Zseni wrote:

Guns represent tons of stuff to tons of people, but they can and should represent a fundamental right to everyone: the right to end your own life, swiftly, when you don't feel like living it anymore. Laugh if you like, but if someone else is picking when you can and can't die, then your ass is in trouble.

Zseni wrote:

Guns are worth having because the having of them demonstrates that there are things more important than just living and fates that are worse than just dying. That idea is worth a whole ton of accidental gunshot victims. It's an incredibly valuable idea. And gun ownership is the only civil right with an appreciable body count, which underlines, bolds, and italics-faces our commitment to this fundamental concept!

Zseni wrote:

Guns should also represent the right and responsibility of self-defense. People who demurely and oh-so-coyly life their hands to heaven and exclaim "even if I could, I wouldn't" are fooling themselves. You push a hundred thousand slow deaths upon the people of this planet every morning: in the exhaust of your car, the price of your coffee, the chicken in your breakfast burrito, the shirt on your back. Everything you do as a citizen of a modern Western nation is the product of other people's grief, sweat, and disadvantage. This slo-mo violence at a distance, this sanctioned slaughter - the inherent and inescapable violence of capitalism, which wrings from the loser and gives to the winner - is your birthright. I'm not telling you to stop it. HEY, LUCKY YOU. But I am saying that it's disingenuous to complain that you wouldn't shoot a guy who's threatening your life, let's throw out all the guns already. You'll kill a whole planet before you start biking to work, jackass, so don't get precious with me. What you resent is the immediacy, and more than that, the responsibility. The same fucktard who's all "oh I couldn't possibly!!!" has no problem calling the cops and having the state exterminate a human on his behalf. He has no problems or concerns about the grotesque and violent death of the criminal in state custody. He just doesn't want to get his hands dirty.

Zseni wrote:

Purely as a feminist, I favor any technology that obliterates the physical advantages men enjoy over women. Women, of course, need to step up to the plate on this one, but at least the tools are there. Removing the right to bear arms just because women's lives are potentially endangered by guns - it's remarkably similar to the idea that removing Saddam Hussein will help protect endangered Iraqi women. The same specious reasoning is at work, and in each case it hides the same fundamental flaw: that somehow, magically, the world without this ONE thing which endangers the ladies will become much safer for women than it ever has been previously. In both cases the fundamental causes of violence against women are ignored in favor of attacking the tools of violence.