trenton

I think this is an important part of spirituality in terms of demonstrating the limits of the materialist paradigm. I have been running into some problems with formulating a cleaner position for something like atheism. The problem happens if the atheist over claims in terms of how much is natural versus how much is supernatural. If too much is claimed to be natural such that everything is natural, it becomes indistinguishable from everything being supernatural or everything being God. I also noticed that there is no real principled line to draw between natural and supernatural. For example, imagine ghosts were real. Why would we call a ghost supernatural if a ghost is still a naturally occurring phenomenon? We may as well just call ghosts natural. The lack of a principled distinction between natural and supernatural is part of why I feel inclined to reject this distinction as it doesn't seem tenable, especially if either everything is God or everything is not God. There is also the problem of what counts as proof and who gets to define these proof standards and the problem of why the naturalist explanation should be privileged over the supernatural explanation as that is a bias. So for our purposes, I will be calling things like ghosts paranormal, granted it isn't really an objective distinction. There could be other phenomenon you would consider paranormal as well, but I will give a few examples. I had an experience with a psychic who shouldn't have known that I had a girlfriend whose name started with 'Ali.' She just looked at me and then had this epiphany even though there is no way she should have known that. She was referring to Alice and without asking leading questions she somehow knew this. This experience makes it hard for me to dismiss psychic phenomenon, especially when paired with other outside evidence. In this case the outside evidence would be ghost tours I went on to see some pictures, psychics claiming to talk to ghosts, military experiments on remote viewing, and reports from skin walker ranch also done by the military. I attached a photo of a ghost I got from a ghost tour. They had other good pictures and videos too such as orbs of light. Orbs of light were also reported at Skin Walker ranch. The Victorian Era woman is the bottom left hand corner. If you have any good videos, recordings, experiences, or anything else you would consider proof of the supernatural, then I would like to see it. This is part of why in terms of formulating a decent position for atheism, I think the scope would need to be narrowed to "the supernatural claims of the Bible are nonsense." This would be a fair defensible claim, but if it is overextended I think it becomes easier to dispute. An overly broad scope would be sloppy. What would you consider the best proof of the paranormal or supernatural?

I agree and this is where I noticed I get stuck a lot. On principle, it makes sense to think that if porn generally reinforces fantasies, both legal and otherwise, then perhaps masturbation in general does the same regardless of the content. I tried this idea but I was later discouraged. There have been studies done on priests who tried repressing sex all their lives and some of them failed leading to moral outrage at child abuse and others admitted that the craving never fully went away, making it an ongoing discipline. The reason I tried this is because I was trying to find a way to make the cravings stop, but I found that it most likely would never be enough. Additionally, I noticed I became much more irritable when I tried to stop masturbation. My body became more tense and anxious as well. I would continue to have sexual fantasies anyway. This is a problem I encountered in childhood. I learned early on that my sexuality made me dangerous, so I reached for religion trying to make sense of it. I had childhood vows against lust as a result. The problem is that when I hit puberty I simply could not make it stop. I never wanted to be straight because I thought that wanting to have sex with women made me a bad person who sees them as objects. I wanted to be asexual while finding something more purposeful or important than sex. Life purpose became a substitute for intimacy as well, hence I ended up on actualized.org. the problem is that the values I hold were imposed on a child in a dysfunctional family environment full of criminals. Given a different environment, I could have a totally different value system. In any case, try if you might to overcome sexual cravings, but realistically most will fail. Additionally, if you try, then don't come at it from a moralizing angle. The angle I came at it from was that sex is not bad and lust does not make me bad. It makes me human. The reason I wanted to overcome it was because I thought I could become more conscious, peaceful, and free by not reinforcing this addiction or sexual craving. However, I ended up feeling even worse and I feel much better when I slid back to where I am masturbating but not using porn. I felt discouraged when I considered the failures of catholic priests who end up preaching such a standard that they themselves can't meet.

