this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Easily.
First, banning assault-style rifles wouldn't be 'disarming', unless you're going to argue that any regulation of firearms is disarming. Is it dumb? Sure. Would it have any significant effect on firearm homicides? No; even most mass shootings are committed with handguns. (For the record, I own multiple assault-style rifles, and I compete in action pistol (USPSA, IDPA, etc.) and two gun matches regularly, in a non-ban state. I do oppose rifle and feature bans, because I oppose regulating tools rather than changing material conditions.)
Secondly, Roe v. Wade never allowed all abortions up to the point of birth. Roe v. Wade specifically balanced the rights of a person-to-be against the person that had to run the risk of pregnancy and birth, and said that prior to viability--broadly speaking, the end of the first trimester, but realistically more like 27 weeks--the rights of the women overrode the state interest in protecting the not-yet-life of a potential person. Beyond that, the overwhelming majority of all abortions that happen after the first trimester happen because there are defects incompatible with life, or because there's a complication that will kill the woman if she does not terminate the pregnancy.
I'll also note that if you really wanted to reduce rates of abortion, you would ensure that schools taught comprehensive sex education--including accurate, factual information about birth control and how to use it (e.g., none of this 'abstinence only' bullshit)--as well as making birth control widely, easily, and affordably available to all people.
Thank you.
So what is an "assault-style rifle" and how is banning them not disarmament? If banning them wouldn't significantly affect firearm deaths, then why are Kamala Harris and the majority of the Democratic Party pushing for it?
On the topic of abortion, less than 8% of reported abortions happened past the first trimester. They also generally don't happen for medical reasons. And fair point about the third trimester thing. However, given the number of states that have very little or even no restrictions on abortion, it's likely to me that they'll push for the same nationwide.
There are several reasons. First, the times they are used in crimes, they tend to create much higher casualties than you would otherwise be likely to see. The combination of a vry high velocity intermediate cartridge with a box magazine makes it very easy for a novice shooter to expend lots and lots of bullets, bullets that are generally more deadly than a pistol-caliber firearm. Secondly, it is a slippery-slope; they want to ban these now to make more extensive bans in the future seem more acceptable, esp. to courts. It's a way of creating precedent. Third, for people that don't grow up with firearms, they just seem more scary than wooden-stocked, full-power rifles. And last, all politicians, across the board, seem to want to maintain the supremacy of state-sponsored violence; Dems want to ban guns, Republicans want to give cops ever heavier firepower.
Again: neither side seems interested in directly addressing root causes for violence, which are largely economic. Fix the wealth disparity in this county, eliminate the systemic racism that limits access to opportunity for non-white people, and end toxic masculinity, and you eliminate most of the gun homicides. From speaking to a criminal defense attorney that specializes in gun rights, the biggest single thing the gov't could do to sharply reduce gun homicides would be to entirely end the way on drugs.
FIRST - I misspoke/I was wrong. Each trimester is roughly 12 weeks. The absolutely earliest viability is about 22 weeks, or close to the end of the second trimester. Earlier than that, and a fetus is little more than a tenant that's not paying rent.
This article isn't saying what you think it's saying. Yes, there isn't a time limit, but most or all states do not allow abortions after fetal viability. That is, if a fetus can survive outside of the womb--heroic measures or not--you aren't getting an abortion. Does it seem unreasonable to you to allow abortion when a fetus can not survive independently? If so, why does that seem unreasonable? Do you believe that any person should be legally required to use their body for the benefit of another person?
So we're both in agreement that the whole quest for assault weapons bans is a smoke screen to take away people's civil liberties. Good.
Back to abortion: We already have six states and DC without any restrictions whatsoever on abortion. All of the existing permissions, besides health of the mother, are utterly arbitrary. It's a human being at every stage of development from the moment of conception and should be respected as such. And yes, human lives have precedent over the comfort of people who invited them to enter through consensual sex. We obviously should take strong measures to protect their lives, but that doesn't mean the baby can be killed at any moment for the sake of convenience. In cases where they didn't consent to sex, it still doesn't make sense to kill them. That's giving the wrong person the death penalty.
