water cannon

[unreasonable]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

I wasn't man, I really mean it. It's obvious that there's something broken in the system and that we all want to live in a safer society (we're not the SPECTRE), it's that we're trying to do it from different approaches.

The right to have a firearm (if deemed suitable for it by a competent panel) should be there regardless of your belief/interest in firearms.

Depriving citizens of their rights won't make a society safer,it will only boost crime, see what happened with proibitionism. What really scares me is that the Orwellian view of modern society is becoming a sad reality in Britain: they don't want you to think, they give you the illusion of freedom and then do what they want with you.

It's sad, but it's a one way ticket to a sad, sad future, human nature is capable of too many perverted things to be contained like that

Britain is an interesting case indeed - it went from being one of the most free societies (in the particular sense of small government with minimal interference in economic and social life) at the start of WW1 in 1914, to one of the most unfree (except in social life) in the non-communist world, by the end of WW2. 31 years only.

The reason of course was that only this degree of state mobilization of the nations resources could save the country from being gobbled up by the Germans. I am sure most would agree that this was a very real threat, and not some conspiracy theory invented by the establishment in order to boost their power.

Then once this new equilibrium was established, the majority of the population decided that it preferred the new deal. There was no going back.

Personally I can live with that - my take is that all developing countries sooner or later have to co-opt the majority of the population into their economic systems through some mechanism of positive rights and redistribution, otherwise development stops. The UK just did it very abruptly due to war - other states have done it as a response to the threat of revolution or economic stagnation.

The problem then becomes how to manage the moral hazard or free-rider problem, when there is a growing constituency of welfare providers who increase the size of their power base by calling for "more resources", and so are not motivated to restrict the distribution of public funds. Sadly the police seem, in some respects, to have been co-opted by this group.

I am not convinced that there is any answer to this problem except that of a major moral revolution spurred by a religious revival, which brings its own disadvantages, to put it mildly, (speaking as an unbeliever).