@Atb210201 @something_else In my experience, porn didn't cause promiscuity, but rather made it even less likely. The reason is that it substituted for intimacy which I felt afraid of. It became an alternative outlet when healthy relationships were not easily accessible. Meanwhile, now that I stopped using porn and I disabled it, I feel more drawn to intimacy instead. I feel even more horny because now I'm using my imagination to come up with something hot instead. It makes me want to have sex even more because it is probably better than porn anyway. I just need to find a way to manage my life situation first and finish this transition. A girlfriend would be nice, but I'm in a tough spot right now. Porn is easier to access, but it points people away from actually having sex if they remain in fantasy. There are some complications with the types of fantasies that get reinforced though such as sadistic or pedophilic fantasies especially. Those are common in early offenders as well.

Before internet porn we still had peeping Toms. This kind of behavior is typical in early sex offenders because they rationalize that so long as they are not noticed, it isn't harmful. If you are afraid of people looking at naked ladies on the internet and therefore ban it, we will need a plan to deal with early sex offenders finding other ways to look at naked ladies such as by hacking cameras, sneaking them into your home, drilling holes in the walls, or entering the wrong bathroom. If somebody wants to look at naked ladies, but there is no porn, then we need to keep in mind that this sort of thing was a problem before the internet and we should account for it. This is how the most evil, corrupt, devil would exploit this kind of system if we did this. They might even take pictures and make porn that way, creating an entire black market for peeping creeps.

Is it realistically achievable to accomplish this or is it idealistic? Think of the opposition created by those who make money from this. If about half of the population were in favor of porn, how would you stop them or persuade them to seek otherwise? I think automatic regulation for devices used for minors would be a start. I was first exposed at 13 after learning about it from my surrounding culture. This seems to be a root cause of addiction. Should parents have to check their child's phone for this? I don't think so. This is probably why you think it shouldn't be there at all, which is understandable but hard to realize.

The best I do is just use parental controls to block the porn from handheld devices. If you get a partner to invent a pin you don't know, then this would be useful. It removes some temptations. There probably is a way to do it for computers as well.

@Nercohype I definitely had sleep paralysis episodes like those. There are tons of stories like these. It includes seeing family members who are distorted and violent. The distortions make them look like an imposter trying to harm you while you can't move. I was wondering about skin walker and this explains it. That's awesome.

The problem with this definition is that it easily becomes unfalsifiable. For example, if I point to something that doesn't have a natural explanation, then the counter is that it actually does but we haven't figured it out yet. The god of the gaps argument makes it impossible for anything to lack a natural explanation. From this position, everything is necessarily natural. Secondly, defining natural would be a challenge. It is a good try to define it in this way, but I think it remains circular. How do we determine what counts as a natural explanation if we need to define natural?

In this photo there is no orb, just a Victorian era woman in the bottom left. The orbs appeared in a video, but it was something separate that I didn't get. If you go on a ghost tour and ask them for the most compelling evidence, they can show you more than just orb videos. They can show you beams of light, unexplained distortions, faces, and so on. I wish I had all of them, but I only have this one. It was in Colorado.

I have seen women cry tears of joy. I end up feeling proud of myself and happy that I managed to turn her life around. This happened when my coworker was a victim of predatory loaning, putting her 60,000 dollars in debt. I showed her Biden's student loan forgiveness program which was open at the time and she qualified. It ended up turning her life around after being stuck in fruitless legal battles for 15 years. I have also seen women who were completely distraught. I will assume you mean an adult rather than a three year old girl on the side of the road abandoned by her parents, in which case I felt that she couldn't be ignored and I needed to do something about it. When I see women crying, I feel morally compelled to speak with them and not ignore them. Sometimes these women are suicidal because they are victims of identity theft and they are being framed for crimes they didn't commit while the perpetrators make obscene amounts of money, forcing the victim to go homeless. I then feel the need to research potential resources for this person as I did with the victim of predatory loaning. Apparently it is common for people with autism to express compassion through practical problem solving. I do this with men as well when I called 911 to prevent a man from jumping off of the bridge. Alternatively, if I get the impression that a woman is being a cry bully trying to manipulate me, I look at her either disapprovingly or with complete indifference to crocodile tears.