"Independent survival" can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Extremely uncharitably, it could mean anyone living in their parents' house, disabled people, children, and anyone who generally depends on the structure of society to survive. If that's the argument, we need to define the threshold of dependence and justify it. Even pretty narrowly, it could excuse infanticide.
We already legally require parents to provide for their children, or give them to people who can. Requiring women to not kill their babies in the womb is a logical extension of this. Once the baby is born, it can be given to someone more capable of caring for it.
If the baby has no chance of survival, as was the case of a woman who died of sepsis, that's a much more reasonable time to permit abortion. Better, though, are measures taken to try and save the baby's and the woman's lives. A premature delivery, for example, wouldn't be outright killing it, but it would have saved the life of the mother.
Based on what? Religion? Jewish thought says that a child only exists once it draws breath.
So, to be clear, once a person has already been deprived of their freedom and liberty by one person, they should continue to be deprived of their liberty?
Riddle me this: where would you stand on forced organ donation? That is, you're a tissue match to me, and I need a kidney. Would you be okay with being legally obligated to undergo surgery and give a kidney to me so that I can live? To make it a little lower stakes, would you be okay with being legally obligated to donate blood every eight weeks in order to preserve the life of people that need blood and blood products to live? Why, or why not?
How is that different from someone being obligated to undergo the risk of carrying a pregnancy to term if they don't want to be a parent, and especially if the were sexually assaulted?
It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the fact that they're human beings. This is the only definition that isn't completely arbitrary and ensures the rights and liberties of every human being without justifying killing anyone who shouldn't be killed.
Being forced to carry a pregnancy is a lesser violation of someone's rights than killing someone who could not possibly be held responsible for what happened. Or do you think that murder is a human right?
So let's seriously consider the implications of this Looney Tunes Medical Malpractice Extravaganza world you've just invented without any actual basis in reality. First of all, dialysis and consensual organ donation exist. These facts alone make this whole question nonsense, but you haven't insinuated you want to kill me, so I'll answer your question despite the fact it's absurd from the get-go.
Second, the vast majority of these "forced" transplants would happen because of consensual activity that somehow is designed to lead to this outcome. On top of that, this activity would also require you to spontaneously develop kidney failure without being involved. Again, for the sake of argument, let's pretend that isn't just outright impossible. That hilarious fact aside, if you cannot handle the possibly of having children, you should not be doing things that are designed to produce children. Similarly, if you cannot handle needing to donate a kidney, you should not do things designed to lead to a kidney donation. If this were the case, then this would be happening for all of human history, and the human body would have an actual mechanism for doing this and the question would actually have a meaningful answer.
And before you go off about how car drivers don't consent to accidents, just know that moving around the world, going to your job, seeing your friends and family, that kind of thing, is an actual requirement to live unless you're completely homebound. You aren't going to drop dead or starve to death because you didn't get enough quickies in with someone else.
Third, there is no way for a fetus to survive a pregnancy other than to carry on through that pregnancy. The fact that other options exist to help you survive your predicament exist means you don't have the right to steal people's organs.
Fourth, you have agency in this situation; the baby doesn't. You may need a kidney transplant because of a completely preventable illness; the baby doesn't have that luxury. Babies will only ever be born once, but if you had the legal right to steal a kidney every time you got sick, you could just keep doing whatever it is screwed your last kidney up.
Fifth, if this was actually permissible, medical ethics as a whole would be completely up-ended. It would mean that people who chose to get themselves into bad situations had the right to rob people of vital functions to get themselves out of them. Again, this does not apply to babies.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Using the logic of the real world where abortions kill hundreds of thousands of people every year, no, neither that nor the blood stealing example would be permissible. But because neither of these things is actually analogous to pregnancy, they're moot points.
Now you riddle me this: how long after conception is it acceptable to kill the fetus without any justification? Why does it end there, and not before or after? Also, why is it okay to kill someone for being the victim of a crime? After all, the conceived child is as much a victim here as the woman is. If it's not okay to kill someone for being the victim of a crime, then it's not okay to get an abortion because of rape.
You're in favor of forcing rape victims to carry their rapist's baby? You have no empathy at all.
Are you in favor of killing a victim because they were assaulted or raped? That's even worse. Worse still is killing someone who had no involvement in the process at all - namely, the person conceived in the rape.