.
-- 
   -----------------
     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
   -----------------
 [cc] counter-copyright
 http://www.openlaw.org