For Project Steelman I am also reading about anti-suffragist arguments prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment. Why should women have the right to vote? I don't really find the arguments against women voting particularly persuasive, but there is this pattern of appealing to natural law, complimentary roles, and appealing to laws backed by force. If men are drafted into the military, then why should women be allowed to vote if they don't have to apply for a draft? If women did have to apply for a draft, then who would take care of children by that point? Does this mean we should get rid of the draft for men even if Germany starts a war in the coming decades? (This was prior to WWII). It looks like the 19th Amendment passed because WWI proved that women were necessary to win the war. They had to help build machines or be nurses for wounded men. This in turn proved the capabilities of women such that their roles were more flexible than previously assumed. This again corresponds with the historical narrative of technology dramatically changing the field such that women would have more grounds for claiming equality. Another example would be the invention of baby formula which made child care more efficient. In order for women's rights to sound silly, I would probably have to go back a few hundred years at least when men would agree that women voting would be outrageous and insane. This again cuts into the idea of rights being absolute. I don't have the right to vote unless our society collectively imagines that I do.

When these videos first came out a few years ago, I didn't watch them all the way through. Many objected at the time, arguing that it was a strawman argument. The two videos I am discussing are "Why Libertarianism is Nonsense" and the one about Conspiracy Theories. The reason I revisited these videos is because I have been working on Project Steelman. What I found is that the people who most consistently disagree with me are Libertarians. Therefore, my political philosophy would require some kind of rebuttal against this other political philosophy. I ended up watching the video all the way through and it wasn't as bad as I remembered. In fact, I had already learned about some of the problems with Libertarianism in my own research that Leo didn't mention. This included things like the arbitrary line drawn for the point at which the State is responsible for harm and the strange distinction of weighting harm caused by the State as more than harm caused by individuals even if individuals collectively harm more than the State. The video was previously criticized for being a strawman, but this was by Libertarians who skipped around and didn't watch the full video. I don't think Leo was making a strawman when he said that Libertarians want to abolish Social Security even though it would raise the homeless population from 400,000 to 11 million. This talking point repeatedly came up from this side of the isle. This isn't a strawman, but rather a reductio ad absurdum. I also noticed that Libertarians must be morally absolutistic, although Leo didn't really explain why. He argued that morality is relative, but I can explain why the Libertarian must be a moral absolutist. What it basically boils down to is that if a Libertarian is not morally absolutistic, then they lose the ability to justify having a government at all. They must say property rights and individual rights are absolute, but if they do they must then compromise these rights with a broader society. This is the logical trap the philosophy runs into because it is too rigid in its absolutism. Absolutism typically falls into logical traps because it cannot bend, it can only break when there are competing values. Relativistic philosophies can more easily bend to different contexts by comparison, thus helping to avoid many of these logical traps. Meanwhile, the Libertarian must argue in favor of moral absolutism in order to justify infringing on individual rights at all in any context. For now I will keep the focus of this thread on Libertarianism. It would be too much to talk about both videos at once.

