Weapons...

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

My memory of the Twentieth Century hasn't quite faded.

Good, there are lessons to be learned.

Also don't forget Iraq, lessons were apparently not learned by some.

Bart

 

[Will_Perlis]

What baffles me, given the history of the 20th Centrury, is why Western Europeans trust strong central governments. Unless Tony Judt's "Post War" is right, and the current world came together out of simple exhaustion.

As for Iraq, it's not that GWB forgot some lessons from history, he never learned them in the first place. That whole "plan" was concocted from pure fantasy.

 

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

What baffles me, given the history of the 20th Centrury, is why Western Europeans trust strong central governments.

You using a generalization, because e.g. the majority of the Dutch population voted against a European Constitutional Treaty (for a variety of reasons). We Dutch hate 'authorities' telling us what to do, have hated it for hundreds of years, and still do.

As for Iraq, it's not that GWB forgot some lessons from history, he never learned them in the first place. That whole "plan" was concocted from pure fantasy.

He was/is just being used by the likes of Wolfowitz et all. GWB is to blame for allowing them, ignorance is no excuse.

Bart

 

[Don Ferguson Jr.]

Ray, since the right to bear arms is enshrined in our Constitution, it's not likely things will change here any time soon.

Yep , thank God for the NRA !

 

[Murray Foote]

In many ways I suspect that strong central governments or decentralised systems are really beside the point. Significant advances in effective social equity and the democratisation of all economic and social institutions would put the nominal structure of government in the shade. That may sound like decentralisation but I think such improvements would inevitably require a fair measure of centralised adjustment. Of course in reality achievement is always partial and things are seldom as they seem.

Incidentally, and no doubt at the risk of being misinterpreted in a wide variety of different ways, small government was a feature of Marxist Communism. This is because Marx defined Communism as the point at which all contradictions had been resolved and therefore there was no real need for Government. Of course this has little to do with the Governments that the West called Communist (they called themselves Socialist because Communism was unattainable whereas in the West Socialism meant a whole different plethora of alternatives).

Returning to the theme of this thread and irrespective of socioeconomic perspective, I think that a more important question than how we should regulate personal weapons is how most effectively we might move beyond conflict. I think that if more people contemplated this and sought practical improvements, the Wolfowitzes of this world might have less scope to cast their mass delusion.