An Illinois state lawmaker, during a town hall over a proposed ban on semiautomatic weapons, responded to a gun owner's questions about the bill by threatening to change the bill to call for outright confiscation of previously legally-obtained firearms, according to a video posted by the Illinois State Rifle Association.A fine for what? Having obeyed existing law?
The discussion was about Senate Bill 107, which would ban future purchases of semiautomatic guns and require those who keep previously purchased semiautomatics to pay a fine and register the weapon.
The legislator's snooty answer tells me that she thinks she's the reasonable one, and that the peons should be grateful that she's considering allowing them to keep their property under any terms at all.
3 comments:
She's been listening to her BFF Eric Swalwell. Fortunately, though, she doesn't have access to nuclear weapons.
Eric Hines
This is another form of a very old American dispute. Suppose the property in question were human beings. African slaves, or even Scots/Irish indentured apprentices. There will be those who claim that the whole practice of owning people is wrong, illegitimate, unworthy of our moment in history. All "rights" the owner might assert over his "property" are to be immediately annulled -- as if they had never existed, and indeed it will be claimed that such "rights" never DID exist. The asserted right was a mistake or perversion or misunderstanding or deliberate mis-representation of the Bible, or the Common Law, or whatever. Why "buy back" slaves from evil doers? Take them, and the loss of wealth the evil experience is just retribution for their sins? Recognize this?
Suppose the property is liquor, or narcotics, or marijuana or child pornography. And of course the land and buildings used to house such contraband, the vehicles used to transport it, the computers and publications archiving it all ... Are we to respect the claims of "property" evil-doers have over matter that all moral people agree should never have existed in the first place? Is the government really expected to buy booze -- let's focus on booze, as the class of property most drastically moved from legal to contraband and back -- from those who stockpiled it under old, incorrect, and out-dated laws? In fact, did the ATF do so? Or did they just find it, take it and dump it?
Property rights are not usually well respected when other considerations become loudly advanced.
There's another conflating aspect of property rights when the discussion gets around to human beings. This is the conflation of property in the man's body and the property the man has in his own labor.
Which also brings into the discussion the...morality...of minimum wage laws, among other things.
Eric Hines
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