I have been reading about the history of Christianity as well. I noticed this pattern with Christians confidently siting narrow verses while ignoring the rest of the Bible that would be taken seriously given consistently applied logic. I found a few examples I found instructive. 1. Slavery is the most commonly sited example. The abolitionist position won out by appealing to higher moral intuitions which exceeded the text. I also discovered that Aristotle defended slavery while invoking natural law. "natural" is a word that I have grown very skeptical of in religion. 2. Exodus 22:18 "you shall not permit a sorceress to live" was used in the Salem witch trials. 3. Capital punishment was seen as justified for minor offenses such as Sabbath breaking. Interestingly, there were societies before the Bible that were even more brutal than this such as ancient Assyria. In ancient Assyria, they would skin you alive and use mass public beheadings. If you think the Bible is brutal in the old testament, there is definitely even worse that came before it. 4. The Amalekite command in Samuel was used to justify genocide and religious persecution. "Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy[a] all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” I find it odd that commands referring to completely different groups of people are taken out of context as if they justified prolonged abuse of some other unrelated group of people. This happened with slavery as well. 5. There was a legal ruling in 1959 in Loving v. Virginia. The judge argued that God placed races on separate continents because he intended not to mix them. The tower of Babel was commonly sited to argue that people of different colors were supposed to be segregated, making interracial marriage "unnatural." 6. The Divine Right of Kings doesn't make much sense to me. If we take at face value "there is no authority except from God" then when did the Bible actually say that the King is God? If the King is God, then why would Jesus be special for being God? It sounds like Jesus being God wasn't metaphysically necessary for Christianity. 7. Psalm 104:5 states "He set the earth on its foundations so that it should never be moved." This was used to argue for the Geocentric theory, making it sound like we have a flat earth sitting on pillars with the pillars standing on a Giant Space Turtle. This was later reinterpreted as poetic rather than literal despite centuries of insisting on literal interpretation. 8. Pain relief for childbirth was considered "unnatural." Genesis 3:16 states "in pain you shall bring forth children." The debate ended with Queen Victoria used chloroform. The divine right of the monarch means that chloroform must be okay. My question for Christianity is what happens if a monarch or a pope says "the bible isn't true?" This sounds like what would be necessary for actually making the contradiction impossible to brush away. 9. Marry the Rapist laws which predated Islam are included. "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." This is Deuteronomy 22: 28-29. Women were considered property, but nobody in their right mind would defend this anymore unless we go to the Middle East where this is still a thing. In spite of all of these verses, Christians still confidently argue "whoever spares the rod hates his child" or "men shall not lie with men." There are continued appeals to what is natural despite the absurd history that makes it hard to take these arguments seriously. These verses are taken seriously because they match a moral conclusion the person has already drawn while giving them a way to say "see it isn't because I say so, it's because the Bible says so." In reality the majority of Christians never read the Bible and they instead get told a curated version of it from the church which feels more palatable to them. When you dig into the history of religion, this is what makes it feel unbelievable to me. The philosophical implications would be catastrophic if applied consistently. On top of that things like Satan look more like a recent cultural trope than something metaphysically necessary to the religion at all. If you add the politicized process for selecting the Biblical canon, it starts to feel impossible to believe that "the holy spirit guided the creation of the Biblical canon." This is an additional leap of faith beyond just that Jesus is God. There are numerous radical leaps in faith required to keep Christianity coherent. If any of these leaps fail, the religion collapses. Also the Bible never said that there would be a selection process for which books are canon centuries later. I was stopped by Catholics earlier who were making exactly these arguments. They are poor arguments, yet they seemed confident anyway.

@Rafael Thundercat that is just low of them. So long as they win their crusades they are willing to exploit anyone toward that end.

@Leo Gura I did my own research on religious history and noticed many of the same problems mentioned in the video you shared. One explanation is that in ancient times they had very different standards of evidence. Rumors and reputations were taken far more seriously because many people didn't realize that millions of people could believe the same thing and all still be wrong. Modern reason makes this distinction. In the case of Christianity, it looks like the spreading rumor combined with unfalsifiability landed in the gaps of human reason for the time. To this day I think MAGA still has roughly this degree of reasoning given the logic they used to justify the attempted coup. It included "if so many people believe the election was stolen, then it must be true." In terms of who started the rumor, I think it is fair for you to suggest that some of Jesus's followers were probably liars. If the lie stirred among the followers then eventually you end up with claims like "500 people witnessed Jesus rise from the dead." The rumor was considered strong evidence back in those days, and it persisted into the medieval ages which I also researched.

It looks like the incentive structure for mass surveillance is strong enough that it is probably going to continue to happen whether we like it or not. My concern is that mass surveillance will not be applied equally to the rich and powerful and this exploit of the justice system continues and is exacerbated by this. Hunting down criminals starts to feel performative rather than having substantial justice.

