Posted on 01/30/2013 7:28:34 AM PST by I still care
The left isn't concerned about suicides. At some level most of them support suicide. They are concerned about guns.
You are righter than you know. This is the proper "angle" of retort. It leverages the Culture of Death's confected "Right to Die" against them.
Only if you hit your target. That is not a sure bet under the kind of circumstances that you would be attempting the shot in. A water pistol is harmlessly and soberingly demonstrative of the difficulty.
I did.
Suicide is high because hate-filled radicals like Obama and his pals create a depressing economy and broken spirits.
“Who Knew?
I did.”
Hey! You beat me to it!
While suicide is terrible, and my family has been affected by it, to blame a gun for someone ending their own life is kinda....crazy, don’t you think. But suicides are called homicides and lumped in with all the rest of the “gun crimes”. Wonder why???
Oh, BTW. Most of the folks around here that kill themselves by gun do so with a shotgun. Does away with the “you have to hit the brain stem” nonsense and such. Makes a helluva mess tho. Just plain ole birdshot does a great job from 2 inches. Friend of mine off’ed himself inside the family motorhome. Took 2 cleaning ladies 2 full days to clean up most of the mess. And they still didn’t get the pieces of brain out of the vents to the AC. It is hard to find good help these days.....
If you believe the DC morgue, Vince Foster shot himslef behind the ear with a .22 and had to then use a 38 special through the mouth to finish the deed.
To be fair that isn’t exactly apples to apples, as there isn’t traditionally so strong a taboo against suicide in Japanese culture. Not that there’s any country that promotes suicide, exactly, given the strong natural human resistance to death. Maybe the old Soviet Union had a culture of death, though half on purpose and half not.
“Does away with the ‘you have to hit the brain stem nonsense”
For the record I wouldn’t say you *have* to hit the brain stem. That’s merely the best way for it to be instant and painless. Shotgun wounds to the melon are survivable, by the way. Jumping from a sufficient height onto a proper surface is more foolproof, except that it’s possible for something beyond your control to intervene. Like I said, I’d go with C-4, which if it goes wrong can’t really go wrong in a way that leaves you alive and in pain. If it ignites it blows you up, period, and there’s no way you feel it.
It is possible to believe, as I do, in the political right to kill yourself (not right to die, which implies others can help), while simultaneously believing in absolute moral prohibtion of suicide. This is so because we have property rights over ourselves, which includes the right to destroy.
Some confusion may apply here, considering property rights are legitimately prone to various restrictions, one of them being for instance that though property implies right of sale or transfer, we cannot legally sell ourselves into bondage. This is so because it would be to abrogate our right to liberty, which is inalienable; that is, nontransferable. The similar right to life is also inalienable, and seems to be threatened by suicide in the same way slavery threatens liberty. Ah, but though we end life by killing ourselves we do not sacrifice the right to life. For how can that right be alienated when it is I who kills me? It can’t be.
I consider anti-suicide laws a moral transgression even though suicide itself is perhaps the gravest of all sins. Certainly it is the only inherently unforgivable sin. But that is no concern of the law, in the same way it is none of their beeswax what spirits I put in my body, even though being a drunkard is a moral lapse.
To clear up any possible confusion, I must clarify that of course suicide is not a natural right. But it is wrong in a realm beyond manmade law, and this is so, I think, inevitably from the logic of property rights, which are natural rights. I read a nook recently which half-jokingly came up with a few examples of practices which in comparison to their view of birth control Victorian Englishmen would find so diabolical that they wouldn’t bother mentioning, let alone condemning. One of them was collecting pictures of your daughter and poking her eyes out with pins. Which practice never has been illegal, to my knowledge, and is your politic right to do, assuming the picture is your property.
Obviously you have no natural right to score representations of your daughter’s eyes. I don’t know if it’s a sin, exactly, but seems like one. This in no way, however, affects your right of property over the picture, which includes the right of defacement. There’s our relationship to pictures and ourselves within the larger concept of natural rights, and there is the moral law restricting what we may do with our property beyond what the law can or cannot touch. Suicide is like that. It’s like poking your daughter’s eyes out by proxy, only much, much worse.
There is no right, but there is a freedom? Merely because you can’t go back and punish dead people? But what about prior to the attempt, and why assume the attempt is successful? The significance of suicide law is not only what happens after you attempt it.
Suicide being illegal grants authorities wide preventive discretion, so that cops can lay siege to your house if someone so much as thinks you’re at risk. Probability of it happening also opens up unlimited tertiary possibilities. There’s the obvious immediate concerns of psychiatric holds and commitments. But there’s so much more.
Think of the publication of supposedly confidential medical information promised under Obamacare. Let’s say you blab about suicidal thoughts to your therapist, or even hint at it with general practitioners. The state can find out, and that’s a crime you were contemplating. Is that sufficient grounds to deny a gun permit? Why not, if they can ban guns for looking scary.
This is all not to mention what becomes of unsuccessful suicides. There are all sorts of consequences emanating from the central insinuation of government into property ownership of yourself. It derives from the decent instinct to protect people from bad “forever choice”s. But as with everything the state does there are manifold unintended consequences.
The better thing would simply be for the state to leave it alone. But alas! they leave nothing alone.
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