Confiscate most guns in the country, and how it could be done

[alcibiades_mystery]

81. Actually, you're not being respectful

Your initial claim is that my position is "clouded" by "anger," and therefore not rational. That's not respect. It is an out and out insult. I don't respond to you by saying you're just a fanatic and dupe of the gun manufacturers, and then say, well, with all due respect. I should immediately cease conversing with you on that score alone. But, I will say the following:

In a free society, we do not make laws based on whether we think law enforcement officers will enforce them. That's their job: they are not the final arbiters of the laws we make, and the minute they are, we live in a fascist state.

I'm talking about a Woman's Suffrage style Constitutional project - two or three generations of ceaseless activism. Integration seemed impossible in 1925, and Plessy was "settled law." Shit changes. WE change things. That's the essence of progressive government. And shit needs to change. That's for the big stuff.

For the little stuff, we need immediate action to deal with what is obviously a public health crisis. In 1981, the problems of HIV/AIDS ran deeper than simply the amplification effect of the bath houses. The problem was complex and multifactorial and required numerous comprehensive and connected approaches. It was not just the bath houses. But we closed the bath houses, and that helped. A lot. It helped in changing the culture, and helped in changing individual practices, and it slowed the spread of the virus. And don't think there weren't thousands who viewed the closure as an affront to liberty. They slowed closure by three years in the midst of the epidemic, and cost many thousands of people their lives, just as the gun manufacturers and their flunkies are doing today. We are currently in a public health epidemic as serious as that. Of course the problem is multifactorial. Who doesn't know that? That doesn't mean we don't act meaningfully. It means we act in multiple strategic and interconnected ways.

But don't tell me stuff is not "realistic" or "impossible."