@Yimpa @Basman I noticed this myself. If we watch the news, it never teaches us the fundamentals at all. It seems to only give ideology while being lost in daily events. It doesn't say anything about what the foundation of political philosophy or government. It would be a lot of work to try to keep up with news and actually keep track of every little detail. Keep in mind it isn't showing certain parts of the world because the narrative is already assumed. It is rare, but in my experience there actually were times in which politics were important to me and the those around me. I didn't have in a say in making it happen or making it end, but it did give me a critical window of opportunity to help a victim of predator loaning get out of 60,000 dollars in debt. She cried tears of joy when I gave her a way out of the trap that ruined the past 15 years of her life. It was Biden's student loan forgiveness program for victims of predatory loaning. It actually was very important, but it is rare to find life changing opportunities like these. Usually politics will not have this kind of impact on you or those around you.

Apparently, I am a Republican. But not just any republican. I am more specifically a Civic Republican. It means I believe that the wealthy and powerful should be held to equal accountability if they break the law. So long as you are against a legal system that bends for the wealthy and creates a two tiered justice system, you are a Republican. This has nothing to do with Republican party though. They are Republican In Name Only. They don't actually care if the law bends for the rich and powerful leaving them unaccountable. All Trump supporters are RINOs.

@aurum how would a leftist explain someone like Ted Bundy? Sometimes people have structural differences in their brain which make them incapable of empathy. Combine that with a joy for power and control and you end up with a sadistic serial killer. Does the leftist account for brain structure in psychopaths?

I have read about standards of rape being invented. Firstly, Marital rape wasn't fully recognized in America until 1993. The reason is that too many people simply assumed that the relationship itself conferred consent. To this day, the outcome is that in intimate relationships there are still men who use force to get sex, believing it is consensual. Therefore the rapist in his worldview claims "it was consensual" because that is how humans have thought for millennia. It required numerous horrendous cases of rape and murder to make the alternative framework of consent hard to reject. This also explains why women don't have consent rights in parts of the middle east. If developed countries haven't done this until recently, then of course less developed countries would not have these kinds of consent frameworks. In fact, ancient rape laws are defined as "rape is when a man penetrates a virgin woman without the consent of her father." This is part of what points toward "Marry the Rapist" laws and "inviting the rape." In this worldview it makes sense because if a woman has what we would consider consensual sex with a man she loves, then in their worldview it would be equivalent to inviting rape because the father did not consent. The woman may have decided she wanted to marry this man anyway despite him technically being classified as a rapist. From this point of view rape and marrying the rapist would be considered "good for the woman because she wants it" as Leo was describing. Unfortunately, this also applies to women who were violently assaulted in cases which we would consider rape in western countries. I hope it helps to clarify how wide the range is in terms of defining rape. Some frameworks make the rape of males literally impossible. Therefore pedophilia would be described as something like sodomy instead in ancient laws of sexual misconduct.

