Evan Thomas
Inactive
Wildalaska said:If you dont, cant or wont understand the moral, ethical and legal issues involved in imposing deadly force on another human being, I'd suggest you refrain from posessing a firearm.
We have plenty of young men in places like the projects of Chicago who posees guns and who cant, dont, or wont understand those concepts and the results arent pretty.
WildthatsthedifferencebetweenusandthemAlaska TM
Exactly. And if the issues were all that simple, this thread wouldn't be 25 pages long, and counting.
bababooey32 said:I understand the need to satisfy intellectual curiosity about the roots of our current laws etc., but it is not necessary to (gratuitously, IMHO) recite passages from the Talmud and Summa Theologica in order to hold the discussion we are having here: Under threat, do you duck or shoot??
It's not just a matter of intellectual curiosity -- it's a matter of using past thinking on the subject as a tool to help clarify one's own thinking. And it's well worth pondering the ways in which people's thinking has changed about these matters: for example, in 18th century England, people were commonly sentenced to death for relatively petty thefts -- toward the end of the century, transportation (to penal servitude in Australia) came to be seen as a humane alternative. (And if you wonder how "humane" it actually was, go read The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes...) And in subsequent decades, penalties changed yet again, following changes in the values of the society.
Not, as I said above, that legal standards are necessarily a good guide to one's moral responsibilities, but they're a signpost to ways that ethical standards have evolved over time. It's perhaps useful to think about those changes if you care about the ethical implications of ducking or shooting.
So there's more than one way to use the historical material Antipitas and WA are tossing back and forth; appealing to the "seniority" of a set of values (ethical system) is one use to make of it, but it's equally possible to look at the ways ethical thought has evolved and say "Jeez, I'm glad we're a bit more enlightened now..."
Vanandmichaeltotallyupstagedfarrahhedlovethatya
(Sorry, WA -- had to get that in. )