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To: jboot

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.


35 posted on 01/31/2013 6:19:57 AM PST by Tublecane
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To: Tublecane
Like you I find suicide law to be foolish at best and diabolical at worst. But making it a right would be no better. The difficulty with a "right" to suicide is that the legal apparatus is obliged to uphold it. If the track record of past "discovered rights" is any guide what is not proscribed will quickly become compulsory. For instance those who are not physically able to exercise their right to kill themselves (such as the disabled or unconscious) must be accomodated by third parties in a way that is indistinguishable from the leftist "Right to Die."

The better thing would simply be for the state to leave it alone. But alas! they leave nothing alone.

36 posted on 01/31/2013 6:44:24 AM PST by jboot (This isn't your father's America. Stay safe and keep your powder dry.)
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