My current position regarding gun control has changed now. It is more complicated than it was previously. Here is my current policy and why. It is mixed with caveats and auxillary policies loosely related to gun control. Given that criminal gangs have access to illegal firearms anyway, I want to avoid scenarios in which I would be endangering innocent people by not giving them the gun they need. Although not well known or discussed, there are cases in which regulations delayed a person in need of a firearm long enough for them to be killed due to an active assailant. My grandpa isn't the only case. That said, people in extreme scenarios demonstrate that the aggregate welfare argument isn't as clean as it first appears due to screening delays realistically getting innocent people killed. Additionally, if a person needs to demonstrate a documented danger, then it might either already be too late or they might not be believed if they try to report an attack which often happens. The case of Carol Bowne in New Jersey, killed by an ex-partner in 2015 while her gun permit application was pending is a commonly sited example in which gun delays got an innocent person killed. Therefore, gun restrictions need to be more tailored to target specific risk profiles while recognizing that gangs and weapons traffickers ignore these policies anyway. The profiles that should be restricted more narrowly are suicidal and violent felony files. Most gun deaths in america are caused by suicide, so it makes sense to more narrowly screen for mental health problems. The problem with screening for violent felons is that most violent felons are never detected until years later if at all. An obvious example would be policing failures in cases of domestic violence in which homicide by firearm is common. Therefore, the auxillary policies for gun control should target enforcement for domestic violence. One example is how police officers commonly disregard child witnesses who truthfully report abuse from adults. Therefore, if a child witness calls 911 to report domestic abuse, the police should route the child to a program that would actually help such as 988 or something similar for crisis management. The police data on domestic violence can't be trusted because of their detection problem which undercounts the prevalence of the issue. Of course in my particular backstory, I obviously wouldn't want drug addicts like my family members having guns. That would have been a catastrophe if they had guns in that house while they couldn't be trusted. Either way the screening fails. If too strict, then people who need a gun can't get one in time. If violent felons aren't detected, then they will get guns anyway. If the screening process requires a judge to believe someone who reports danger from either direction, then that creates room for error. Either way a victim won't be believed if someone is dangerous and shouldn't have a gun or if they are in active danger and need a gun very soon. Documented danger must by definition require said danger to have already happen, in which case the threat to a person's life must therefore precede documentation. It now looks like I am tentatively leaning pro gun because of this argument with more limited restrictions. These seem to be the hardest cases to argue against for anti-gun. I think I will need to go back and see if I can steel man the anti-gun position further. If not, then I think my present policy position is sound while maintaining that mass shootings require better security if people can access illegal firearms anyway. We need a better approach for combating gang related activities such as drug, sex, and weapons trafficking that doesn't endanger innocent people who need a gun.

I have been working on project steelman for a couple months now. I came to an issue in which I seem to have gotten genuinely stumped as to what can realistically be done. Not only do policy suggestions have weak empirical backing, but the political stakes also seem nearly impossible to overcome in America given extreme polarization and ideological disagreements. Attempting to legislate such things would realistically lead to a gridlock with no sustained solution passing. Gun Control is a uniquely American problem, probably because of the Second Amendment which itself has an ambiguous meaning. Some dispute the preamble regarding the regulated Militia because it may be referring to the scope of the Amendment. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." There is a part in this Amendment that throws me off. It talks about a Militia being necessary. I remember that this was supposedly for the American people in case the government became tyrannical so we could overthrow them. The problem is that I am not convinced that the emerging government would necessarily be any less tyrannical depending on how the new government forms in the event of a seemingly successful revolution against the government. Additionally, the American government has been extensively designed in a way that makes it resistant to attempted revolutions. I struggle to imagine a scenario in which this would go well for anybody. This is certainly something we should avoid. Imagine where America would be if the January sixth attacks were successful and MAGA killed countless officials while taking over the government themselves. Furthermore, although mass shootings drive a lot of the emotional pull around this debate, most gun deaths are the result of suicide. Personally, I don't believe I would be alive if I had access to a gun because I could have killed myself much more easily while I was stuck living with a family of drug addicts. Means prevention is the most effective way of preventing suicide. Another part I am skeptical of is the idea of using a gun for self-defense. My main objection on this point is that if too many people have guns, then there is the problem of attackers having the first move and therefore the element of surprise. The outcome is that I would expect attackers to be more successful than defenders because the defender draws his arm second. On a big enough scale, I would then imagine that overall we would all be less safe if more people had guns. There is again the problem of empirically measuring such things, so I can't be certain about these ideas. If we are dealing with a country in which there are more guns than people and the government comes to a standstill when attempting to pass legislation which may not even be enforced, then I start to become stumped in terms of what could even be done. I never really came up with a convincing method of suicide prevention in these scenarios if people often purchase guns illegally anyway. There are background checks and licensing which can therefore easily be circumvented. If suicide by firearm seems difficult to prevent, then we could try homicide and mass shooting prevention. To my understanding, women generally feel less safe in a home with an intimate partner if there is a gun in the house because of the increased likelihood of homicide from an abusive partner. From this standpoint, I would imagine that preventing abusive relationships should give people a means of exiting such situations. This can include things like avoiding isolation and maintaining contact with other support networks such as friends and family. If our lives revolve too much around intimate partners, we would create a situation of co-dependence which would become difficult to leave. Having regular check ins with an outside perspective would be important for ensuring people don't end up trapped with someone homicidal. This is part of the problem with modern romantic relationships as they are commonly structured in ways that enable abuse if it comes with isolation from others. I believe organizing relationships more consciously to avoid isolation is a strategy that works independently of government gridlock. This might be something the people would have more leverage over when it comes to safety. When it comes to preventing mass shootings, the best I could come up with would be the security measure of dispersing the target. One of the reasons schools are common targets is because they are crowded with a lot of targets. A larger quantity of schools combined with smaller classroom sizes and online courses where applicable would help keep schools less crowded, thereby reducing the number of children killed per attack, assuming we can't prevent all attacks. We can't guarantee that parents will actually pay attention to children enough to discover they are looking at gore forums which glorify violence. Some schools have started using metal detectors in case kids do try to come in with weapons, though this is criticized for security theater while making students feel less safe and presently lacking clear proof that this really deters attackers. Personally, I am kind of lost when it comes to what data is reliable from a policy standpoint. Policy doesn't seem to be particularly helpful if the government will realistically be stuck in a gridlock over the second amendment. that said, the best leverage I can see on this issue would be looking for ways to make us more secure without needing to go through gun control policy. It looks like there are some ways to circumvent this problem, though I don't know how successful or impactful the changes would be at scale. What can you come up with for project steelman on this issue.

