Since you brought seat belts into this, I advocate letting people choose. I oppose mandatory seatbelt laws but agree seatbelts are useful. That confuses people: "He said it is good but said not mandatory. If it is good it should be mandatory. He said not mandatory. That means he thinks it is not good. But he said it is good."
I used to agree with your position on this. I also used to be a little "l" libertarian.
But then some very very smart people on a message board much like this one presented some very excellent arguments demonstrating that while my position that an idiot should be free to go head first through a windshield because he should have the freedom to not wear his seat belt... it is a
fact that the idiot's choice has very expensive consequences on the rest of society.
Even if the idiot is fully insured, said insurance will not even remotely cover the true costs of his "free choice" not to wear his seatbelt. The rest of us will be picking up the costs of scraping him and his vehicle off the road, for all of the first responders and medical people - which will be exponentially more costly than if he were less severely injured by wearing his seatbelt, for all of the social support for him and his family if he is permanently injured by his "free choice"... on and on the examples go.
The same applies to guns. Some idiot demands his "freedom" to own guns. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to pick up the tab for his "freedom". Last week I saw an excellent article -
Shot and Forgotten - that speaks to this point.
We tend to think only about the people who are murdered by the gun violence; and the financial cost to society for them is bad enough. But to be very cold-blooded here for a minute, it are the survivors of gun violence that are more of a financial burden. Meanwhile, the gun fetishist likes to insist those of us who want common sense gun control are speaking only from emotion (while he is simultaneously in a manic meltdown over an imaginary government-led gun grab
)
I'm not a libertarian anymore. I still believe that every human being should be afforded the maximum freedom possible to live their lives as they wish. But I also believe that your freedom ends at the tip of my nose. When your freedom is quantitatively harming other people in our society, your freedom needs to be curtailed while you freely chose to remain a part of said society.
In the United States of America, guns and the people who shoot them are quantitatively harming other people in our society, so the "freedom" to own every kind of gun and massive amounts of ammunition without any restraints or responsibilities needs to end.
