Speed Limiters, Too?

by Eric Peters EricPetersAutos.com Recently by Eric Peters: If Guns Are ‘Bad’….

Most people – including people who favor what they call “gun control,” would probably not support the idea of fitting all cars with speed governors. But why? Isn’t the principle exactly the same?

A car is a machine that’s capable of being used for “illegal” purposes. It can be used to cause harm, even to kill. Why should anyone be allowed to own a car with more capability than they need?

Most people would rise back on their heels and defend their cars. But why not someone else’s gun?

It is because thoughtless Americans do not discern the commonality – because they have been conditioned to never think in terms of concepts. They have been reduced to a state of bipedal animalism – because they have lost (or never developed) the distinctly human capacity to focus on principles rather than particulars. This, in turn, makes it easy to convince them that a given particular (such as a gun) is “bad” – based on childish arguments that would be washed away in an instant if their brains operated on the conceptual rather than the animal level.

If, for example, the argument is that a given item could be used in a harmful way, and for that reason must be banned – it inevitably follows that any potentially harmful item is also subject to being banned. Guns today. Cars tomorrow. Soda pop the day after. Actually, make that yesterday – because it’s already happened. And more will happen – precisely because there’s no reason for it not to happen.

But the human cattle out there do not see the principle at issue, so it is easily surrendered by them to people who have much more in mind than merely that particular thing (“bad” guns).

The only thing preventing the wholesale banning of literally everything (because almost anything could, in the hands of a malignant person, be used to cause harm) is the subjective feelings of the majority – or rather, whomever controls the levers of organized force and can plausibly claim to be acting in the name of the majority.

The concept of rights disappears as the concept of principles slips beneath the waves. Human existence devolves into a high school popularity contest – with all the nasty outcomes of such a contest.

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