@Basman what kind of tyrannical government do you think the pro gun position is imagining? I would understand that a coup would be justified in the event of Nazi Germany leading a genocide. There were attempted assassinations, but they failed. Meanwhile, the attempted coup on January 6th was over an election that was allegedly stolen with the evidence being extremely weak. This is part of why I argued that even if we did overthrow the American government, we would probably end up being run by a government which solely allows MAGA supporters and no one else. Why wouldn't they start a genocide against immigrants in captivity given this kind of power?

Firstly, what counts as misuse of a gun and what would proper use be? Secondly, why would the value of freedom in this context outweigh the real cost that involves taking freedom away from others? Thirdly, how do we determine who is responsible enough to handle this kind of freedom? Currently, the best argument I can imagine for pro gun would be "I like guns and I personally feel safer with access to a gun." In some situations I can imagine why a person would feel this way. In my case my grandpa loved guns. He slept with a handgun under his pillow because it made him feel safer after a traumatic incident in which a gang tied him and his best friend up, accusing one of them of being a snitch. My grandpa lied to save his own life, sacrificing his friend's life. He had nightmares about this constantly after experiencing this, so he slept with a gun under his pillow in case any gang members discovered he was the snitch and they came after him. He was secretly working with the police. For a person like this, not having a gun would sound insane because it would be a death sentence if gangs maintained access to illegal weapons and his address anyway. I find this kind of argument more convincing because I knew my grandpa. I think a strong anti-gun argument should be able to take on a scenario like this. I'm having a hard time imagining how I would argue that my grandpa should not have a gun in this situation.

If guns cause harm to third parties due to being designed to injury or kill, then it makes sense to restrict how or where they can be used. Should you be allowed to take a gun just anywhere to play with it, like a bank or a school? It is similar to why you can't smoke just anywhere as enjoying cigarettes harms third parties. If I concede that guns are useful for hunting, then that is narrow in scope regarding gun use. If guns are useful for security then that justifies the military and police having guns. If the general population has guns, then that doesn't necessarily improve security if now anybody can walk into school with a gun. There would need to be much better enforcement to prevent people from taking guns to places where guns are not supposed to be.