At 01:09 PM 6/8/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
First, a Smith and Wesson is not what the tots should be carrying. An MP-5K would fit nicely in their bookpacks (especially now that all yuppie kids carry de rigeur designer backpacks, though mostly for designer water). More firepower.
My point of view is that while schools should be free of guns, adult citizens should probably have access to guns. There are, sadly, nutty people who will use nearly any available weapon to commit mayhem and mass murder. Rifles, shotguns, axes, knives...
And to bring things back somewhat to cypherpunk (or at least technopunk)issues, weapons control (like other forms of regulation) is defeated by technology. Last week's Economist had an article on the first commercially available 3D "printers" or desktop fabrication stations. A bit hard to control weapons when one can just print off a few. In addition other technical advances are bound to put a host of weapons in everyone's hands. You can't disarm a technically advanced population. Too many tools can be adapted to kill. This being the case, you should allow your society to adapt to this reality by getting people used to the concept of self defense, small group defense, and behaving oneself in public.
Remember, "Guns don't kill people, postal workers do."
In fact, in 1995 the term to go "postal" entered the vocabulary. As in the sentence "LD went postal and wiped out the whole ballet class." Another Cypherpunks angle lies in the fact that fans of "going postal" have also noted that 14 is a Schelling point for the number of victims of one of these massacres. I wonder why that is? Magazine size?
In general, I think Phill raises some good points about the efficiency of free markets. However, I doubt that Cypherpunks is the proper forum for debating economic theory, for various reasons. I lean strongly toward the free market side, inasmuch as I think most non-free market economies are actually just cases where the government controls the _single_ corporation they let run an industry, and thus one gets a worse situation that with the grossest excesses of capitalism.
I always ask the commies how they can guarantee that political complications won't interfere with the perfect implementations of their no doubt superior five year plans. I can guarantee that the commissar's brother-in-law will go bankrupt (if he deserves to) under capitalism. How can they guarantee that under socialism?
However, the reason many of us don't jump in and write defenses of free markets here (and I would not have except to make my transhumanist joke--so sue me) is that this list is not "Libernet" nor any of the similar political discussion lists.
Also it's not necessary since markets can take care of themselves these days. "History is on our side." "We will bury you." "The Multinational unites the human race." "Di-electrical materialism dooms both the ancien regime and state capitalism." etc. DCF "A free market is what you get when people are free."