When Stonekettle posted this article on his Facebook wall:
I called out J. Neil Schulman on my wall. I called him out specifically because he and I had gone around and around on this endless argument track a few times. I wanted him to confirm my suspicions on this specific subject. I wanted him to say he would not support smart gun technology. I wanted him to offer the same old platitudes one more time for the record. He did not disappoint:
If a right is a right the same standards need to be applied to other rights.If — as a writer — you eschew grammar-and-spellcheck software, what assurances are you willing to make to your readers that you’re not producing substandard writing?
J Neil Schulman
Typos don’t kill people.
Really?This blanket is inflammable.
J Neil Schulman
ActiveR. Anthony SteeleNo one is dead. Try a different one.
No, I’ll stick with this one. Someone buys a blanket labelled “inflammable” because the prefix “in” — like used in incompetent — means “not” –and believing the blanket is fireproof falls asleep smoking weed.
There’s your fatality. Unreguated language can kill.
J Neil Schulman
Still nobody dead. I checked the whole house.
You can’t check the whole house because it burned down. Call the forensic team.
J Neil Schulman
It didn’t burn down, because the person in question wasn’t pedantically handicapped. Unlike some.
I’m done arguing with people who refuse to think in principles.
J Neil Schulman
The allegory you are attempting to craft is flawed; it’s flawed because no one is attempting to take away your guns (although given the number of people you’ve purportedly threatened violence on, I’m not sure you should have them. But that is a separate issue) You are not born with a weapon; you have to buy them. The right to keep & bear does not entitle you to a gun, contrary to popular belief.
Self-defense is not limited to weapons. Self-defense does not entitle you to accidentally kill people and escape punishment. Rights come with obligations, and as far as I can tell, you don’t acknowledge any obligations. Consequently I’m not really interested in maintaining your rights.
…I’d also like to add that the principle of self-defense is certainly not maintained if you are killed with your own weapon. If your child kills himself with your weapon. That pretty much destroys any personal principles you might have.
Sorry Jim, I should probably feel bad trolling libertarians and gunnuts on this subject, but truthfully I don’t. I keep hoping that one of them will admit that they’ve lost their nut on the subject of gun rights, and have suddenly seen the light, realizing that gun owners do have obligations to the rest of us; that training is actually a good idea, that some people really shouldn’t have guns, and that not being shot by your own gun is a laudable goal.
No luck so far, but hope springs eternal.
I’ve threatened no one with the initiation of violence. I have expressed my willingness to engage in self defense. Evidently you are unaware of the Zero Aggression Principle which defines the libertarian moral position. And evidently you do not value human life since you express the view that human beings must be defenseless against aggressors wiling to impose their will by violence. Such as genocides and holocausts committed by governments as standard operating policy.
Obviously the use of force in self defense is subject to review to make sure it was not initiation of force.
The rest of what you write is rot.
Tag: L Neil Smith if you have the patience to continue replying to this self-admitted troller of libertarians.
J Neil Schulman
The ZAP is largely a fig leaf to cover the naked paranoia present in the movement. Openly carrying a firearm is itself aggressive, when no one else in the room is carrying; much less insisting that you carry weapons you barely understand, haven’t been trained for, and can be taken from you and fired by anybody. I’m reasonably certain that you have threatened many who have not threatened you. There is a basic cluelessness when it comes to social issues present in libertarian and anarchist circles (this really isn’t a surprise, it’s the nature of the false belief that they are or can be self-sufficient) in which threats are issued and then denied. I’ve seen it several times. I linked your name specifically because you were (at one point) on the bleeding edge of the movement. Because leaders set the tone. So I’m asking you, by what right do you infringe on the free market, the holy grail of libertarian capitalism, and tell me that I cannot buy a smart gun from Armatix? Threaten gun dealers with their lives and livelihoods for daring to offer the gun for sale? Insist that any hesitation shown in continuing to allow your paranoid friends to stockpile weapons is tantamount to disarming the entire populace?
When sir, will you actually show reason?
Postscript
I reproduced this exchange exactly as it appeared on Facebook because I knew I was going to attribute Schulman’s words to himself. Every comment of his is linked back to the original comment on Facebook. I even took a screengrab just for posterities sake.
L. Neil Smith flew his Agenda 21 freak flag a little over a year before that article appeared on Facebook. Mr. Schulman can be forgiven if he didn’t know that Mr. Smith and I are no longer on speaking terms. I was forced to put the above linked conversation with Mr. Smith on the blog through the actions of the people I quoted in the article that I created from the conversation.
As far as I know J. Neil Schulman is still speaking to me. If I wanted to talk to him first, he would probably reply. I really don’t want to talk to him, so I restrained my desire to embroider my comments within the thread, just as I did not edit his comments. Now that I’m in the postscript, I can add my thoughts from the time the conversation occurred without altering the text of the argument as it exists in Facebook.
My obtuseness on the subject of typos was purposeful. When literary regulation fails, no one dies. The words don’t kill people in the same way that guns don’t kill people in the minds of libertarians. The words do not set the blanket on fire, people do. I was engaging in a bit of comic business that Mr. Schulman refused to acknowledge and seemed just as obtuse about as I appeared to be to his hypocrisy on the subject of words.
Regulation is what puts labels on items that the end-user may or may not understand and fail to comply with. Regulation is what the government should do when it comes to guns:
